Jonathan Lehr worked in Morgan Stanley's Office of the CIO before co-founding Work-Bench in 2013, built around a highly specialized bet: that distribution, customer access, and enterprise community-building are as much a part of what a firm sells founders as the capital itself. Lehr publicly championed Cockroach Labs as a foundational enterprise infrastructure bet years before it became a major database company, and Work-Bench's broader portfolio has produced exits including CoreOS to Red Hat, Semmle to GitHub, and FireHydrant to Freshworks. The firm announced its new $160 million fund in 2025.
CoreOS's acquisition by Red Hat - one of several enterprise infrastructure exits in Work-Bench's portfolio, alongside Semmle's acquisition by GitHub