11 down, 1 to go! It might be a shorter month, but no less activity kept us busy in November. Here’s what an angel investment group gets up to when left unsupervised.
Meetings:
November’s calendar was anchored by our last “Seasonal Summit” of 2025, in Charlotte, NC. We welcomed over 50 VentureSouth members and guests, mostly from Charlotte but with intrepid attendees from Greenville and the Triangle, for an afternoon of angel investing.
We also met virtually, and in-person in Greensboro, Durham, and Chattanooga to make sure our members got to see entrepreneurs in real life.
Thanks to six companies who pitched across those sessions, and to the four portfolio companies who updated us on their progress while we were in Charlotte.
Investments:
November was on a regular pace (given the lost week), with VentureSouth’s angel investors and funds investing $692,500 this month.
We had some concentration risk this month: most of those funds went into the one new company that joined the VentureSouth portfolio. As is often true, we can’t publicly identify the company because the round is still active, but we are excited to add a new logo to the website! A small amount also trickled into one other existing portfolio company raising follow-on funding.
VentureSouth members joined a wider set of “local investors” to fund some crowdfunding investments through Vicinity Ventures. Over the last month Vicinity Ventures has facilitated over $1.3M in community investment in public deals. You can check out these deals, and more at https://vicinityventures.co/ (but need to be a VentureSouth for the private deals, of course.)
Liquidity!
November was one of the very enjoyable months during which exiting companies sent more capital back to investors than investors sent to new investments.
A company - who must remain nameless because the transaction documents swear us to confidentiality - was acquired in mid November. We sent distributions totaling over $1.4M to VentureSouth members and VentureSouth Angel Fund V investors. The “early exit” was a nice solid quick win, of ~2x in 15 months, at a 31% IRR. Not a Techcrunch article, no press releases, and no misleading TVPI markups along the way; just a solid (and, hopefully, consistent and repeatable) “southeastern angel” deal. And a success for the entrepreneurs, who continue to work on the technology with the strategic acquirer.
That’s the eighth realization from the VentureSouth portfolio this year – the M&A markets appear to be opening up.
Of course angel investing has bad news as well as good. Another portfolio company filed bankruptcy paperwork after some ill-judged follow-on round debt funding, working capital challenges, and growth issues compounded earlier personnel turnover and led to a hard-stop negative exit. We don’t see many of those, but this one hurt.
Diligence:
Behind the scenes, we skipped our screening meeting because we have plenty of companies in the diligence pipeline. But we made progress on those, with one company finishing diligence and getting investment, and two others reaching positive verdicts right at the end of the month.
Portfolio:
We processed incoming 3Q updates from ten companies. Notable public news from the portfolio in November included:
- Gradient Health presented at Medtronics, and at Johnson & Johnson; its Atlas platform is now live on Google Cloud Marketplace; and Atlas 2 just launched.
- MPath’s JAMA article (published in October) demonstrated that its direct-to-patient digital health intervention increased rates of lung cancer screening
- Phinite was voted best Ag-tech startup of the year by Ag Startup Engine.
- Seal the Seasons is available at Hannafords.
- (And not a portfolio company, but Venture in the South interviewee Scale Social AI announced its $1.3M Seed round, with participation from several southeastern angel group efforts. Congratulations on getting this done!)
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Out & About:
We coincided our Charlotte meeting with the Venture 135 conference - one of the best VC conferences in the southeast. Matt covered the “ask me anything” investor reverse pitches, and Paul covered the pitching crowd and was a general nuisance to organizers (sorry Avra). Great work Dan and the team.
Next up: year end closings, company budgets, portfolio updates – and holiday parties. Merry Christmas from the VentureSouth team!