NVNG +Venture North 2025
Last week I attended +Venture North, a conference in Milwaukee designed to explore how traditionally strong industries in the Midwest can leverage innovation to not just evolve but to drive growth. A mix of corporate innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs were there to connect as well as learn about innovation in autonomy and electrification of transportation, robotics and automation of heavy equipment, quantum computing as well as the evolution of American manufacturing.
Takeaways
Here are a few takeaways from the sessions and conversations.
On partnering with and getting investment from corporates:
Understand their intentions before you sign the deal. Are their goals strategic? Financial? Or both?
Know the timing of their expected return.
Clarify whether getting into the corporate buying cycle is included (and the timing!).
When looking for investors, understand the primary risk for your company (e.g., execution, market, etc) and ensure it aligns with expectations of the potential investor.
Value drivers for potential investors right now are revenue and contracts, these are indicators of commercialization.
Customer adoption currently involves saving money, and incentivizing may be critical. An example was an electric school bus companies providing fleet-as-a-service to overcome steep upfront cost differences ($325k for electric vs. $125k for diesel buses).
There are too many small companies building software that will have to integrate/consolidate because customers want easier access and interfaces. This discussion was around construction, but we hear the same things from hospital execs in healthcare.
AI is giving good results in industry specific applications, but often companies still have to double-check the results. Sometimes that is still faster and easier than doing it from scratch.
Thank You!
The event is the brainchild of the team at NVNG, which is an investment firm in Wisconsin with a venture fund of funds. They have invested in 23 funds across the country, and a large part of their thesis is having corporate partners as their limited partners as a value add for their funds, their portfolio companies, and the corporations. A huge thank you to NVNG for great connections and content!
We’re already looking forward to +Venture Health in Madison in November.
Bonus
We can’t help but share a couple of companies mentioned that are using cool tech to address big problems in fleets and supply chains.
Genlogs - Freight Intelligence on every carrier, shipper, and asset via a nationwide sensor network.
Hubble Network - The Hubble platform makes it easy to transmit low-bandwidth data from any device using Bluetooth wireless technology — no infrastructure required.