Let’s Celebrate the Two Year Anniversary of Great North Ventures Fund II

We announced our $41 Million Fund II back on May 23, 2022.

On the two-year anniversary of our Fund II announcement, here’s a progress update-

• We’ve invested $12,000,000 into 19 startups.
• Thematically, we are still focused on our three primary investment themes. Those are digital transformation through AI, solving labor problems and community driven applications.
  • Examples of our Fund II investments by theme:
    • Solving Labor Problems- Carbon Origins, Mangxo, Micruity, OneCarNow, Skillit, Yardstik
    • Digital Transformation through AI- Ensodata, Freede, Soiltech, Vocxi
    • Community Driven Applications- Featured.com, HLRBO, NextGem, Omnia Fishing, Percent Pledge
• We continue to use a network driven approach to backing founders based in markets underserved by the broader venture capital market.
  • Where are these underserved markets?
    • We’ve historically been very active in the Midwest, especially in Minnesota where we are headquartered.
    • We recently made our first two investments in LATAM with OneCarNow and Mangxo. We are finding the LATAM is a bit of a capital dessert like the Midwest, and we are especially excited by the fintech startups we are seeing in the region.

Team Update

• All three General Partners (Pradip Madan, Ryan Weber and I) are still actively searching for new investments.
• We have added two new Associates who are coming up on their one year of full-time contributions, Joseph Daher and Grant Gibson.

Future Outlook

• We have 60% of Fund II’s committed capital still to deploy, so that’s approximately $24.6M.
• We are planning to invest in another 7-10 new companies.
• We are spending a lot of time in B2B SAAS and fintech.
• From a stage standpoint, we are looking for startups which have launched their product and showing early signs of product-market fit.
• We have no minimum revenue threshold for us to write a first check (we are mostly evaluating a startup based on qualitative factors of an opportunity at the seed stage), however, most of the startups we invest in have anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue run rate at the time we first invest with growth rates in the 25% to 50+% month over month range.
• Typically, our initial checks are $250k to $1M into Seed stage rounds with potential to follow on in subsequent rounds.
• We are comfortable leading rounds, but being the lead investor is not a requirement.

I’d like to personally thank each of our Fund II investors. It’s through their capital commitments which we are able to continue on our journey backing ambitious founders!