Oregon Venture Fund named Deepthi Madhava partner, bringing the fund’s investing team to six people and gender parity.
Madhava has been an investor in the fund since 2020 and last year boosted her involvement to investor-in-residence.
Prior to OVF, Madhava spent 11 years at Deloitte, where she worked on due diligence for private equity clients, researched emerging industries and technology trends and worked on large strategic investments.
For Madhava joining OVF first as an investor and now as a partner is a way to fully dive into the local startup ecosystem and build a deeper connection to the Oregon community. Madhava and her husband have lived in Oregon for 11 years, but with her role as a consultant her network was mainly out-of-state.
She was drawn to investing as a way into the community because her skillset developed in consulting complemented venture capital more so than joining a startup as an operator, she said.
In this new role Madhava will be a voting member of the investment team. That team consists of Madhava, Alline Akintore, who joined in 2021, entrepreneur Jon Maroney, Lynn Fletcher, who has been with the fund since 2011, entrepreneur Matt Compton, and founder Eric Rosenfeld.
Madhava is also on the board of Oregon Entrepreneurs Network.
Her interest in startups comes from her perspective seeing how innovation is driven by startup ecosystems.
“Startup ecosystems and venture capital are driving innovation in the broader economic construct. Having seen and lived through the challenges of larger scale companies, true innovation is at the grassroots and at startups,” she said. “To be a pivotal part of that change I wanted to be in that grassroots level.”
Madhava is particularly interested in artificial intelligence applications and clean tech.
OVF raises an annual fund, which means the money raised one year is invested in that year and anything left over is carried forward for follow-on investments. The group has about 180 investors in its pool. In 2018, the group launched its first multiyear fund to make it easier for institutional investors to participate.
That first multi-year fund raised $18 million. Last year, OVF starting raising money for a larger second five-year fund called Fund XV.
OVF focuses on early stage growth companies in Oregon and southwest Washington. It writes checks between $500,000 and $5 million. OVF manages $250 million in active investments, according to the group. It was an early investor in Inpria, Elemental Technologies (now AWS Elemental), Jama Software, Absci and Brandlive.
OVF says its portfolio has a $4.4 billion market value and employs more than 5,200 people.
This story has been updated to reflect what happens to left over capital at the end of a fund year.
