Brightstone Venture Capital Launches New Venture Fund, Makes Its First Investment

Minneapolis, MN, August 1, 2017 (Newswire.com) - ​BRIGHTSTONE VENTURE CAPITAL today announces the formation and first closing of its new venture capital fund focused on early stage technology and life-science businesses, primarily in Minnesota but also across the U.S.

The new venture fund called BVC2 LP, formally accepted its first limited partners last week and has made its first investment.  The fund has received over $25 million in fund commitments thus far, primarily from existing limited partners in its previous fund and will have a hard cap total size of $100 million.

Today, the new BVC2 venture fund also closed its first investment in a Boston-based cloud storage platform called WASABI, a new venture formed by the two previous founders and CEO/COO of another storage success called CARBONITE.  The new venture is delivering hot storage to over 600 clients and reports storage speeds over 6X faster at 1/5 the per/GB cost of Amazon's S3 cloud storage services.

Brightstone invested in 14 companies over the past four years including local Minnesota businesses such as:  BiteSquad, Celcuity, Stemonix, Atavium, Gravie, HomeSpotter, MiroMatrix, and has prior successful exits such as: Definity Health (sold to United Health), AppTec Labs (sold to WuXi Pharma), August Tech (sold to Rudolph Tech), chf Solutions (sold to Gambro), Health Fitness (sold to Trustmark JNJ), and Gentra Systems (sold to Qiagen NV).

The new fund will be managed by the same general partnership team of David Dalvey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Seth DeGroot who managed the prior Brightstone fund.  Brightstone Venture Capital has been investing in Minnesota since 1985 and has invested in over 70 primarily Minnesota businesses.   Brightstone Managing Partner David Dalvey states that "Brightstone will continue to be one of the largest and most active early stage investors in Minnesota and we are excited to continue our long history of helping extraordinary entrepreneurs realize their vision and help create significant value for their stakeholders and build extraordinary companies". 

Source: Brightstone Venture Capital