High Alpha launches third venture studio
INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — Indianapolis-based High Alpha has launched third venture studio, which it says will help accelerate the creation, launch and scale of new startup companies. The firm says High Alpha Studio III raised $18 million from San Francisco-based Emergence Capital and Foundry Group in Colorado, both of which are repeat investors. High Alpha Managing Partner Scott Dorsey says the new venture studio is validation for the firm’s work over the last six years, which includes the launch of more than 30 Software-as-a-Service companies.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Dorsey said the new venture studio will fuel more growth in Indiana’s tech sector.
“I think it just speaks to how much opportunity there is for new technology and the trends we’re seeing in work and productivity and the underlying technologies like AI and data science,” said Dorsey. “We’re in just such an exciting time to be dreaming up new ideas where technology can make a difference and I think we’re proving that many of these companies can be built in a market like Indianapolis where we can really assemble that right combination of talent, capital and expertise to launch these breakout companies and hopefully become category-defining companies that can really stand the test of time.”
Dorsey says the goal with the new venture studio is to launch 15-20 more SaaS startups over the next three years. Dorsey says new ideas are being evaluated every week to find potential solutions that a new company could create.
“We run a really robust pipeline and have a tremendous team that’s always ideating on new ideas and concepts,” he said. “We’re thinking about what’s the world at work look like five, 10, 20 years out and then building ideas that we think we could run with and implement today. We’re [also] always searching locally, nationally, internationally for talented founders who want to start new companies and want to make a big difference in the world.”
High Alpha describes the venture studio model as a combination of startup creation and venture funding. Dorsey says the model provides a unique support system for founders.
“We have 40-45 of us on the team and we snap in from the very beginning, from company formation forward, and give that small founding team – two or three founders – a really robust support system across key functions like HR and recruiting, finance and accounting, product design, web design, go-to-market, so a 2-3 person startup team can feel like they’ve got the muscle and the resources of a 25-person team right out of the gate.”
As a result of the investment, Carlotta Siniscalco from Emergence Capital and Jaclyn Freeman Hester with Foundry Group will join the High Alpha board of directors.
“The High Alpha team are incredibly talented entrepreneurs and operators in addition to being wonderful humans,” Hester said in a news release. “Their track record speaks for itself as they continue to prove that the venture studio model will be one of the premier avenues for starting high-growth technology companies in the future.”
The launch of High Alpha Studio II comes less than a year after the firm closed on its $110 million third venture fund, High Alpha Capital III.