Great companies that Mitt has funded

Here’s what you probably know about Bain Capital, the private equity company cofounded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 1984: It buys up shares of companies like KB Toys and Dunkin’ Donuts, offering sweet bonuses to board members and loading the company up with debt in order to finance “dividend recapitalizations.”

Now here’s what you probably don’t know: If you’re a fan of receiving quick shipments from Amazon, use Apple’s iCloud to store your favorite songs, or recently updated your LinkedIn profile, you’ve boosted the bottom line of Bain Capital.
Let’s connect the dots.
How do you think that box from Amazon gets outside your front door just 48 hours after you place an order--with free shipping, to boot? You’ve got Massachusetts-based Kiva Systems to thank for that, and Kiva Systems has Bain Capital Ventures to thank for most of the seed money that got it off the ground. Kiva created a fulfillment model based on burly, but compact, orange robots that shuttle stacks of inventory around massive warehouses.

If you’ve recently purchased the iPhone 5 or upgraded your legacy device to iOS 6, you’re taking advantage of the software’s cloud-based music management properties developed by Lala, a company backed by BCV that was acquired by Apple (another MIC--you seeing the trend here?) in 2009. BCV led multiple financing pushes, including the Series A round in January 2005, that helped move the company’s business strategy from CD-swapping to cloud-based uploading and licensing of songs. Apple acquired the company for $80 million in December 2009 after bidding against Google.
Over half of the $103 million in venture funding LinkedIn raised from 2003 until its IPO in 2011 came in 2008 when Bain Capital Ventures and three other companies made a Series D investment. That round of funding helped the business networking service expand by nearly a factor of 10--from just over 100 employees to 1,000, and from 17 million members to 100 million.
Bain Capital Ventures has over 100 companies in its portfolio, and each has its own story. But Bain’s work with Kiva Systems from 2004-2012 seems standard enough to be educational. And it resulted in Kiva being purchased by Amazon in March for $775 million.
Bain has been involved in a lot of successful companies, it depends on how you measure it before rattling off BCV connections with LinkedIn, Doubleclick, Liberty Dialysis, and SolarWinds. (There’s Tennis Channel, Vonage, Princeton Review, Minute Clinic, and others, too.)
But Bain were investors pre-revenue, and they were the largest shareholder, and … the absolute return on dollars was significant.The limited partners and folks at Bain were thrilled about it, it was a very good outcome and an outstanding outcome for the team.

After a few years, what some potential investors saw as a $100 million risk started generating cash with just a third of that investment. Eventually it became an appealing target for Amazon.

This is all proof that Mitt can get this country back on it's feet.