The AV 2025 APEX 50

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  Speaker 1:
  Hello, I’m Mike Collins. I’m the founder and CEO of Alumni Ventures. Today we’re going to go over our 2025 Apex 50—telling people a little bit about some of the companies within our portfolio that we’re excited to be a part of, and I think it points to the future and where a lot of technology and innovation is going. So looking forward to telling you a little bit about how we put together the list today. Just a quick disclosure: this reflects our opinions. This is not an offer to buy or sell any securities. Consult your investing professionals.

  Okay? Just very quickly, I think most of you know me—grew up in the Midwest, been in the business since the eighties. Really, my love is at the intersection of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. I started the business to bring venture capital to retail investors in a smart, simple, entertaining, lucrative way. We’ve been successful. We’ve raised 1.5 billion. Of note, I think we are one of the more active venture capital firms in the world. We have a very large portfolio, and I think we have built a reputation of being a very strong co-investor to really try and help our entrepreneurs the best we can.

  We have a large and growing trophy case. Again, we stick to our lane. I don’t think we overpromise, and again, we’re extremely focused on serving our customers and serving our portfolio companies. So hopping right in—what is the Apex 50? From our entire portfolio, we basically ask our teams to nominate companies. We think by highlighting a small fraction of them—kind of less than 5%—it actually brings it to life for people. The sheer volume of the companies we’re involved with can just, I think, overwhelm people. So narrowing it down so it’s something people can pursue and study. Because we’re such a leading co-investor, I think it also points to where top-tier venture capital firms are investing. Obviously, a lot of these firms are beyond the seed stage, but I think it’s very interesting to look at the diversity.

  This is a pretty interesting cross-section. Again, there’s already a lot in data and software, but I think it shows that the venture industry is really diverse—and so is our portfolio. Why does it matter? I think it really points to where the companies that you’re going to be hearing about in five or ten years come from—the garages and apartments of small teams today. As I mentioned, I think it really points to the areas where VCs are allocating capital. I think there is a lot of focus today in a very narrow subset. A lot of it’s related to AI and what’s going on with OpenAI and Google and Meta, but the breadth and depth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the United States, I think, sometimes is underappreciated. So the diversity of these companies, I think, is important to underscore.

  I also think it’s really—entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation—that creates enormous value for our society. We are always dealing with problems, unintended consequences, sometimes caused by previous technologies, but I think it is very important that we continue to inspire entrepreneurship. Clearly, this is the engine that drives the capitalist economy. If you look at the value that has been created—really within the stock market—if you look at the leading companies, most of those are venture-backed companies, creating jobs, providing solutions, and it is always about moving forward. This is a case where today’s technology solves a problem, creates unintended consequences, creates new problems that again, have to be solved. So just three companies here within the AV portfolio working in the area of defense and security—in the case of Hawkeye 360; Yassir serving kind of a super app, providing value to consumers in Africa; and then we’ve got picks and shovels in the area of AI and computing. So companies are doing important work.

  I also think there’s a huge difference—we obviously make all of our investments with a return-on-invested-capital perspective, but they also solve societal problems. And here are just three again from the list that I’m giving you a tease to. RapidSOS is kind of reinventing 911—literally saves lives by getting more accurate information more quickly to people in trouble. Obviously, as we move toward the future, energy is an important consideration. Radiant is an example from our energy portfolio that is doing very innovative work—kind of distributed, safe, clean energy. SHINE—a company with deep tech in the making of medical isotopes that go into healthcare, cancer treatment, and diagnosis—has big ambitions and big plans for the future. Again, where the alternatives are a long way away, and with half-lives, having things closer to the end user is very important. So we believe that doing well and doing good are aligned and not inconsistent.

  Speaker 1:
  So people ask—as we’ve shared the Apex 50, people have asked how we’ve selected. Again, we have 10 distributed teams. These teams have their own remit, have their own style, have their own vertical, and we worked together to bring them within the AV family. But they nominated, and then we debated, and we chose companies that we felt were doing well, meeting their benchmarks, and innovating. We’re looking at size of opportunity, execution, things on trend, diversity. We wanted to show the breadth and depth of the AV portfolio. And we thought that these companies again are ones that are noteworthy—to give a flavor of the kinds of companies we invest in. And at the end of the day, Mark Edwards, our CIO, and I made the final calls, and it was a vigorous process and debate. And then we look forward to doing it again next year.

  Again, just wanting to give a little sample even from the 50—here’s three companies: TTI in the quantum space, which has been really hot and interesting—kind of a very deep, long-term company we’re investing in. That is public—one can read about that, find analysts reviewing it. Groq obviously is a company we’re excited about that is really doing good work in inference. Oura rings—I mean, walk down the aisle of an airplane, you’re going to see ’em on many, many, many, many hands—many, many fingers. A company that probably has a lot of consumer recognition.

  Again, just a sample of the diversity—Bluesky and Sleeper. Bluesky is actually a company that came out of our blockchain team as a distributed, different stack strategy than X in the social media space. Sleeper is a company that we’ve been in for a while—actually going back to one of our earlier Green D investments—that has gone from its pre-seed stage to now is one of the leading players in fantasy sports. Very large, very successful. A16Z led the deal. So again, a little more visible there.

