Blue Scorpion is far from your typical early-stage venture capital firm. Gautam Ahuja and Jamison Ernest, the co-founders and general partners of the company, place a premium on their personal values and connections with brands, using authenticity as a form of quality control.
Using their super-user ethos and hands-on approach, Blue Scorpion offers not only financial, but brand-based conceptual and creative value to each company in their rapidly growing yet selective portfolio.
Since its inception in 2015, Ahuja and Ernest have been the force behind some of your favorite brands such as Van Leeuwen, the trendy artisan and vegan ice cream brand, Quip, the first subscription based oral hygiene company, Thursday Boots, the fast growing online footwear brand, and Back to the Roots, a brand designed to increase awareness about the origin and relationship with food.
For each of these companies, Ahuja and Ernest became users and patrons of their products, promoting them with genuine loyalty to their brand. “We have to be passionate about the product or else we can’t honestly tell people to use it,” says Ernest.
You’d be surprised how many VCs I’ve talked to who have never used the product,” notes Ahuja. “It’s amazing; sometimes they don’t even know about the product, they just see numbers.” For instance, Ernest would hangrily stalk the streets of SoHo looking for a fix of Van Leeuwen ice cream when the company was just starting out as a word-of-mouth food truck.
With the help of Blue Scorpion, Van Leeuwen now boasts 37 locations with 20 new stores opening by next year. They’re currently carried in most major supermarkets, including Walmart, expanding the brand from its brick and mortar locations.
