WVV Capital: An Update Three Years in the Making
It was a bit over three years ago when WVV Capital (WVV) began to take shape. That’s around the time when Jason Franklin, Ph.D., first met WVV’s founding corporate partners. Jason, who had recently left Sand Hill Road to venture out on his own, learned that prominent Wisconsin companies — Aurora Health Care (n/k/a Advocate Aurora Health), Foxconn, Johnson Controls, and Northwestern Mutual — were forming a strategic alliance in the form of a venture capital fund. Having committed $100 million to establish the fund, these leaders of their respective industries were in search of a manager to run this new style multi-corporate venture fund with interdisciplinary investment focus areas (more on this later).
As the saying goes, the rest is history, and shortly thereafter Jason took the helm of WVV. Since then, Steve Robinson, Danielle D’Agostaro and Matthew Maurer joined the WVV team. We’ve also made 9 investments (some are still in stealth), and thought it was due time to share a bit more about what we’ve been up to.
Interdisciplinary Venture Capital
WVV is a bit different from your traditional venture capital fund. Instead of passive financial limited partners (LPs) contributing capital, WVV is comprised of four active corporate partners who’ve equally invested in our $100 million early-stage fund: Advocate Aurora Health, Foxconn, Johnson Controls and Northwestern Mutual.
Of course we have capital — that’s table stakes. But, in addition to having established customer bases, industry knowledge and insights, and large strategically-valuable datasets that make them ideal partners for startups, our corporate partners are deeply integrated with the fund to drive strategic partnerships and relationships with our portfolio companies. Each corporate partner has appointed a senior executive to our investment committee, allowing for a tighter integration and greater facilitation of collaboration with our portfolio companies. The relationships facilitated between our startups and our corporate partners enable shared market insights, accelerated product feedback cycles, expanded initial customer pipelines, and provide access to well-established distribution channels.
In return, our corporate partners’ close partnership with WVV allows them to work with our portfolio companies to access new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and to assess how these technologies will affect their respective markets. We believe software and AI are not only going to enhance, but are also likely to reshape their respective industries. Being part of WVV provides our corporate partners not only an opportunity to invest in emerging technologies, but also get a glimpse into the future of how their industries are being transformed.
Lastly, as we are structured as a traditional venture capital fund, we are aligned with our founders to maximize their outcomes. We want to help our startups grow and scale their business, while providing strategic value from our corporate partners.
Innovation in Established Markets
Our corporate partners formed WVV in order to invest in startups working on transformative and interdisciplinary innovations in healthcare, manufacturing, building technology, and financial services. These are large and mature industries that have been around for many decades, if not much longer; in fact, three out of four WVV partners were started over one hundred years ago!
While these industries seem quite disparate, they are increasingly being impacted by technology and — in particular — AI. You might be asking yourself, ‘What ties these companies together?’ Quite a few things, in fact: They are all well-established, rich with data, and in large (and increasingly intersecting) markets.
Advocate Aurora Health is the one of the largest not-for-profit, integrated health systems in the United States. It serves three million unique patients across 26 hospitals and 500+ outpatient locations.
Foxconn is the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. In 2020, the company ranked 26th on the Fortune Global 500 rankings.
Johnson Controls is backed by more than 130 years of expertise with a global team of 100,000 experts in more than 150 countries.
Northwestern Mutual has $265 billion in assets, $28.1 billion revenues, more than $1.8 trillion worth of life insurance protection, and holds more than $125 billion of client assets as part of its wealth management company and investment services.
As a venture capital firm led by someone with a Ph.D. in Computer Science, we sought to leverage this expertise to approach startup investments in a novel way. WVV Managing Partner Jason Franklin saw first hand in his PhD research on systems, data-intensive computing, and security how academic AI projects were forced to utilize artificially-small datasets, thus limiting their real-world applicability when it came to commercial scale. During his time in venture capital, he also noticed many AI startups faced this same dilemma — so much so that data acquisition costs began to be a barrier to their growth.
This is where we believe the magic of WVV comes into play.
Interdisciplinary Markets and Data
As traditional industries have evolved since the start of the computing revolution (and more recent AI revolution), they have begun to expand into interdisciplinary markets. Take, for example, the recent COVID-19 pandemic and how industries from health, buildings, manufacturing and insurance are involved in various approaches to combat the health crisis. The ability to monitor indoor air quality, for example, and understand personalized health risks associated with indoor environments — as well as manage those risks — requires new approaches that span industries.
We believe our unique composition as a multi-corporate-backed venture fund with an interdisciplinary investment team with experts in AI, FinTech, HealthTech, manufacturing, and smart buildings makes us uniquely positioned to identify new unique opportunities and investment areas.
Another example of an interdisciplinary market is the fast-growing industry of GreyTech: technology to help the world’s rapidly-growing aging populations. Smart devices and corresponding medical and insurance services are now playing an important role in helping people age in place. The combination of Foxconn’s manufacturing capabilities, Johnson Control’s expertise in smart buildings, AAH’s health services, and Northwestern Mutual’s insurance and financial services make WVV uniquely positioned to help GreyTech companies grow.
As a final example (of which there are many more), the need for a sustainable future has particular implications for the built environment, including commercial and manufacturing facilities. With the support of our corporate partners, we are engaging with sustainability and decarbonization startups to enable them to work across industries and geographies for a cleaner and more sustainable future.
The WVV Portfolio
So far we’ve made nine investments, several of which are still in stealth and not yet announced. We are thrilled to share a bit more below about our current portfolio, and plan to share more details on each in future posts.
Blueberry Pediatrics: Blueberry Pediatrics enables pediatric care at a moment’s notice. With Blueberry’s home exam kit, unlimited 24/7 access, and $0 visits, a Pediatrician is always just a text away.
Caspar.AI: Caspar.AI works with retirement communities to leverage AI technology to provide a more healthy, safe and convenient lifestyle for their residents.
SignalWire: SignalWire is an API and Products platform that brings broadcast and enterprise-grade communications to anyone around the world through its software-defined telecommunications technology.
Siris Medical: Siris Medical’s goal is to improve oncology treatment delivery, patient outcomes and cost effectiveness through AI-enabled decisioning that supports clinicians and payers.
Syntegra: Syntegra aims to democratize healthcare data by leveraging machine learning models to enable low-burden access to high-quality, privacy-preserved ‘synthetic’ data. This data allows the development of novel treatments to be dramatically accelerated and patient care to be improved.
XaiPient: XaiPient provides marketing intelligence that recommends the best campaigns and predicts a company’s best leads with its deep-learning AI engine.
Wanted: You
Perhaps it goes without saying, but we’re always on the hunt for startups that have deeply-embedded AI or are innovating in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, or building technology (or any combination of these industries). We like to get involved early (and won’t shy away from a seed round pre-product development), and feel we have a lot to offer in terms of product expertise, data acquisition and go-to-market partnership support.
Don’t hesitate to contact us — we’d love to learn about what you’re working on.
The content contained herein (“Content”) is provided by CVC Manager, LLC (“CVC”), an exempt reporting advisor for the venture fund, Wisconn Valley Ventures, LP. Opinions offered herein by CVC personnel belong to such personnel, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of CVC. Some of the Content contained in this site is provided by third-parties, and no warranties are offered with respect to the adequacy, accuracy or completeness of the Content. The Content is made available solely for informational purposes, and does not contain tax, legal, or investment advice, nor is it intended to be an offering or marketing for the purchase or sale of securities (including the companies mentioned or any fund). Investors should always consult with financial professionals when evaluating any tax, legal, financial or investment decision.
