Two Greater Cincinnati leaders are among the founding members of a new nonprofit that’s looking to unite the top venture capital firms across the Midwest.
The Great Lakes Venture Capital Association announced its formal launch, effective Aug. 6. The organization will work to empower the top VC firms in the middle of the country – namely Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, western Pennsylvania and Kentucky – with the goal of fostering a “collaborative environment that benefits everyone.”
Among GLVCA’s five founding members are a pair of locally based VCs: Tim Schigel at Over-the-Rhine’s Refinery Ventures and Chad Summe at Covington’s EGateway Capital.
The list also includes Adrian Fortino, who leads Houston-based Mercury Fund's Midwest office; Camila Noordeloos at Michigan’s Grand Ventures; and Kaleb Dumot at Integrity Power Search, a boutique search firm for startups based outside Cleveland.
Schigel told me a unified group like this has never existed across the broader region before. There are established venture capital associations in Michigan and Illinois, respectively, but none in Ohio, and other organizations like the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association span multiple state lines.
He said the idea took shape a few months ago and came together relatively quickly.
“We often say cities don’t collaborate with each other. People do. You have to connect with people, and that’s the key point of this,” Schigel said. “A lot of us know each other, but don’t get together regularly on any sort of basis. That’s the first goal – to create a forum for everybody to develop better relationships and trusted bonds.”
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All members of the leadership team are volunteers. GLVCA is planning its first event, a summit at French Lick Resort in Indiana, in June 2025. The group expects more than 50 venture capitalists from across the Great Lakes region to attend.
The nonprofit will start sending invites to general partners at funds based in the Great Lakes soon, but the membership will include those in the broader Midwest as well. There are no dues, at least to start.
The goal is to get the group together twice a year, according to Schigel.
“So many of our cites are a two- to four-hour drive away from each other,” he said. “It slows down that feedback loop between the groups. Those loops take longer than if we were all on the West Coast, where everybody’s 30 minutes away – where the loops are smaller, faster, tighter.
“Finding new ways to decrease the learning loop and get people together is a good thing,” he added.
The nonprofit’s heavy Cincinnati – and Ohio – roots could prove beneficial for the local ecosystem.
Refinery, which Schigel launched in 2017, invests at the post-seed stage in the enterprise software-as-a-service, or SaaS, space in fields like IT, human capital, digital health and media and marketing. EGateway is newer to the fold: Summe founded the firm in 2021 to back technologies, platforms and marketplaces that form the e-commerce value chain, or how goods are marketed, sold, transacted and delivered.
EGateway is currently raising a $100 million fund, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Refinery Ventures has coinvested frequently with Grand Ventures. Locally, Grand's portfolio includes Cincinnati-based Astronomer and Tembo. Mercury Fund just participated in a $1.2 million round raised in July by BrandRank.AI, a generative artificial intelligence-based brand search firm. Its local portfolio also includes Lisnr and Amify, which sold earlier this year to Cart.com.
