Many startup investments involve multiple investorsthese days, but it’s not always easy to assemble a group of backers necessary to close the deal.
Wisconsin—which has a small local pool of venture capital and aspirations to churn out more high-growth startups—is one of the places experimenting with tactics to nurture relationships and collaboration between investors in the state. Now, some of those efforts are starting to bear fruit.
FactoryFix, a software startup that connects skilled workers and manufacturers with short-term staffing needs, is announcing today it reeled in a $1.5 million investment led by Capital Midwest Fund, a venture capital firm based near Milwaukee. As part of the deal, FactoryFix recently relocated its headquarters from Chicago to Madison, WI, according to Capital Midwest. (FactoryFix participated in Wisconsin-based Gener8tor’s startup accelerator program in Milwaukee last year, and it already had employees located in the Badger State before the Capital Midwest deal closed.)
Capital Midwest general partner Dan Einhorn says the deal was sparked by a conversation at a meeting of the Wisconsin Investment Syndication Committee. The committee is an informal group Einhorn formed more than two years ago to try and coax more meaningful conversations—and more deal-making—between Wisconsin’s growing number of venture capital firms, corporate VC arms, angel investors, and other startup backers in their networks, some of whom are located outside the state.
The FactoryFix investment is the first deal to materialize from the syndication committee’s quarterly meetings, Einhorn says. Read the full story here.
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