Investment deals are mounting for Wisconn Valley Ventures, the $100 million Milwaukee-based venture fund supported with $25 million each from Foxconn Technology Group, Advocate Aurora Health, Johnson Controls International plc and Northwestern Mutual.
Over the last 16 months, the fund — which also operates in Silicon Valley and invests in early-stage startups, both domestic and international, working in health care, technology, manufacturing and financial services — has completed three investment deals and is approaching a fourth, said Jason Franklin, the managing director of WC Ventures.
Deals from WV Ventures was initially said to be in the range of $250,000 and $5 million, but the fund has cut checks around $2 million and $2.5 million, Franklin said. The fund was launched in 2018, but the limited partners said it would not become active until a fund manager was hired. Franklin was announced as the fund's manager in March of 2019.
Franklin talked about the fund's activity on Wednesday during the virtual Summerfest Tech conference, the annual innovation and technology conference hosted by Milwaukee World Festival Inc., organizer of the Summerfest musical festival. The session on corporate venture capital was moderated by John McDonald, an attorney at Milwaukee's Godfrey & Kahn who chairs the firm's venture capital and startup teams and is also on the firm's technology team, and included Dan Reed, managing director of American Family Ventures, the venture arm of Madison-based American Family Insurance.
The initial investment deal for WV Ventures was into SignalWire, a company that developed a cloud-computing platform that allows developers to embed voice, messaging and video capabilities into applications. SignalWire closed on a $11.5 million round in late 2019. The company has a primary office in Palo Alto, California, but its CEO and founder Anthony Minessale is located in Brookfield. Minessale travels to California often and previously told the Business Journal the company employs people working from all parts of the globe.
Other investors in SignalWire include Samsung Next Ventures, a San Francisco venture capital firm owned by Samsung Electronics; Eric Yuan, the CEO and founder of Zoom Video Communications (Nasdaq: ZM); Jerry Yang, the former CEO and co-founder of Yahoo Inc. and founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures; and Ron Neuenberger, who created AngelFire.com.
WV Ventures most recently invested in Syntegra, a San Francisco company whose technology applies state-of-the-art machine learning models to create synthetic health care datasets. WV Ventures participated in a $3.1 million round for Syntegra, according to Crunchbase. The fund's second deal was in a University of Wisconsin-Madison spinout, which Franklin did not name, and the fund working on its fourth deal with a yet-to-be named company in Pittsburgh, he said.
“Our goal is to invest in companies that are building tech solutions that are maybe slightly outside of what our corporates are currently looking at," Franklin said. " Kind of fringe or frontier technologies, things that are a few years out where the corporates that we're working with haven't really put resources on yet."
Franklin anticipates more deals flowing through startup networking systems and startup accelerators like Wisconsin's gener8tor due to less face-to-face meetings happening due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
American Family Ventures has a venture portfolio of more than 70 companies. Investments are in the range of $250,000 to $5 million in startups focused on innovation in insurance-related services, artificial intelligence and data analytics, and internet-of-things technology, primarily around home automation. AmFam recently raised over $200 million for a latest and third fund.
Reed said 10% of the American Family investment are with companies based in Wisconsin, compared with a national trend of Wisconsin representing about 1% of all VC deals.
