Madison-based Venture Investors, LLC has announced that it has closed on a new venture fund with $80 million in commitments.
The new fund, which will be called the Early Stage Fund V Limited Partnership, will be funded with the help of returning investors like the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, the Customized Fund Investment Group on behalf of the Venture Michigan Fund, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, American Family Insurance, WEA Insurance, Thrivent Financial, and MGE Energy.
New investors included Western National Mutual Insurance.
“We are pleased that our investors have confidence in our team’s ability to continue to deliver returns from untapped opportunities in the Midwest,” says John Neis, a managing director of Venture Investors.
Venture Investors is a venture capital firm with $250 million under management. Company leaders say Venture Investors will continue its strategy of investing in seed and early-stage companies that commercialize technologies in the life sciences, engineering, and information technology sectors, and from interdisciplinary interaction between researchers in these fields.
Venture Investors has offices strategically located next to the nation’s second- and third-largest research universities — the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The firm has invested in 30 companies that were spinouts of eight leading research universities in the Midwest, including TomoTherapy (now part of Accuray), NimbleGen Systems (now part of Roche), and Third Wave Technologies (now part of Hologic). Venture Investors typically invests between $500,000 and $2.5 million in a first-round financing and up to a total of $7 million in a portfolio company over time.
Chris Prestigiacomo, portfolio manager at SWIB, said the investment board continues to believe there are tremendous startup opportunities being created in the “ecosystems” around leading research universities in the areas in life sciences, advanced engineering, and information technology.
