We spent 2025 focused on what we know best: backing early-stage companies, helping teams embed financial infrastructure and AI into operations, and writing about the execution decisions that move companies forward. Some of that work came from companies we’ve backed directly. Some came from platforms we’ve supported for years. All of it reflects our belief that founder-led, disciplined execution still drives the best outcomes.
Here are a few highlights:
- Our portfolio company Micruity’s $20 million Series A underscored how progress in retirement is increasingly happening at the infrastructure layer. More than 100 million Americans save through defined-contribution plans, which were designed to accumulate assets, not deliver predictable monthly income. Insurers and asset managers have developed income products, but the industry lacks a secure, standardized way to connect them with plan recordkeepers. Micruity offers that missing link.
- Retirement infrastructure isn’t the only area where specialized systems are starting to replace one-size-fits-all solutions. Long-term care planning is stubbornly complex and fragmented across insurance, healthcare and personal finance. Waterlily’s $7 million seed round reflected growing interest in using AI to bring structure to that process: helping families model costs, risks, and care decisions earlier, before a crisis forces reactive choices. AI tools that are designed for emotionally and operationally complex decisions can help navigate these difficult moments.
- We led the seed round in NROC Security, a platform tackling a fast-growing enterprise problem: how to govern employee use of generative AI. With more than 90% of employees reportedly using personal GenAI accounts like ChatGPT or Gemini, security teams face a “shadow AI economy” that’s largely invisible to existing controls. NROC’s network-based proxy solves that with one-step integration. It plugs into secure web gateways, allowing companies to inspect every GenAI interaction, without installing endpoint agents or browser plugins. This not only makes deployment faster, but also provides visibility and policy enforcement features that companies need to secure their data.
A Focus on Long-Term Execution
On our blog, we highlighted portfolio companies that turned focus and operational rigor into long-term results. Here are a few standout examples:
- We profiled LendAPI, a lending infrastructure platform that gives lenders such as banks & credit unions along with fintech companies the tools to quickly stand up underwriting, servicing and compliance. Lenders and fintech founders use LendAPI to launch credit products without building a full tech stack from scratch. What stands out is its ability to turn embedded credit from a months-long build into a matter of weeks, compressing both time and cost. For startups or lenders under pressure to move fast and spend carefully, it’s a model built for agility.
- OneCarNow (OCN) reflects that same intersection of vertical data, embedded finance, and disciplined growth. It’s now the largest gig fleet in Mexico. The company aims to solve a fundamental access problem: fewer than 3% of ride-hail drivers in the region qualify for traditional car loans. OCN’s in-house underwriting model uses ride platform data (earnings, trip volume, reliability scores) to assess risk more accurately than a credit score can. That system supports a vertically integrated stack: subscription-based vehicle access, bundled insurance and maintenance, automated payments and collections, and a rent-to-own path. The company remains profitable while scaling, and is now investing $150 million to triple its fleet and expand into Brazil. While OCN might look like a vehicle provider, it’s really a fintech infrastructure company laying the groundwork for the economic empowerment of its users.
- We revisited Field Nation, a portfolio company we’ve supported since its early days. What began as a marketplace for on-site tech work has become one of the largest platforms enabling America’s contract-based IT and retail services economy. It processes more than a million work orders a year with more than 80,000 active technicians. The platform isn’t just a job board. It runs on an integrated fintech and workforce management layer: real-time payments, 1099 automation, insurance enrollment, tax form generation, and compliance tools — all embedded directly into each transaction.
How Our Thinking Evolved
Great North’s perspective is guided by our firsthand operating experience. Drawing on lessons from bootstrapping a company to more than $70 million in revenue, we’ve emphasized fundamentals that often get lost in growth cycles like capital efficiency, granular metrics, and a clear understanding of unit economics. In our early days, scale didn’t come from spending more. It came from understanding what actually drove revenue and treating profitability as a discipline rather than an endpoint.
That operator lens continues to inform how we approach investing. We look closely at how founders deploy capital, whether technology is being used to solve a real problem, and how early teams build systems that scale under pressure. Capital, in that framework, amplifies execution. In markets moving as quickly as AI and embedded finance, we’ve found that discipline often matters more than speed.
We also examined how investors look back on bets they didn’t pursue. Through the concept of “anti-portfolio thinking,” Graeme Thickins dug into the idea of past misses as data and not regrets. Across our own history, the pattern is consistent: many generational companies initially looked uninvestable because they appeared crowded, too small, overly regulated, or misclassified as hardware or consumer plays. What investors often miss is the underlying infrastructure, including developer experience in payments, data connectivity in fintech, or workflow-level pain that incumbents tolerated but customers didn’t love. Reflecting on those passes sharpens how we evaluate today: we prioritize execution over narrative, founder insight over market optics, and systems that change how work gets done.
Backing Builders in Our Backyard
This year marked the launch of Next in the North, a digital media platform created to spotlight the founders, startups, and investors shaping Minnesota’s innovation economy. Built to highlight funding activity, founder stories, and emerging themes across the region, the Next in the North reflects a belief that strong ecosystems are built through visibility and connection, not just capital. Great North Principal Grant Gibson launched the publication as part of our founder-first approach and long-standing support for entrepreneurship in the Midwest.
Looking Ahead
What stood out most in 2025 wasn’t a single breakthrough, but the strengthening of infrastructure that now supports critical functions across the economy. The strongest companies are now embedding technology into workflows across industries.
Vertical AI isn’t showing up as general-purpose copilots. It’s supporting underwriting, compliance, security, and operations, taking ownership of tasks that used to require human judgment. Meanwhile, embedded finance has moved from add-on to core architecture. Payments, credit, insurance, and disbursements are becoming foundational. Teams that build these systems early control more of the experience, more of the margin, and more of the customer relationship. As we head into 2026, the divide isn’t between companies using AI and those that aren’t: it’s between those deploying it inside critical operations, and those stuck at the prototype stage.
That’s where we’re focused and that’s where we’ll keep building.
Wishing you a happy holiday and fruitful year ahead.
