By Evan Vitale
It’s been a short week due to the long July 4th holiday weekend (we love those!), but there’s plenty of activity and news in the world of venture capital.
Black Enterprise has a good article featuring Arlan Hamilton and her bootstrapped venture fund.
Backstage Capital, the bootstrapped $12 million nano-venture capital fund founded by Hamilton, is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing $25,000‐$100,000 in pre‐seed and seed stage startups led by high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT. Hamilton entered the venture investing world from an unconventional path. As a band tour manager who’s worked on shows with Pharrell and Justin Timberlake, Hamilton started thinking about the venture industry after seeing others like Ellen DeGeneres, Troy Carter (John Legend’s manager), and Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber’s manager) investing in startups.
The full article is here: http://bit.ly/29wQjpP
Crain’s has released an informative piece – “74 opportunities to get the funding your business needs.”
This is the annual directory of Chicago-area venture-capital firms and private-equity firms. The alphabetical directories combined contain more than 70 firms with offices in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties in Illinois plus Lake County, Ind.
Data for most firms include 2015 and 2014 capital, sources of funding, number and dollar amount of investments made in 2015 and 2014, types of investments and the number of local employees. The Excel versions of each list include additional firms that did not appear in print as well as a contacts file with names and titles of more than 130 executives at these firms.
You can find out more here: http://bit.ly/29kcZ8f
In New York, the New York Business Journal is reporting a big decline in New York City venture capital deals for the second quarter of 2016.
The number of venture capital (VC) deals over the course of April, May and June saw a significant decline. According to investment research firm PitchBook Data, the tally of deals in the second quarter of 2016 is at 178 — the fewest number of deals since the fourth quarter of 2011.
You can read the full story here: http://bit.ly/29p1fmY
