Meet Lightspeed’s newest partner, Moritz Baier-Lentz.
We are excited to announce that Moritz Baier-Lentz is joining our Consumer Team as a Partner to lead Lightspeed’s gaming practice and expand the firm’s presence in Los Angeles, where he is currently based.
At Lightspeed, we look back on more than 15 years of investing in gaming, from early commitments and successes with Kongregate and Playdom, to more recent partnerships with leading game studios and adjacent platform and technology companies including Epic Games, Tripledot Studios, and Stability AI. We’ve known Moritz since 2014, and most recently, worked together on our joint investment in Methodical Games. What stood out in our conversations with many of the exceptional founders he’s previously partnered with — and who have been leading the creation of popular games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Apex, Overwatch, Valorant, StarCraft II, and Warcraft III — is their appreciation for Moritz’s expertise, network, and relentless support in his role as investor, board member, and friend.
Moritz’s background at the intersection of gaming and finance is quite unique: Growing up in rural Germany, Moritz has been a lifelong gamer and spent the majority of his teenage years competitively playing Blizzard’s Diablo II, culminating in a global #1 ranking among 13 million players in 2003, and — approximately two decades before NFTs entered the mainstream — trading the digital swords and armor that he earned in-game to afford his tuition at Stanford Business School, where he and I first met.
Moritz went on to become a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, where he built and co-led the firm’s global gaming practice. During his tenure, he advised many of the world’s leading gaming and technology companies across PC, console, and mobile platforms such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Activision, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two on over $300 billion in transaction volume across over 40 M&A, IPO, VC, and other strategic transactions — including Dell’s $67 billion acquisition of EMC and IBM’s $34 billion purchase of Red Hat.
For the last three years, we’ve interacted with Moritz in his role as partner and management team member at BITKRAFT Ventures. Together with the founders, he scaled the firm to become the most active gaming VC and lead investor of 2020, 2021, and 2022. At BITKRAFT, Moritz led many of the funds’ marquee deals including Inworld AI, Theorycraft Games, Horizon Blockchain Games, Raid Base, Lightforge Games, and TRIPP, among others.
Like a video game, Moritz is in constant search for the next challenge. This includes his participation in ultra-distance races, including the 251 km long, self-sufficient ‘Marathon des Sables’ through the Moroccan Sahara — only complete with a venom pump to self-defuse snake bites and scorpion stings — or the ‘World Marathon Challenge,’ in which athletes face 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 consecutive days.
Moritz’s arrival at Lightspeed will allow him to represent the firm in the gaming community and in Los Angeles at a seminal moment. His deep knowledge of gaming and interactive technology perfectly melds with Lightspeed’s 20+ years of expertise across our consumer, enterprise, fintech, and blockchain infrastructure practices — with team members in our 12 offices across the world.
We believe that a multi-sector and global approach to partnering with gaming founders is critical as video games have profoundly shaped consumer behaviors and acted as a catalyst for significant technological innovation. With the advent of the ‘Metaverse,’ and more time being spent in immersive virtual worlds, gaming is expected to continue its pivotal role in how we play, work, and socialize.
Investing from our latest funds of over $7 billion dollars to support early- and growth-stage entrepreneurs around the globe, Moritz’s key objective is to help us continue to build our rapidly expanding gaming portfolio across five overarching themes:
- Game studios looking to become cross-media IP powerhouses (e.g., the next Blizzard, Riot, or Epic)
- Gaming platforms that aspire to become social networks (e.g., the next Discord or Roblox)
- Interactive, immersive technology transforming 3D, UX, etc. (e.g., the next Unity or NVIDIA)
- Extended reality (VR, AR), now having crossed the ‘chasm,’ providing experiences for increasing install bases
- Web3 x gaming as experiences on the blockchain return from initial hype to a focus on the ‘fundamentals of fun’
Let’s build the future of gaming, together.
It’s an exciting time to be a founder — if you’re building something special, please get in touch with Moritz via email or Discord. He’s also speaking at D.I.C.E., SXSW, and GDC this quarter, so stop by and say hello if you’re there!
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