Drive Capital is a venture and private capital firm investing in companies primarily operating out of the America Midwest that is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio and was founded in 2012 by Chris Olsen and Mark Kvamme. According to the companies website as of October 2019, Drive Capital has over $30 billion in exits between its partners, has partnered with over 100 partners, and met with over 7000 entrepreneurs since 2013. Notable investment made by Drive Capital include: CrossChx, Aver, Duolingo, Branch, ChannelIQ, Comply 365, Immuta, Hologram, and Lightstream.
The first venture capital fund raised by Drive Capital was worth $250 million and was invested into 13 companies; 12 in the Midwest and one company in San Francisco, California.
On August 29, 2016 Drive Capital announced raising $300 million for their second investment fund. Chris Olsen, a founder of Drive Capital, commented on the companies plans to use the investment fund to continue to make investments in companies operating out of the Midwest by saying:
What's interesting is that most of these companies, when you really do a hard look at who the customers are and where they're located, they're probably not in Silicon Valley. If you're selling into healthcare or finance or telecom or any retail, the headquarters of those customers are out here. We find there's an advantage for companies to be close to their customers.
Timeline
Funded Companies
A robotics company developing and supplying robots for industrial automation.
Physna is a Cincinnati-based 3D modelling software company offering 3D models understandable by software applications for manufacturing, engineering, product design, 3D printing, augmented reality and virtual reality applications.
Immuta is a Boston-based provider of a cloud-native data governance platform for organizations to automate data access control, security and privacy compliance.
Greenlight Financial Technology is an Atlanta-based company offering a debit cards for kids parents can manage by app.
A data virtualization company than enables instantaneous, secure access to large, fragmented and geographically dispersed datasets to support demanding Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads.
A company that had a wait list mobile application that was used in restaurants by owners and customers alike. It was founded in 2010 and acquired by Yelp in March 2017.
An e-learning company that has a digital education platform. It was founded in 2011 and is located in Mountain View, California.
An insurance technology company offering car insurance.
Hologram is a company with a platform for building Internet of Things type products
Fast Radius is a company offering batch production, 3D printing, CNC machining and additive manufacturing company.
Non-GMO, pesticide-free, and sustainably-grown in human-free biodomes. Fifth Season is changing the game in vertical farming with the help of robotics and AI that keep fresh greens on shelves year-round.
FarmLogs is a company providing a platform that gives operational data insights to row crop farmers.
A software company offering a platform for international students to find and apply to top universities.
Duolingo is a free language-learning and crowdsourced text translation platform founded in 2011 by Luis von Ahn.
Roadtrippers is a Cincinnati-based company in the automotive industry founded by James Fisher, Tatiana Parent and John Lauck.
A company developing robots for industrial inspections
Clinc is a company with an artificial intelligence platform that looks to enable enterprises to create virtual assistants
Beam Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio-based company founded by Alex Curry, Dan Dykes and Alex X Frommeyer.
Ascent Technologies is a company that provides financial services
Branch Messenger is a Minneapolis-based company founded by Atif Siddiqi.
Aver Informatics is a healthcare company that assists healthcare payers and providers create programs
Finite State is a company that provides IoT device intelligence
Kapow Events is a company that looks to help venues book client events online
Associated investment funds
People
Chris Olsen
Founder
Ned Schwartz
Partner
Zach Boerger
Employee
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