Your Window Into the Innovation Economy

Justin Strausbaugh, Managing Partner of Lakeshore Ventures (Alumni Ventures fund for the UChicago community) shares his venture journey, including his first job, lessons learned, exciting investments, and more.

Brian Keil, Managing Partner of Chestnut Street Ventures (Alumni Ventures’ fund for the Penn community) shares his venture journey, including his first job, lessons learned, exciting investments, and more.

Today’s manufacturers face numerous challenges, including skilled worker shortages, high production costs, and compliance concerns. Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) technology can address many of these concerns. According to a McKinsey study, by 2030, AI is expected to create $13 trillion of realized value for the world’s economy. Within manufacturing specifically, companies have added AI solutions to streamline their core production processes.

In a recent analysis by Axios, Alumni Ventures (AV) ranked third in the number of investments made in U.S.-based climate tech companies, behind only Breakthrough Energy Ventures and SOSV.

Like many of our peers in the venture community, we believe we’re entering into a new part of the venture cycle. We’ve already seen a dramatic reset of public market valuations — with impacts also affecting the private markets.

Nearly all of our belongings hold value, from homes to vehicles, furniture to collectibles, etc. Factors like age, wear and tear, upgrades, and demand can impact the valuation of these objects, and their physical traits are helpful in determining their worth. On the other hand, it’s much more complex to put a price on the value of an intangible asset, such as the current and potential worth of a young, fast-growing startup.

One of Alumni Ventures’ most crucial assets is our broad network of venture capital partners. We are strictly a co-investor, following other established lead investors into rounds. That means we don’t negotiate terms or take Board seats, giving us more time to source promising opportunities. It also affords us the latitude to build diverse portfolios while investing alongside VCs with significant domain experience.

According to a PitchBook report, global investors closed as many climate-focused funds in 2021 as were raised during the previous five years combined. Alumni Ventures Managing Partner Matt Caspari and Partner Erik Hammer spoke with Venture Capital Journal to discuss the influx of capital VCs are deploying into ClimateTech. They shared their thoughts on the profitability of climate-focused startups, consumer demand for sustainability, and the lessons investors and entrepreneurs alike have learned from companies like Tesla.

Low-code development platforms are an increasingly popular option for web and mobile app developers. According to Forbes, some of the many benefits of this tech include lower cost and maintenance burden, increased productivity across teams, quicker innovation and development, and rapid prototyping. Low-code development also makes it easier for entrepreneurs to test new ideas, products, and services. As a result, the value of the global low-code development platforms market is expected to reach $94.8 billion globally by 2028.

Third-party vendors (suppliers, partners, customers, etc.) are crucial to a company’s growth and success. Yet, onboarding these vendors is among the most time-consuming, opaque, and manual processes within an enterprise. Companies face a wide spectrum of risks across several domains (legal, privacy, procurement, compliance, etc.) and need to coordinate with multiple stakeholder groups to ensure that they’re sufficiently mitigating each one. Growing data security concerns, privacy regulations, evolving sanctions, and a heightened emphasis on ESG only add further complexity and burden to the overall process. As a result of these bottlenecks, onboarding new vendors can take mid to large enterprises over 90 days.