New venture studio launches in Bloomington
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A trio of veteran entrepreneurs has launched a new venture studio based in Bloomington. Paragraph Venture Studio was created by Brad Wisler, Michelle Cole, and Mike Trotzke with a focus on building and backing the next generation of software startups.
The venture studio’s aim is to provide startup and growth capital to develop companies offering software-as-a-service products, help build their teams, and executing go-to-market strategies.
Brad Wisler, who has founded multiple companies over the last 25 years, said the timing was right to start the new studio with his partners.
“It was quite serendipitous that a couple of years ago, Michelle and I both were fortunate enough to sell our companies at around the same time, it just kind of lined up where we were both searching for the next chapter, if you will,” Wisler said. “When that opportunity arose, it was kind of a no brainer.”
Wisler and Trotzke have been business partners for nearly 30 years and co-founded the venture studio SproutBox in 2008 after selling another company they had co-founded.
“We started doing angel investing…and we realized the need for shared resources when you’re starting a company, both in terms of investment but also in terms of teams,” Trotzke said. “We were able to kind of parlay that into what had turned into the first venture studio, and we didn’t know it was that at the time. But it evolved into the first kind of software development shop, go-to-market shop that also had a dedicated venture fund to fund the ventures it was creating.”
With Paragraph Venture Studio, Wisler said they have a goal of building and backing 15-20 scalable software startups over the next five years.
“We will have a venture fund and a full-service studio that will be capable of bringing new companies to life, but also partnering with other startups that just need help with product development, product design, go-to-market, team building, etc.,” he said. “We can really step in and accelerate that path to market for new startups.”
The studio aims to be a one-stop shop of sorts for startups, which Cole said has proven to be effective for young companies.
“I think that you can see that the data just shows their path to acceleration, their success is completely different when they have the backing of a studio that has done the work, that is is building the software companies,” she said. “We all have experience in various roles within at the C level, and so it allows them to just be that much faster and get to success that much quicker.”
Trotzke said Paragraph Venture Studio will also employ a team of software engineers in addition to the traditional go-to-market experts, who can even further accelerate a startup’s product development and get to revenue generation even quicker.
The studio’s three founders are each founding board members of The Mill, a not-for-profit startup accelerator in Bloomington. Wisler said that experience was a reinforcement of the level of talent in the city.
“We get to interact with talented entrepreneurs every day and just see exactly how many great ideas and how many great executors there are out there,” Wisler said. “There was a study a year or so ago that said Bloomington is second only to Chicago and start up momentum in the Midwest, and that is really obvious when you’re hanging out here at The Mill; the momentum is just palpable.”
The partners said the studio is up and running, and they expect to begin making their equity investments within the next 60 days.