Ridgeline, a Memphis, Tennessee-based early-stage venture capital firm, closed its inaugural $52m Fund.
Limited partners include Fortune 500 companies FedEx, AutoZone, and Dollar General, which, through investing with Ridgeline, intend to drive innovation in their organizations by conducting meaningful pilots and proofs of concept with the firm’s portfolio. Additional LPs include Staley Cates’ community foundation donor-advised fund; Kevin Ryan, CEO AlleyCorp and co-founder of MongoDB; and Ray Rothrock, CEO of FiftySix Investments and former General Partner at Venrock. Advisors include Kevin Compton, Co-Founder and Partner at Radar Partners; and Michèle Flournoy, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of WestExec Advisors.
Led by founding partners Ryan Clinton, Ben Walker, and Andrew McMahon, Ridgeline aims to invest in technologies and businesses that have the potential to transform large enterprises across both software and hardware. The firm plans to invest in early-stage enterprise software and hardware companies at the seed and Series A stages. Ridgeline has made 17 investments in Fund I to date and expects to invest in up to 30 companies throughout the life of the fund.
Portfolio highlights so far include:
- Wallaroo—providing a simple, secure, and scalable deployment capability for last-mile machine learning.
- PlanetWatchers—bringing the analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to the commercial world with use cases in agriculture, climate, and insurance.
FinSMEs
04/10/2022