Participated · Seed · Sep 2021

Agricycle Global partners with rural farmers in East Africa to upcycle excess food into ethically made ingredients sold to consumer packaged goods manufacturers in North America and Europe. The company produces 159 different ingredients, from cassava flour to gooseberries, and is supplying pilot medium and large CPG customers making cookies, crackers and premium dog food. Founded in 2015 as a school project by CEO Josh Shefner, Agricycle previously operated consumer brands Jali Fruit Co. and Tropicoal Ignition but is shifting focus to its ingredient supply brand, Field Better Ingredients. The company employs four full-time and four part-time staff at its Milwaukee headquarters and 55 full-time employees in East Africa. With the recent seed funding, Agricycle plans to acquire a fleet of trucks and a milling facility in Africa to more fully control and consolidate its supply chain, which it says helps it beat commodity prices. The funding is intended to scale ingredient supply into more products and onto more retail shelves.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2018

Socialeads builds a digital prospecting platform that uses advanced natural language processing, personality and emotionality detection, and machine learning to source near-fully qualified leads from advisors' social networks and identify mutual connections for introductions and referrals. The product targets financial services companies and insurance enterprises and their field advisors. Founded in 2018 and based in Milwaukee, WI, Socialeads is part of Plug & Play Ventures' Insurtech program and has run pilots with several large insurance companies in the US and abroad. The company has onboarded enterprise customers Northwestern Mutual and TruChoice Financial for deployment to their field advisors. Socialeads raised $1.75M in funding and plans to use the proceeds to expand its sales and client success teams to meet demand in domestic and international field sales organizations. The platform's core focus remains improving advisor prospecting and introductions via AI-driven signals from social networks. Socialeads provides an AI platform for financial services firms and their advisors to identify the size, depth and value of professional and personal social networks. The company uses advanced machine learning and natural language processing to generate insights derived from social media. Founded in 2018 by Larry Hitchcock and Matthew Salzer and based in Milwaukee, Socialeads targets financial-advisor workflows and prospecting. It closed a $750k seed round to support growth. The financing will be used to expand resourcing and to launch initial pilots with Northwestern Mutual’s financial advisors. Participation from Northwestern Mutual’s Cream City Venture Capital follows Socialeads winning Northwestern Mutual’s Reverse Pitch the prior fall.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2018

Lumanu offers a platform of tools that help creators manage operations such as invoicing, payments, collaborations, and IP/brand protection. The company introduced EarlyPay, which enables creators to send invoices and receive instant payments 24/7 for brand collaborations. Lumanu positions its product to streamline inconvenient tasks and provide the flexibility creators need to scale their businesses. Leadership is led by co-founder and CEO Tony Tran. In the past nine months the company has seen significant growth in its network as more creators embrace entrepreneurship. Lumanu intends to use new capital to continue expanding its business reach and drive what it describes as a creative revolution that puts creators in the driver’s seat. Lumanu is a Milwaukee-based digital marketing platform that connects brands and agencies with brand ambassadors. Launched in June 2016 by Tony Tran and Paul Johnson, the company serves clients including The Ritz-Carlton, Harley-Davidson, Unilever and Absolut Elyx. The platform facilitates brand-ambassador relationships and campaign execution for enterprise clients. In June 2018 Lumanu raised $1M in seed funding to support its growth. The company intends to use the capital to continue developing machine learning capabilities and to enhance its sales workforce.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2015

Beekeeper Data builds a reporting platform that lets businesses quickly create and email data reports to customers, partners and employees without a dedicated reporting team. The platform connects to NoSQL systems such as Hadoop and Spark and to traditional datastores including MySQL, Amazon Redshift, and Microsoft SQL Server. Beekeeper’s product is designed to help teams iterate on report ideas, debug data issues, and deploy reports that are easy to maintain, adapt, and track. The company launched its reporting product at the Texata Summit and had begun a private beta rollout in October 2014 after graduating gener8tor Milwaukee in 2014. Led by Matthew Rathbone (an ex-Foursquare analytics engineer), the company positions its product as a “Mailchimp for data.” Financially, Beekeeper completed a $550,000 seed round to fund the launch and early growth. As part of the financing Michael Thorson (WIP Co-Manager) and Eli Collins (Chief Technologist at Cloudera) joined the company’s board of directors.