Great North Ventures Fund II is now actively investing!
Investors can learn more on our Investors page.
If you have a pre-seed or seed stage startup, check out our Founders page for our criteria:
- Great North Ventures invests in companies using breakthrough technologies to transform industries in a variety of verticals including: Consumer, Financial services, Health, Transport/Warehousing, and Education/Workforce Development
- We invest in startups wherever they are located, because we believe that great startups can come from anywhere
- We are interested in startups solving bold problems that can reach global scale and a $1B+ market
- We look for evidence of strong product/market fit
The struggles of building, scaling, and existing tech startups are well-know to us, because we’ve done it before. If you are interested in partnering with Great North Ventures, apply for funding, or slide into Rob Weber’s DMs.
Any founders with a SAAS or marketplace startup looking to raise a preseed or small seed round (<$2M) right now? We are just starting to invest from our Fund II and as such, looking for the earliest of early stage deal flow. Referrals welcome.
— Rob Weber (@robertjweber) June 29, 2021
We are pleased to announce the launch of our venture studio, Great North Venture Labs. Great North Venture Labs will design and build companies with world-class founders and operators that are in focused market segments with substantial opportunities. Promising studio startups will be funded with capital from the second Great North venture fund.
![](https://gnladmin.staging.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-30-at-10.54.11-AM.png)
The venture studio model is a relatively new model for entrepreneurship that combines company building with venture capital. By creating researched opportunities from great ideas, and pairing them with talent that can execute, Great North Venture Labs will create early-stage startups built to succeed. These startups will be vetted for funding, with seed capital coming from Great North Ventures (formerly Great North Labs).
Great North Ventures will focus on investing in founders who are applying breakthrough tech to inefficient processes. Our first two Great North Venture Labs companies are headquartered where we have the strongest talent pipeline, in Minnesota. In light of today’s reality of startups adopting a remote-first approach to developing their teams, Great North Ventures will encourage founders to build where they are.
We are flexible with respect to what the right business model is, and will pursue different business model types including enterprise SAAS, online marketplaces, and online community/social networks. Strong execution translates to all verticals and business models, and knows no borders.
This is an evolution from our initial positioning. The truth is that the latest opportunities, teams, and new ventures are distributed. Remote work is becoming standard, and our geographic investment focus has become increasingly arbitrary. Good opportunities happen anywhere people can execute them.
Why Now?
Before we launched Great North Labs in 2017, we considered launching a venture fund and a venture studio. Predating the launch of Great North Labs, Ryan Weber and I traveled the world as founders, and we were able to see great examples of the venture studio/incubator type of businesses such as Betaworks in NYC, IdealLab in LA (our partners in Fund I portfolio company Branch), and High Alpha (our partners in Fund I portfolio Structural) in Indianapolis. Locally, Rally Ventures (our Fund I partners in Parallax) and Invenshure (our Fund I partners in Flywheel) have successfully executed this studio model too. After much consideration, we opted to exclusively focus on launching our venture fund first so that we could develop a strong platform as early stage investors.
Now that we are getting started to launch Fund II, we now have a more robust internal team along with our Innovator Network. This strong foundation rooted in strong execution from founders and operators who have demonstrated excellence in execution enable us to do so where most other early stage funds lack operational depth.
We are not just service providers, we are entrepreneurs!
One of the biggest questions we get from our fund’s Limited Partners is how can we build even large ownership in the startups we invest our capital and resources into. With the explosion of new early stage funds, including those that invest earlier such as in pre-seed, the competition for the best deals is fierce. There is no more proprietary deal flow than ground up building a startup, and the opportunity to pick teams centered around strong foundation execution enables us to de-risk the earlier stages at a level not possible by most other funds.
The first Great North Venture Labs company
The first Great North Venture Labs company is in stealth mode. The new startup is focused on solving the biggest problems faced by collectors of trading cards. Like many other alt assets such as luxury goods, paintings, vintage cars, NFTs, the trading card market has grown immensely over recent years, but the market is still dominated by legacy marketplaces and other industry participants, many of which rely on dated technology and analog business processes. It looks to enhance the trading card market by using breakthrough technologies not available to prior businesses operating in the trading card market.
This stealth startup is headquartered in Minnesota. Additional details will be shared at a later date.
