A trio of local startup veterans has launched a new venture fund to target companies in the region and beyond. It’s the next phase, they said, in a “pay-it-forward” approach they hope will catapult the Cincinnati ecosystem to bigger wins.
Tim Metzner, formerly of Coterie, has teamed up with Astronomer co-founder Ry Walker and Ocean Accelerator’s Christy Johnson to create Fireroad Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. The team is raising $20 million and has already made a few investments to start.
The fund will sit inside Fireroad, Metzner’s latest venture.
Johnson, who previously served as Ocean Accelerator’s chief operating officer, joined full time in mid-July to serve as its principal.
The goal is to make early, inception-stage investments in companies, while also serving as a long-term partner that can work hand-in-hand with founders.
“It made sense for a number of different reasons, including Ry and I’s personal desire to have an investor in this region we wish existed 10 years ago,” Metzner told me.
“A big gap we felt early was a lack of people who had been in our seats, who understood early-stage tech. There's some good momentum now, and we want to build upon that. Having a fund like this in Cincinnati is another reason why this is going to be a great place to build startups.”
The formation of the fund comes four months after Metzner formally announced the formation of Fireroad. He exited Coterie, a red-hot insurtech he helped co-found, earlier this year to focus on the launch.
The firm is still a “full-stack venture building platform,” he said, which now includes the fund.
Fireroad also operates as a holding company, which will acquire small businesses using a “Warren-Buffett-style” approach, and venture studio, where new startup companies will be created/validated with founders plugged in to run and scale them.
Metzner called it Differential 2.0. He and Walker co-founded the high-growth startup studio 10 years ago, which spun out one of Cincinnati’s only unicorns in Astronomer (Astronomer develops systems that help companies manage the flow of data, powered by Apache Airflow, an open-source platform).
Walker led the company as CEO until 2019, and officially sold his shares and exited as a part-time adviser in November 2022.
The reboot is inspired in part by a book published in 2012 by renowned venture capitalist Brad Feld, a Techstars founder, called “Startup Communities.” Building an ecosystem is a 20-year journey, Feld said.
Both Metzner and Walker said they distinctly remember having conversations at that time that Cincinnati was just getting started.
“In the book, (Feld) talks about how the first 10 years might be driven by community organizers, but eventually the founders have to take over,” Walker said. “The successful founders have to put the ecosystem on their shoulders. I feel like it's my duty. Everyone helped us get to where we got. Now I need to help continue the progress we’ve made.”
Fireroad Ventures will access deal flow through its existing collective networks – and through a partnership with Ocean Accelerator, one of the region’s longest-running startup programs with a portfolio value of more than $1 billion.
Fireroad Ventures will serve as its new capital partner, replacing 11 Tribes, a Chicago-based early-stage venture fund. It will provide $50,000 in seed funding to each company chosen for its cohorts for the next couple years.
The fund was also able to get an allocation in Tembo’s seed round, Walker’s latest startup. Previously called CoreDB, Tembo is a commercial open-source company based on the popular database, Postgres. Walker said it’s a $70 billion segment. Tembo raised around $6.5 million earlier this year and is working on a Series A raise.
Of the $20 million, Johnson said Fireroad Ventures has closed $1.5 million. The process recently got underway.
Johnson said the team is targeting commitments of $250,000 from its LPs, or limited partners.
There’s no hard timeline to complete the raise. Sometimes even top venture capital firms talk to about 150 to 200 LPs to get it done.
“We're pretty clear eyed that it's not going to be easy, but also we are confident in our track record and the opportunity and our networks,” Johnson said. “We are first-time managers, but we're coming in with a pretty solid track record. There's space for this in the ecosystem.”
