GUV Powerlist 2018: #21 Brian Long

Brian Long is managing partner of Atlantic Bridge Capital, an international venture capital firm he co-founded in 2004 with fellow managing partner Elaine Coughlan, among others.

Atlantic Bridge manages more than $500m across five funds, including the €60m ($68m) University Bridge Fund, an investment vehicle targeting Ireland-based spinouts set up in mid-2016.

University College Dublin (UCD) and Trinity College Dublin joined forces with Atlantic Bridge to set up the University Bridge Fund, which has also been backed by the European Investment Fund (EIF), the investment arm of the EU-owned European Investment Bank, as well as Enterprise Ireland, the country’s development agency responsible for helping Irish businesses grow in international markets, and financial services firms AIB and Bank of Ireland.

The fund is not only backing spinouts of UCD and Trinity but is supporting the commercialisation of research across all universities in the country, though the two partners anticipate that approximately half the portfolio companies will come out of their respective pipelines.

Trinity and UCD both expect the University Bridge Fund to help them fortify their positions in the top 1% of universities in the world for generating spinouts and startups. In the past decade the two institutions have between them spun out more than 60 businesses, which have attracted more than €200m in combined investment.

Trinity actually holds a higher percentage of cited patents than any other top-100 European university, according to a report published by news agency Reuters. The university’s research portfolio had a value of more than €520m when the fund was launched.

Ireland itself is also no stranger to choosing a more centralised road to technology transfer – the government launched Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI), a program to boost commercialisation efforts at all public higher education institutions in the country, in 2014.

The fund focuses particularly on the areas of software and hardware, engineering, physical sciences, life sciences and agri-food, offering both capital and expertise with a specific view of helping spinouts scale into the US, Chinese and other international markets.

Long has a master’s degree in electronic engineering from Trinity and now lives and works in Palo Alto, California, which is one Atlantic office among staff also based in London, Dublin, Beijing and Hong Kong.

His active investments and board seats include Movidius, a computer vision processor sold to Intel in November 2016. Other deals include Blue Data, Hedvig, 3D Robotics, Swrve, Boxfish, Lion Semiconductor, GBox, Nod Labs, Navitas Semiconductor, and Highlight Semiconductor. Some of his previous investments and board seats include Maginatics (acquired by EMC), Ozmo Devices (acquired by Atmel), BridgeCo (acquired by SMSC), Silicon Blue (acquired by Lattice Semiconductor), and Osmetta (acquired by Facebook).

Long was founder and CEO of semiconductor technology producer Parthus-CEVA Technologies from 1993 to 2003, taking it public on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange. He was founder and chairman of GloNav which developed the first single-chip GPS solutions used on mobile phones (acquired by NXP).