By focusing on these verticals, Venture First is often able to work with companies that are more capital-efficient than their peers and that, whether due to the niche nature of the business, geography, or some other factor, are neglected by the capital markets. These relationships often result in highly connective partnerships with the potential to yield asymmetric returns for all parties involved.
Our Private Equity and Digital Transformation activities center around locating mature, cash-flowing companies with strong operators that we can acquire for reasonable multiples before leveraging our team’s experience, data and technology playbook, and operating partner network in order to accelerate growth. Though there are countless companies that need modernization assistance, strategic guidance, and other support in order to supercharge their growth; it takes a great deal of time, effort, experience, and focus to identify the right opportunities and execute a plan to take them to the next level.
Our Venture Capital investments focus primarily on Data & Technology companies in the “fly-over” states that show promise and have a unique skill set or product offering. Typically overlooked by coastal VCs, these companies are often dramatically more capital-efficient than their large-market peers, are available at more reasonable valuations, and greatly benefit from the connective tissue that Venture First provides to get them to the next level.
While most VCs plan for a high failure rate and bank on a “unicorn” making the returns for the portfolio, we carefully nurture our portfolio, resulting in very few negative return investments over the past 15 years. Even in the venture space, we’re always working to cap risk.
Our Special Situation Credit team identifies and invests in unusual lending opportunities with asymmetric return potential. We often engineer creative structures that both reduce risk while optimizing returns for investors and match timing, situational and cost of capital dynamics for borrowers. Ideally, this creates “win-win” situations for both companies and investors.
An example of this creativity was pioneering some of the first barrel-focused lending vehicles in the American craft whiskey space. We’ve now deployed over $100M in the space and our Whiskey Capital Secured Financing Fund I is one of the highest-performing special situation credit funds currently in the market, despite a lower risk profile than many of its return peers.
Contact Info
