Indianapolis-Based High Alpha Raises $100 Million For Second Fund, Revamped Venture Studio

On Monday morning, Indianapolis-based High Alpha, a venture studio and early-stage venture fund, announced that it has raised over $100 million to expand the scope of its current operations.

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The group’s venture studio—which, according to the announcement, “conceives, launches and scales software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses by uniting company building and venture capital”—raised $16.65 million for High Alpha Studio II.

Alongside its venture studio, the group also raised $85 million in a second fund for High Alpha Capital, a venture firm which typically writes its first checks in companies’ seed and Series A rounds. The firm’s first fund, announced in June 2015, was $21 million in size.

High Alpha Capital’s portfolio is geographically diverse and includes payments company Dwolla, drone mapping and analytics platform DroneDeploy, and team learning software provider Lessonly, among others.

High Alpha raised this capital from Emergence Capital, which was a prior investor in the group, and a new investor: Foundry Group. Gordon Ritter from Emergence Capital and Brad Feld of Foundry Group will join High Alpha’s board of directors. High Alpha’s founding board consisted of managing partner Scott Dorsey, Mike Fitzgerald, Eric Tobias, and Kristian Andersen.

High Alpha is now listed among Foundry Group’s Partner Funds on the firm’s website. Back in May, Crunchbase News explained that Foundry Group makes investments in emerging funds, as a limited partner, out of its “Next” series of funds.

“With the support of amazing investors like Gordon Ritter from Emergence Capital, Brad Feld from Foundry Group and numerous limited partners in our venture fund, we are doubling-down on our initial vision and making sizable investments in design, engineering, data science and corporate innovation resources,” Dorsey said in the announcement.

Speaking about Emergence Capital and Foundry Group, Andersen told the Indianapolis Business Journal that “[i]t would be hard to overstate the magnitude of the validation of the involvement of those two entities.”

This is, no doubt, welcome news to the Indianapolis startup community and to the Midwest as a whole. For the most part, America’s midsection doesn’t have many large venture funds. But this announcement, alongside filings by SF and Chicago-based Builders VC for a $200 million fund we reported on at the end of June, indicates that might be changing.

Disclosure: Emergence is an investor in Crunchbase, Crunchbase News’s parent company. As with any investor in Crunchbase, Emergence has zero input into Crunchbase News’s operations and output.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias