2025 was a busy year for VentureSouth members, funds, and team. Paul’s episode of Venture in the South with David released in January captures some of the highlights, but here’s a fuller outline of what we got up to last year.
Invested:
- $8.4M in 33 companies - 8 new companies joined the portfolio, and 23 existing companies (via 25 rounds) saw additional capital invested in their continuing journeys.
- 32% of capital invested into new companies, a little below our historical norms but in line with the market’s continuing focus on portfolio company support.
- Roughly 100 members wrote one or more investment checks during the year (plus the, partly overlapping, 50 investors in the VentureSouth Angel Fund VI that made its final investments this year).
Proceeds:
- Final tally of proceeds of $8.7M from 9 realized gains and losses, from exits including Proaxion, Zipit, and several others that aren’t publicly disclosed yet. Returns > deployment makes a good year at VentureSouth!
- Of the realizations, we had 6 companies creating realized gains (over 13 investment rounds), 3 creating realized losses (8 rounds; which ranged from 20c to 85c recovered), and 1 company (1 round) repaying a note. Overall a “win rate” significantly above the 50/50 benchmarks
- Similar to our November recap, December saw an exciting “early exit” when one of our companies partially exited through a growth recap – festively, the day before Christmas. We sent another >$1M of distributions to VentureSouth members and sidecar fund VI investors - the first exit from fund VI, and enough to make it a top 1% VC fund based on DPI! Again no Techcrunch feature, but another very solid “southeastern” deal at 5x on sold stock in 18 months.
Ups, downs, and dodges: 3 up-rounds secured, technically zero down-rounds endured (although a couple of arguable recaps and mergers), and 12 portfolio companies that raised capital without pricing equity.
Strategy: Our combination into Vicinity Ventures, which lets us cover the full range of Reg D and RegCF fundraising, expanded our team, systems, improved variety of deal flow opportunities for members, and helped local companies access different financing options from a wider investor group.
Staffing: we welcomed Jewel Walker to the team, wished Alex well for his contributions to VentureSouth, and became increasingly concerned about how long we’ve been doing this for!
What’s next: for a full rundown of 2025 results, you really need to attend Matt’s annual “State of VentureSouth” address at the 10th Annual VentureSouth Summit. To do that, you have to be a member of VentureSouth - which you can do via this link.