  So again, one of the things I’ll touch on too, which is—we have amazing companies within our portfolio that aren’t in this list. But at the end of the day, there was debate internally whether we should even put together a list like this, because inevitably there are going to be companies in the AV Apex 50 that stumble and don’t work out the way we hope. And then there are companies that aren’t on this list that are going to be legendary and do really well for themselves and our investors. But that’s what venture capital is about. It is a business where you have a point of view, you make decisions, and you live with the good ones and the bad ones. So we recognize that. And this is what we think today, and we’ll put together another list tomorrow. And again, it’s the fun, exciting, challenging, frustrating, rewarding part of being a venture capitalist.

  TTI, as an example I talked about, was a company we really love. But it has not always been an up-and-to-the-right experience. The company has struggled and had to make changes, and people became impatient, and really things were languishing—until they weren’t. And again, sometimes that is the nature of the beast here.

  We hope people check out the whole list. Again, I tried to tease it a little bit today, but I hope you give it a look and a scan. And again, we’re really proud of earning the right to be partners in these companies. Again, it is less than 5% of our portfolio, but these are companies that I think are noteworthy. So it’s really easy to check out the full report. We love to talk to people, so if anybody wants to chat about what we do and how we do it, encourage people to book a call with one of us. We love to tell our story.

  So thanks for your time today. I’m going to answer a few questions that have come in right now.

  So one of the questions that came in was: What industries or sectors are you seeing the most venture capital inflow? Besides AI, there is a lot of activity going on in energy. There’s a lot of activity going on in blockchain, obviously, and health tech. I would say those three are where we’re seeing some of the most exciting ventures being funded and a lot of activity going on.

  I think in the course of energy, I think everybody is familiar with the correlation between GDP and energy consumption. I think when you look at the development of a digital economy and an AI-centric economy, we need more energy. And so as a firm, we are in an “all of the above” category, with a special emphasis I think on kind of nuclear.

  We think that that is coming back—risk, reward, overall net benefit to society, our competitive position against China and other countries—it needs to happen. And so again, very proud of that. We have a long, deep, long-term commitment to all kinds of smart, new, innovative energy solutions.

  Health tech—huge part of the economy, huge part of society. We still are struggling with scourges of cancer, dementia, and other forms of health where I think there’s great promise combining new technologies and AI to transform longevity and health span. So those are two areas.

  And then again, I think this is a classic case of the hype cycle—ebb, flow—but the onward trend of innovation. We’re seeing that in blockchain. Just again, one real world—obviously Bitcoin is disrupting gold, I’ve written about that. I also see we’re seeing betting markets replace other types of markets that are far better predictors for outcomes than some old-world approaches like polls.

  I think with AI we’re going to continue to see huge innovation and necessity of the blockchain for authentication and security. So those three sectors I’d mention.

  What gives AV an edge over other venture firms? So number one, it is our network. If you’re an entrepreneur, when you raise money, clearly your most important decision is who’s going to lead your round of financing and what kind of deal they are going to provide.

  And then you’re going to round out your round of financing with other investors. We fit into the latter category. We don’t lead rounds, we don’t price rounds, we don’t negotiate terms. We evaluate those to determine whether we’re going to do a deal or not.

  But we fight for allocation by basically telling the entrepreneur—we’re going to do a small part of your round, we’re going to tuck in, and we’re going to be disproportionately helpful compared to our check size. And so that is the reason that we get in—because of our ability to help them make connections, introductions into potential customers, recruiting board members, just activating our network to help them build their business.

  Speaker 1:
  The core idea behind Alumni Ventures is that together we can do better in this asset class by pooling capital and pooling our ability to help than any of us could do on our own.

  How does AV manage exits? So I talked a little bit about how we get into deals and why we get into deals at such a good rate with these top-tier firms. On the exit side, it’s either really easy—meaning the company is just sold—or it can be tricky, in which case we have another investment committee and determine regularly how we’re going to sell stock.

  In an IPO, typically there’s a lockup and there are restrictions and volume considerations. And usually, we take a timed approach. So there are cases where we’re going to get out over a relatively short period of time.

  And then there’s other cases where we view the IPO as really a financing, and that we’re taking a more traditional long-term venture perspective, where we might sell our position over years—actually in a deep tech company or a biotech company—where we’re really just waiting to see the kind of venture returns and venture benchmarks and waypoints that we invested in with the company in the first case.

  So the quick line is: it’s easy if the company gets sold. If there’s a secondary opportunity or it’s a public company, we have a whole process that is usually based on time—that we’re going to just sell 10% of our position over the next 10 quarters, for example. But it’s really time-based, and we don’t tend to orient things like that.

  But I will also say it varies, and situations are unique. And we get in, and it’s always in the best interest of our investors.

  So happy to answer those questions. Again, encourage you to hop on the phone, talk with us, check out the Apex 50, and we’ll see you down the road. Thanks for your time.