REV Venture Partners

Co-founding partners Tony Askew and Kevin Brown jointly lead investment decisions, each managing distinct board and portfolio responsibilities. Askew oversees positions including CreativeLive, EdCast, and LegalMation; Brown managed the firm’s investment in Palantir and sits on the boards of Mode Analytics and Sixgill. There is no external investment committee—the partnership structure concentrates authority in the two co-founders.

REV’s sourcing benefits from its position inside RELX Group, whose data businesses—LexisNexis, Elsevier, Cirium—generate proprietary information signals across legal, scientific, and risk markets. The firm uses that parent-company intelligence to identify companies applying AI to large, structured industry datasets. Additionally, co-founders Askew and Brown have operated in European and US venture networks since the late 1990s, first through the SOFTBANK/News Corporation eVentures fund and subsequently via REV’s two decades of board-level relationships.

REV operates as a captive venture capital partnership within RELX Group, a FTSE 100 information and analytics company. Unlike a conventional corporate venture arm, REV was founded with an independent partnership governance model and has maintained that structure for over two decades. It does not report into a corporate development function and makes investment decisions without requiring parent-company business-unit approval, though it can draw on RELX’s balance sheet and data assets.

REV exclusively makes direct investments. The firm’s website describes leading rounds, taking board seats, and managing a concentrated portfolio of early- to mid-stage companies—with no mention of fund-of-funds commitments or LP positions in other venture managers. This direct-only posture is consistent with its model of active board engagement and long holding periods backed by permanent capital.

REV targets early- and mid-stage rounds as its primary focus, leading deals and taking active board seats. Initial investment checks range from $1 million to $10 million. The firm will also invest at much later stages as a follower or board observer for select opportunities, such as pre-IPO or growth rounds where it already holds a relationship or unique data advantage.

REV is backed by RELX Group, a publicly traded London-headquartered analytics and publishing conglomerate with 2024 revenue of roughly £9 billion. RELX provides the firm’s investment capital, meaning REV does not raise funds from external limited partners. This single-LP structure eliminates fundraising pressure and allows the partnership to hold investments through extended technical and market development cycles.

Although REV is not a family office, its structural independence and single-LP backing produce investment behavior that resembles one. The firm can hold positions indefinitely without responding to redemption requests or vintage-year deployment targets. Unlike most family offices, REV’s parent is a publicly listed operating company, which brings additional transparency requirements but also grants access to proprietary data assets that family offices typically do not possess.