Seven months into the launch of his rolling fund targeting Triangle startups, serial entrepreneur Scot Wingo has a new partner.
Robbie Allen, whose artificial intelligence firm, Automated Insights, was acquired in 2015, is joining Wingo’s Tweener Fund as a general partner.
Allen, who calls Wingo “one of the most productive people I have ever been around,” said talks got serious a few months ago. Allen, one of the Tweener Fund’s founding investors, said he “really believed in the initial vision.” So much so that, earlier this year, he starting talking to Wingo – a former Automated Insights board member – about ways to get even more involved. The partnership emerged from those conversations.
Allen has invested in 15 startups personally, and he said it’s extremely difficult to pick winners. He points to the volatility of the stock market, where disclosures make so much information readily available, and yet it’s still hard to pick the winners. With startups, there’s a lot less information. The traditional venture capital model, where firms bet on just a handful of companies a year, seemed a risky model to Allen. He favors the index fund format as a way of hedging bets – and thinks Wingo has identified the sweet spot.
But why dive in now – with economic outlooks show particular volatility in the startup sector.
Allen said he has particular expertise at launching companies in downturns. He launched what would become Automated Insights in 2007 – “I kind of started my entrepreneurial career in pretty poor economic times,” he said.
“I started a company with the idea that you really have to create a real business,” he said. “You can’t always count on funding to be there. … But just because there’s going to be some financial hardships in terms of the larger economy, that doesn’t equate to being a bad time to either start a company or invest in a company.”
And as he knows from personal experience, “there are going to be a lot of really successful companies to emerge on the other side.”
The Tweener Fund has already become one of the region’s most prolific investors – at least in terms of startups in the portfolio. According to Wingo, the company recently added 14 new companies to its portfolio, bringing the total to 25 firms and more than $1.4 million invested since the fund launched in January.
New firms in the portfolio include Diveplane, led by former Epic Games President Michael Capps, and Bandwidth (Nasdaq: BAND) spinout ArenaCX.