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April Newsletter
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June Newsletter
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Demystifying Startup HR
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Head of Finance & Fund Administration- Venture Capital Firm (Remote)
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Demystifying Startup HR
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3 Portfolio Companies Make Inc. 5000 + Quicklly & Instacart Expand
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iraLogix closes $22M + Branch expands with Uber
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iraLogix closes $22M Series C
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Flywheel lands Gates Foundation grant
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Venture Capital Analyst
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Orazio Buzza, Founder and CEO of Fooda – on Episode 13, “Execution is King”
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$40M Fund II Raised!
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Great North Ventures Raises $40 Million Fund II
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Investment Thesis: Fund II Strategy
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Investment Theme: Community-Driven Applications
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Investment Theme: Digital Transformation Through AI
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Investment Theme: Solving Labor Problems
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Trends in the Gig Economy + Work in the Metaverse
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Portfolio raises $125M + talking fundraising with Branch CEO
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Omnia Fishing closes $4M round, joins Great North portfolio!
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Yardstik new to portfolio, closes $8M Series A
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First venture studio startup comes out of stealth!
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Insights for founders from a data guru, + FactoryFix raises a Series A!
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Una Fox: Episode 9, Execution is King
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Start With a Mobile App, Not a Website
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2ndKitchen acquired by SoftBank-backed REEF + advice from an early Googler
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2ndKitchen Acquired by REEF
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Venture studio startup jobs + advice for founders from founders
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Best Advice from the Great North Annual Event: Episode 7, Execution is King
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Newsletter: Do you fit our investing themes?
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Jonathan Treble, PrintWithMe: Episode 6, Execution is King
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Newsletter: “Podcast Launched: Execution is King!”
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“Execution is King” – the Great North Ventures Podcast
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Newsletter: Fund II is open for business!
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Unlocking the Potential of Anonymized Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Data
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Fund II is open for Business!
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Mike Schulte Promoted to Venture Partner
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New Name + New Venture Studio
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Great North Launches Startup Studio
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We Don’t Need No [full-time MBA] Education
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Building Capacity for Innovation
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Recessionary times, a record-setting IPO, and Minnesota’s Resilient Startups
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Minnesota's Resilient Startups
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July 4th, Equitable American Dream-ing, and Robots Diagnosing COVID
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Jumpstart, the Startup School, and Branch Wins a Webby!
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COVID-19 Trends, the Great North response, and our Founders Survey
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Giving in the Time of Coronavirus
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COVID-19 Resources for Startups, State-by-State
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COVID-19, the CARES Act, and startups stepping up
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New Business Preservation Act
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Digital Future Boardroom, PartySlate, and The Lean Startup School
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Great North Labs’s Startup Summit 2020
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Great North Labs's Startup Summit 2020
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World Economic Forum, NoiseAware, and the Startup School reboot
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Great North Labs at the World Economic Forum 2020 in Davos
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Top 5 Stories of 2019
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Taking the Founders Pledge, Inhabitr, and gBETA Pitch Night
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Founders Pledge: Support the Organizations that Support You
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BETA Showcase, Greater MN, and Launch MN comes to St. Cloud
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7 Places to Spot Us at Startup Week
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The Greater MN Meetup, Parallax, and Exponential Medicine
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Greater MN at the big show, Neela Mollgaard heads Launch MN, and Misty’s roadtrip.
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Talking VC, tech kids, and Forge North’s Horizon
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June: Great North Labs’s first fund raised!
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May: Innovation Ecosystems, SingularityU Kickoff, and PrintWithMe
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April: Minnebar Recap, ZenLord Pro, and Supporting Entrepreneurs
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MinneBar 14 Recap
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Dispatch and 2ndKitchen claim Tech Madness titles
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Minnesota Innovation Collaborative
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March: Minnebar, Hockey + Hustlers, and Innovation Workshops
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Great North Labs at CES
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Dec.-Jan.: Top Posts from 2018, pepr, Glowe, and Misty Robotics
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Carried Interest: Top Posts from 2018
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Oct.-Nov.: Singularity University, Exponential Tech, and the State of Innovation
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Digital Transformation Summit, July 25th in Minneapolis
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June: Silicon Lakes, FactoryFix, and the Digital Transformation Summit
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Digital Manufacturing and Logistics
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May: Team Genius, IoT, and the Future of Everything
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IoT 3.0
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Healthcare Innovation
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March: Exponential Tech, the “Goldilocks Zone”, and Minnebar 13
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February: Team Expansion, Dispatch, and Startup School Events
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Great North Labs Newsletter – December 2017
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A Letter To My Younger Self
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Great North Labs Newsletter
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Great North Labs Featured on Tech.mn
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Great North Labs Featured in St Cloud Times
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Great North Labs – Featured on BizJournals.com
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