Robert Cholnoky

Robert "Robbie" Cholnoky is a private equity investment professional. He earned his B.A. and B.E. (Bachelor of Engineering, via the Thayer School of Engineering) from Dartmouth College in 2013. As a Dartmouth engineering student he participated in a Thayer capstone project addressing a real-world engineering problem in Haiti. He began his career as a consultant at Navigant Consulting, where he focused on energy-efficiency policy and analysis, before moving into finance as an Investment Banking Analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. (now Piper Sandler).

He then joined Harren Equity Partners, a Charlottesville, Virginia–based private equity firm founded in 2000 that invests in the lower middle market — typically companies with roughly $20 million to $200 million of annual revenue — emphasizing operational improvement and strategic partnership over financial engineering. At Harren he advanced through progressively senior deal roles, from Associate to Senior Associate to Vice President (VP through 2021–2022). The stub "Senior Associate" title reflects one of those earlier Harren roles.

In August 2022, Cholnoky joined BV Investment Partners (a Boston-based private equity firm founded in 1983 that focuses on the information services, business services, and communications sectors) as a Vice President, a role he held through 2025. He has also served as a board member of Velosio LLC, a Microsoft Dynamics / cloud business-applications partner — a company originally backed by Harren Equity Partners (2019) that later received a strategic investment from Court Square Capital Partners (March 2024).

Note: the stub classification of Cholnoky as an "Angel Investor" making "Seed Round" checks does not match the public record. His documented career is in institutional lower-middle-market and middle-market private equity, investing firm capital in control/growth deals rather than personal angel checks into seed-stage startups.

• Works within institutional private equity, deploying fund capital into established, cash-generating businesses — not seed-stage venture bets.
• At Harren Equity Partners: lower-middle-market companies (~$20M–$200M revenue), with a stated firm approach centered on "operational excellence and insightful strategic analysis, rather than financial engineering," and building "strong partnerships" with portfolio management teams.
• At BV Investment Partners: information services, business services, communications, and tech-enabled services companies, typically via control or significant-minority growth investments.
• Engineering + management-consulting background (Thayer School; Navigant energy-efficiency work) suggests comfort with operationally and technically complex, services/software-oriented businesses.