Park Bench Capital

Kathryn O'Connor Gardner serves as founder and the sole named investment principal. Her background combines sell-side high-yield credit research at Deutsche Bank and buy-side energy investing at AllianceBernstein, where she was an investment committee member for the firm's energy opportunity funds. No additional investment committee members are publicly disclosed.

The firm states it invests in 'innovation that changes how people live, work and thrive' with a hard requirement that each portfolio company includes at least one female founder or a woman in a key leadership position. Investments span direct company stakes and commitments to venture capital funds, ranging from seed to growth stages.

It does both. The firm's portfolio lists 15 direct investments — including Einride, Tala, Primary, and Smitten Ice Cream — and five venture fund commitments, namely BBG Ventures, Inspired Capital, Aspect Ventures Fund I and II, Human Ventures Fund I, and Acrew Capital.

The portfolio shows exposure across mobility (Einride), fintech (Tala), food and beverage (Air Protein, Smitten Ice Cream, 21 Seeds Tequila, Dream Pops), consumer marketplaces (Primary, Rockets of Awesome), legaltech (Court Buddy), enterprise AI (Node), and biotechnology (Phylagen). Geographic focus includes the U.S., Mexico, and East Africa.

No. The firm does not publish assets under management, and no regulatory filing or press report has cited a figure. The portfolio size suggests a micro-venture scale, but no deployment total has been confirmed.

It is structured as a private equity firm, not a family office. The founder manages Park Bench alongside a separate role at Livello Capital Management, and the firm's website draws no connection to any underlying family wealth. It functions as a small, thesis-driven venture platform.

The firm does not describe its sourcing process explicitly, but founder Kathryn O'Connor Gardner's board affiliations — notably with UC Berkeley's Haas Center for Gender, Equity & Leadership and the CSNK2A1 Foundation — suggest networks in both the academic and rare-disease communities that may generate deal flow alongside the venture funds it backs.