Laurence Levi

Laurence Levi is the founder and CEO of VO₂ Partners, a New York–based investment firm he launched in 2011 with backing from GCI, the family office of Gary Comer — the founder of Lands' End, which was sold to Sears Roebuck in 2002 for roughly $1.9–2 billion. VO₂ Partners was built to invest exclusively in "active & healthy living" consumer companies, providing capital for growth, buyouts, and recapitalizations to businesses in food & beverage, sporting goods and recreation, and fitness.

Before founding VO₂ Partners, Levi founded Levi Littell Herbst & Co., a boutique M&A advisory firm that was later acquired by the transaction-services firm Sikich Group. He began his career as a transactional attorney at the international law firm Latham & Watkins, giving him a legal and deal-structuring foundation that carries through to VO₂'s advisory work.

Levi has also held an operating role in a portfolio context, serving as Chief Strategy Officer of The Flowr Corporation (TSXV: FLWR), a publicly traded cannabis company. In its current form, VO₂ Partners has broadened beyond direct consumer investing to offer institutional investors a suite of portfolio-optimization services — "Liquidity" (sale options and primary/secondary transaction execution), "Insight" (portfolio reporting, NAV and peer benchmarking, runway analysis), and "Bandwidth" (day-to-day investment management, governance, follow-on underwriting, and GP replacement).

Levi was educated at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned bachelor's degrees with honors in Political Science and German Literature, and at Columbia Law School, where he received his J.D. as a Stone Scholar.

• Invests in companies riding the structural growth of the "active & healthy living" consumer economy — food & beverage, sporting goods/recreation, and fitness.
• Targets businesses at a "key inflection point in their development" — the firm's own framing for when it prefers to deploy capital.
• Historically provided flexible capital for growth, buyouts, and recapitalizations rather than pure venture rounds, reflecting Levi's M&A and PE background.
• Values on a foundation of deal structuring and legal rigor (Latham & Watkins pedigree, Levi Littell Herbst M&A advisory).
• The current firm also advises institutions on secondary transactions and portfolio liquidity, so Levi thinks actively about exit paths and NAV — useful context for how he evaluates a company's endgame.