Wisconsin last year had its lowest levels of venture capital activity since 2018, with less than $360 million in deals captured in an initial tally by the Wisconsin Technology Council.
Joe Kremer, director of the Tech Council’s Investor Networks, yesterday presented an early look at last year’s investment landscape during a luncheon in Madison. While the group will be adding additional deals in the next few months to its tally for the year, Kremer said he doesn’t expect the overall dollar figure to increase very much.
At latest count, the Tech Council identified 66 deals that occurred in 2024 totaling about $358 million. That’s down substantially from the recent peak of $869 million in the standout year of 2021, when the state had 140 deals, but also continues the trend of declining investment activity that’s been seen since then.
In 2022, Wisconsin saw about $640 million raised through 107 deals, which then fell to $490 million in 2023 though the number of deals was unchanged over the year.
“Numbers are down, and we’re hearing a lot of different reasons from investors, from valuations being high, some of them don’t feel that they’ve been seeing good deal flow,” Kremer said. “There’ve been other issues that we’ve seen, some investment rounds haven’t been happening.”
The total investment figure for any given year is typically driven by the “big ticket” rounds, Kremer noted. He referenced Madison-based rewards program Fetch raising $240 million in 2022 and Germantown-based software firm VBA landing $156 million in 2023.
By comparison, the largest deal of 2024 was $55 million, raised by a Madison biotech firm called Elephas.
“That being the top last year is really sort of showing that the larger rounds have not been either raising, or we don’t have entrepreneurs operating in that space and they aren’t attracting the dollars,” Kremer said.
Broadly speaking, most of the rounds Wisconsin companies are raising are around the range of $2.5 million or below, according to Kremer’s remarks. He noted the middle range, from around $3 million to $10 million, represents a funding gap for Wisconsin’s startup ecosystem.
“Seems like once a company raises around the $10 million round, they’re able to really jump out of the state and attract investors from other states so they’re able to fulfill their rounds,” he said. “But it seems like this is really the space that we need to start focusing in on.”
