Editor’s note: River Cities Capital, a Midwest-based fund with Raleigh offices is looking for deals in the Triangle. ExitEvent Editor Laura Baverman has the details about the firm’s new $200 million fund and its efforts to find Triangle deals. WRAL TechWire and ExitEvent are news partners.
RALEIGH, N.C. - Say you’ve got $3 million or more in revenue, you’ve raised a seed round and the pace of growth at your startup is accelerating. You may have few places in turn in the Triangle for growth-stage funds, but one that might not be on your radar is River Cities Capital.
With a $200 million fund closed in May—its fifth in 20 years—and two local partners, the Midwest-based fund shouldn’t be so easy to overlook. River Cities was an early investor in Cary-based SciQuest, which it helped to take public in 2010, and holds stakes in two Raleigh tech companies, cloud-based marketing software startup KnowledgeTree and local television media app-maker StepLeader Digital (a spin-out of ExitEvent parent company Capitol Broadcasting). The StepLeader investment happened in 2013—one of the first four investments made out of fund five, its largest to date (Fund IV was $120 million).
River Cities now has the largest local fund actively making investments in growth-stage companies in the Triangle.
Raleigh partner Rik Vandevenne [the second partner is veteran Ed McCarthy] says the firm is strongly considering another Triangle-area tech investment, and that the pool of potential software and medical technology startups in town seems to be growing. It’s a far cry from 2008-2012, when the software industry was dismal and venture-backed startups weren’t raising funds—valuations were too low.
The full story can be read at ExitEvent.
