New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Annie Lamont’s firm relocates to Stamford
Oak joins several other firms that have recently opened offices at 2200 Atlantic, a group that also includes Tomo Networks, NewEdge Wealth and Altus Power.
STAMFORD — Oak HC/FT, the venture capital firm co-founded by Annie Lamont, has relocated its headquarters from its longtime location in downtown Greenwich to Stamford’s South End, a move intended to support the firm’s growth.
Occupying 17,480 square feet at 2200 Atlantic St., in the Harbor Point section, the new offices are more than double the space that Oak had occupied in the Pickwick Plaza complex in downtown Greenwich since the firm’s founding in 2014.
“As our team continues to grow, the new office provides us with the space needed to accommodate our continued growth,” Oak spokeswoman Michelle Daubar said in an email. “The new location is reflective of the entrepreneurial renaissance in Stamford, and we are excited to be part of the thriving community of talent and entrepreneurs in the area.”
The new offices are the base for the resounding majority of Oak’s approximately 40 employees including Lamont, who is a managing partner. Oak also has offices in Boston and San Francisco.
Oak joins several other firms that have recently opened offices at 2200 Atlantic, a group that also includes Tomo Networks, NewEdge Wealth and Altus Power.
“We’re proud of the incredible success we have been able to achieve over the last year at Harbor Point,” Building and Land Technology, owner of 2200 Atlantic and developer of Harbor Point, said in a statement. “We’ve seen great demand from premier tenants who are attracted to everything that Stamford has to offer.”
As the “HC/FT” in its name indicates, Oak focuses on firms in the health care and financial technology industries and operates with about $3.3 billion in assets under
management. Among recent transactions, it announced last month that it was leading a $40 million Series B funding round in Mendel, a platform for clinical artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Some of Oak’s investments have attracted scrutiny — particularly its support of Stamford-based Sema4, which specializes in genomic testing, but expanded into COVID-19 testing when the pandemic spread to Connecticut in early 2020. Oak was one of several investors that participated in two fundraising rounds, in 2019 and 2020, that each raised about $120 million for Sema4.
Critics of Gov. Ned Lamont, who is married to Annie Lamont and has recused himself from state transactions with companies in which she has invested, said he should have prohibited Sema4 from providing COVID-19 testing to the state. They have also raised concerns about whether the Lamonts would eventually profit from Oak’s investment in Sema4. The Lamonts have said they would donate to charity any profits they receive.
Connecticut’s ethics office did not find a conflict of interest related to Connecticut’s COVID-19 testing contract with Sema4 regarding Ned or Annie Lamont.
The contention over the Lamonts’ ties to Sema4 did not contribute to its decision late last year to end COVID-19 testing, according to company officials. They said the decision was instead motivated by a desire to reinforce the firm’s focus on genomic testing.
“We tune out all that noise,” Sema4 founder and President Eric Schadt said in January of the public discussion of the Lamonts’ connections to Sema4. “We’ll let the politicians fight that one out.”
Some of the governor’s critics were also unhappy with how he disclosed the investment that Oak made in Digital Currency Group, which his administration announced last November would create more than 300 jobs at a new headquarters in Stamford and receive up to $5 million in state funding.
Oak officials said that in April 2021 the firm sold its entire position in DCG, an investment that totaled less than $1 million. They said the decision was not made because of DCG’s headquarters relocation from Manhattan to Stamford.
Ned Lamont has indicated that Oak would not invest in other Connecticut-based companies.
“Unfortunately, that’s it for Connecticut companies,” he said last November, shortly after the announcement of the new DCG headquarters. “Annie is in Nashville setting up companies there because Connecticut is pretty complicated.”
Oak did not immediately respond to follow-up inquiries about whether it had decided to not invest in other companies based in Connecticut.