Arthur Jessop

Arthur Jessop is a Utah-based operator and investor best known today as the founder of Base Case, a Draper, Utah startup building the "world's first ultraportable workstation" — a carry-on-sized case with integrated docking, dual 24" 4K monitors, telescoping legs, and removable storage. He holds a degree from the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business. His utah.edu contact address and angel/seed classification trace to his University of Utah affiliation and finance background rather than to a named angel fund.

His investing roots are institutional. Jessop was an alumnus of the Institute of Advanced Investment Management / University Student Investment Fund (USIF) program (2010–2011), where he helped develop a direct hedge fund, private equity, and venture capital portfolio for the University of Utah Endowment's alternatives allocation — meeting with prospective fund managers, evaluating strategy and process, sourcing and recommending funds, and conducting due diligence across hedge fund, PE, and VC strategies. He also competed as part of a four-person University of Utah team that reached the finals of the National Investment Banking Competition in Vancouver, Canada.

Before founding Base Case, Jessop spent years in private equity, supporting mergers and acquisitions for a PE-backed platform out of a Dallas headquarters. He has described integrating roughly six beauty brands plus a couple of manufacturing companies while traveling constantly. That frustration — "I'd go to our headquarters in Dallas and get frustrated working on my laptop… There has to be a way to have a suitcase that folds out and becomes a dual-screen workstation" — became the origin story of Base Case. He built the first prototype himself in his garage from a re-engineered hard-shell suitcase, and in 2025 the company ran a highly successful crowdfunding campaign (over $500,000 raised on Indiegogo, well past its $50K goal).

Note: Jessop's verifiable public activity is as a founder and former institutional/PE investor. No specific, individually-made angel checks or a named angel vehicle could be independently confirmed from public sources; the "Angel Investor / Seed" label reflects directory classification and his finance/due-diligence background.

• Background spans the full alternatives stack — hedge fund, private equity, and venture capital due diligence and manager selection — from his work on the University of Utah Endowment portfolio.
• Institutional PE experience centered on M&A and platform roll-ups (consumer/beauty brands and manufacturing).
• As a founder himself, his sympathies and network skew toward early-stage, hardware/consumer-product and Utah-based founders; a founder pitching him would be pitching a peer who has raised via crowdfunding and built a physical product from scratch.
• No publicly stated per-deal thesis or check-size range was found; treat sector/stage specifics as unconfirmed.