MONTGOMERY, TEXAS

Forrest Andrew Jones

Capital formation and program evaluation

Chief Investment Officer at Blackwater Investment Group Inc. He has worked with Genvor since 2016, first in investor relations and later as Chief Financial Officer, and with The Oasis of Texas since 2018. He has been writing software since 1996.

More about Forrest → Career record

Building the systems that raise the capital

Forrest Andrew Jones leads capital formation and investor relations at Blackwater Investment Group Inc., and advises its executive team on banking, treasury and investor distribution infrastructure. The work runs from preparing corporate documentation and managing the capitalisation table through to evaluating third party opportunities and competitive research across the private capital market.

Rather than buying platforms, he has built much of the operating layer himself. He wrote and open sourced a tool that reads and organises public company filing data from EDGAR, built the investor acquisition and follow up system his outreach team runs on, and wrote the training materials and call framework that team works from. He has been writing software since 1996.

His own measure of the work is whether investors come back for a later placement after working with him on an earlier one. It is a slower test than a closing, and a harder one.

Forrest Andrew Jones standing with his arms folded in a modern office lobby, wearing a navy jacket over an open-collar light blue shirt, with glass partitions and a wood-panelled wall behind him.

CURRENT ROLE

Blackwater Investment Group

As Chief Investment Officer he leads capital formation and investor relations for the group, and advises the executive team on the banking, treasury and investor distribution infrastructure underneath it.

The role covers capitalisation table management, evaluation of third party investment opportunities, and competitive research across the private capital market. He also recruited and trained the firm's investor outreach team.

OPERATING DIVISION

Blackwater Evaluation

Blackwater Evaluation performs federally mandated third party program evaluation. Its clients include the Department of Defense, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and major research universities.

It is an unusual pairing with capital markets work, and it is the part of the business that explains how he reads an opportunity: independently, and against a written standard.

Selected Work

The problem in each case, what he did about it, and where the outcome is documented.

Genvor

2016 to present · Agricultural biotechnology

THE PROBLEM: The company was an idea and a piece of intellectual property. It had no capital, no investor base and no public market presence.
HIS PART: He made the first investor calls, led the founding capital raise as part of the founding capital team, and stayed through subsequent financing rounds and the transition to the public markets. He has been with the company since 2016, as Director of Investor Relations and later as Chief Financial Officer.
OUTCOME: Genvor received Bayer's inaugural Golden Ticket award for its AMP agricultural biotechnology intellectual property and subsequently entered the public markets under the ticker GNVR. He still holds the chief financial officer seat.

Blackwater Evaluation

Federal program evaluation

THE PROBLEM: Federal grant programs are required to be assessed by an evaluator independent of the team delivering the work. That independence is the whole point, and it is easy to compromise.
HIS PART: He leads capital formation for the parent group and advises its executive team, and writes publicly about what the evaluator role actually involves and why reviewers weigh it as heavily as they do.
OUTCOME: The division's client base spans the Department of Defense, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and major research universities.

EDGAR filing tool

Open source

THE PROBLEM: Filing information sits in EDGAR in a form that is public but awkward to work with at any scale.
HIS PART: He wrote a tool that identifies and organises that filing data, and released it as open source rather than keeping it internal.
OUTCOME: The tool is publicly available. It sits alongside the acquisition and follow up systems he built for the firm's own investor outreach.