Rockies Venture Club
One of RVC’s leading principles is to be as diversified as possible when investing in companies.
DENVER (PRWEB) February 21, 2018
Rockies Venture Club (RVC), one of the largest and most experienced Angel investing organizations in the country, led and closed 15 funding rounds over the past year. RVC has created a community of accredited investors who are passionate about helping early stage companies raise the capital that they need to grow.
This trend of early-stage investing in Colorado is encouraging considering the fact that there has been a downward trend in early-stage activity worldwide. A November 2017 report by TechCrunch shows that despite record levels of Venture Capital being raised, the number of funding rounds has been cut in half since 2014. This indicates that capital is being concentrated into larger, later-stage companies. With this being the trend, it would seem that Rockies Venture Club and more largely Colorado as a whole is providing its companies the capital they need to grow.
According to RVC Executive Director, Peter Adams, “One of RVC’s leading principles is to be as diversified as possible when investing in companies. We believe that investing in a variety of sectors allows our Angel investors to diversify their personal portfolios while having fun learning about industries they don’t have past experience in.” This is something that the Angel group truly puts into practice if their 2017 portfolio is any indication. Among the 15 new companies that RVC backed in 2017, there was industry representation within CyberSecurity, AgTech, FinTech, Medical Devices, and Consumer Products; just to name a few.
In addition to engaging local capital through its network of over 200 active Angel investors, Rockies Venture Club also syndicates many of these deals with other Angel groups from across the U.S. Dave Harris, RVC’s Director of Operations, states, “RVC has been working to develop strong partnerships with other Angel groups for several years now. This allows companies to more quickly and easily close their funding rounds, bring deal flow to other areas of the country, and ultimately results in a greater amount of capital being invested directly in Colorado companies.”
Among the 15 deals, RVC led the seed-round in the female founded, Fort Collins company, The Food Corridor (TFC). TFC is the first online marketplace for food businesses to connect with available commercial food assets. Food businesses can find and book commercial kitchens, equipment, commissaries, processors, co-packers, and food storage spaces. CEO Ashley Colpaart put together a $550k round through Rockies Venture Club, Rockies Venture Fund, and other Northern Colorado Investors. Peter Adams stated, “I believe that RVC investors were especially interested in this deal due to Ashley’s deep industry knowledge and the promising early traction they have gained with food entrepreneurs and commercial kitchen spaces.”
RVC Angels also invested in CirrusMD’s $7 Million Series A Round. CirrusMD is a company that gives patients immediate access to providers via secure chat so healthcare organizations can excel in a value-based care environment. This was the third round that RVC has participated in, having first invested in the company in 2014. Since then CirrusMD has expanded access to care to over a million of patients and formed strong partnerships with some of the largest health systems across the country.
Beyond closing the 15 deals, in 2017 Rockies Venture Club created the Women’s Investor Network(WIN), an initiative created to address the lack of diversity in Colorado’s investor community, launched the Rockies Venture Fund, an early-stage VC fund that invests alongside RVC’s Angel investors, and collaborate with the Colorado OEDIT to create the OEDIT HyperAccelerator, program that helps Advanced Industry grant recipients raise the necessary matching funds.
Looking forward to 2018, the club will be hosting the 11th annual Angel Capital Summit (ACS) in March. The Angel Capital Summit is the largest Angel investing event in Colorado, bringing together over 300 investors, entrepreneurs, and community members together under one roof. This year the conference will focus around current, past, and future waves of innovation that have had or will have lasting impacts on the venture capital industry. RVC is excited to announce that there will be two keynote speakers at ACS this year: Divya Narendra, and Colorado’s own Andre Durand. Dyvia is the Founder and CEO of SumZero, and co-founded ConnectU, the inspiration behind Facebook. Andre is the Founder and CEO of Ping Identity who lead the company through a $600M+ acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2016.
About the Rockies Venture Club: Rockies Venture Club is the oldest and one of the largest Angel Groups in the U.S.A., founded in 1985, whose mission is to advance economic development by actively connecting the most promising entrepreneurial companies with Angel investors, venture capitalists, and other community members. Every year Rockies Venture Club offers over 140 educational programs, mastermind groups, Angel forums, and two major conferences for both investors and entrepreneurs.