It's been a busy week for Madison-based venture capital fund 4490 Ventures.
On Tuesday, it was announced the fund led a $14 million round in interactive digital signage Chicago startup UPshow, and led a $6.5 million seed round for Fluree, a Winston-Salem, N.C.-based secure data management company.
4490 Ventures, led by Greg Robinson and Dan Malven, makes investments between $5 million and $10 million over multiple rounds for portfolio companies. The fund's portfolio also includes Wisconsin tech startups Understory, Abodo, HealthMyne, Avid Ratings and Eat Street.
In 2013, the State of Wisconsin Investment Board and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the patent and licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provided the initial $30 million to start 4490 Ventures.
UPshow said it will use the funds "for continued product development and servicing of top brick-and-mortar brands throughout the United States and beyond." The company also said it "has signed multiple seven-figure deals this year with leading household brands that collectively have tens of thousands of locations."
UPshow allows bar, restaurant and gym owners to show branded content on their TV screens to engage customers.
"UPshow’s offering gives brick-and-mortar brands control over the digital experiences of their customers and employees in ways they never had before," Malven said.
Fluree developed a permissioned blockchain data platform. Earlier this year, the company won a contract to provide the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force with its technology to allow secure databases and computer systems not initially designed to communicate with one another to do so.
“Becoming data centric using current data management products is too difficult and expensive for 99 percent of the world’s enterprises," Malven said. "Not only does Fluree take out massive cost elements of becoming data centric, it enables a whole suite of new capabilities that not even the largest companies can build today without storing their data in a platform such as Fluree’s.”
