Please see this helpful article. The article points out that “three of our [Lauchpad’s] highest return investments were made during the depths of the 2008-2009 recession. More modest valuations, less competition for talent, and strong positioning for economic recovery were a rare combination to drive outsized portfolio returns”.
I have been around startup companies for 35 years and have experienced both good and bad economic cycles. We have now entered uncertain times.
That said, from a company’s point of view, a financial down turn can be a good time to create an early-stage start-up.
And from personal experience, I know that a down turn is a really difficult time to for a company to raise a many million-dollar, later-stage VC round. During the 2008 recession, I had to sell my company at a loss to the investors because I could not raise a $12M series C round.
For investors, capital-efficient, pre-seed companies who can get by for a few years on minimal dollars suddenly looking pretty interesting. And the current environment means that pre-money valuations and valuation caps will be more attractive. The balance of power has shifted somewhat toward investors.
The Southwest Angel Network is pleased and excited to announce an investment in SpeechVive. SpeechVive offers a proven device that allows the majority of Parkinson’s patients to the recover the ability to carry on a conversation. This patented technology was created by co-founder Dr. Jessica Huber. The company has revenue and is poised for rapid growth.
Acadeum was founded by 2016 and the Southwest Angel Network was one of the early investors in 2017. Acadeum, previously known as College Consortium, offers a software platform that allows universities to share online courses. Students today can face challenges with earning a degree on a timely basis because the students are burdened by a lack of access to needed classes at the needed time. Making classes more available can increase graduation rates and decrease the time to graduation.
Our network is pleased to announce a follow-on investment in OneSeventeen Media. The company improves the social-emotional well-being of youth, and reaches those youth through partnerships with employee benefit programs and with schools.
Don’t Get Mad Get Paid addresses the problem that 78% of divorced mothers don’t receive the child support that legally belongs to them – money that could be instrumental in improving the lives of their children. Long time child support expert, activist and author Simone Spence has been successful in helping moms collect their arrears for more than two decades. Her expertise is now Don’t Get Mad Get Paid.
The Southwest Angel Network is pleased to announce that it has participated in the funding both Harmonic Bionics and in Skyven.
The mission of Harmonic Bionics is to innovate the rehabilitation process with robotic technology. The company was founded in 2016 as a spin-off of ReNeu Robotics Lab at The Univ. of Texas at Austin, and is actively developing a robotic platform for introduction into the clinical market. The company aims to revolutionize the fields of therapy for stroke and spinal cord injury. Their exoskeletons are already being tested in pilot clinical trials and are well known in the rehabilitation robotics research community.
Skyven recognizes that industrial process heat is the last bastion of fossil fuels. It accounts for 20% of all emissions worldwide. And it’s expensive. Skyven is taking over this carbon stronghold, by turning industrial plants into their own heat sources. The journey to low-cost carbon-free process heat starts with Thermal Energy Efficiency. Thermal RE-injection™ captures high-value low-temperature heat rejected from process equipment such as boilers and dryers and re-injects it back into the facility. Each BTU of heat recovered is one less BTU of new fuel burned. And Intelligent Mirror Array (IMA™) technology capture heat from the sun, raises its effective temperature (up to 400F), and injects it into the plant to further displace fossil fuels.
With these two investments, the Southwest Angel Network has now invested $4M in 20 companies since the network’s founding in 2016.
At the Mass Challenge Austin awards ceremony, SWAN portfolio company TeleCalm was one of 5 companies, out of 76 companies in the Mass Challenge cohort, that was awarded a no-strings-attached cash prize.
Picture: Jerold McDonald and Ani Bagipalli, CEO and CTO of Omaiven Health, and Zoe Schlag, Executive Director, Techstars Impact
Techstars is an American seed accelerator, founded in Boulder, Colorado in 2006. As of 2019, the company had accepted over 1,600 companies into its programs with a combined market capitalization of $18.2B. Less than 1% of applicants are accepted.
They operate accelerators in 60 cities worldwide, and their international Social Impact accelerator is in Austin.
Their impact companies have outperformed their non-impact companies. You can read about these results as reported in Forbes Magazine.
The Southwest Angel Network has invested in SHYFT Power Systems, which believes that the future of energy in emerging markets is distributed energy resources.
SHYFT is building IoT and software to enable and intelligently manage solar, generator, inverter and utility power. Their solutions help a customer’s energy solutions work together seamlessly in order to help save money and make life easier.