A three-year-old Chicago-based venture outfit that invests in pre-seed startups, primarily in the Midwest and founded by overlooked individuals who are focused on massive markets, has closed a new fund with $52 million in capital commitments. The Office of the Illinois State Treasurer is one of the limited partners in the new fund.
It's a huge step up from the outfit's debut fund, which was $6 million, and a sign of confidence in the company's investor, an engineer who spent six years at Goldman Sachs before joining the venture firm.
While it's too early to judge the success of her portfolio, she has been active, investing between $100,000 and $250,000 into 27 companies with her first fund, and investing in eight more with her second effort. Career Karma, a four-year-old startup that matches employees and contractors to job training programs, and Suma Wealth, a financial wellbeing platform for the Latino community, are two of the portfolio companies.
The areas of interest for both startups are health and wellbeing, food tech, and the future of learning.
They also play to the strengths of the man, including an understanding of the Latino market. One of every four kids being born today in the U.S. is Latino, yet Latinx companies still attract less than 1% of venture capital funding.
She is willing to back people who have not heard from other backers. They didn't because Harris had a network and lived in Silicon Valley. The initial strategy of Career Karma was to help aspiring students and working professionals navigate their way to the right school. Harris moved to Miami from the Bay Area.
The plan is to do more of the same, with slightly larger checks, ranging from $250,000 to $1 million.
She wants to be the first and largest check into a round.
She is more than happy to lead the way with investors like PayPal and Insight looking to her for some of their deal flow.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
