Investing Early

Borealis looks to involve itself in the earliest phases of a company’s life - even if it’s just smart people with knowledge of a market and its unmet needs. By engaging in a company’s formative stages, we can better help the team validate a market opportunity, focus resources against it, and generally avoid the startup challenges that we have experienced ourselves.

Getting involved early has taken many forms for us, including:

• Company Creation: Identifying an unmet need in the architecture, engineering and construction industry for project information management and then assembling the founding team from scratch, incubating it, and providing seed funding to pursue the concept.
• Technology Commercialization: Licensing novel vision correction technology developed at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering.
• Seed Stage: Mentoring founders in launching their first product and then leading their seed round of funding to strengthen the team, improve the product and grow the company’s user base.
• Early-Stage: Assisting technical founders who had developed a software prototype build out the team and develop a business plan and then assembling and leading a Series A investor group.
• Velocity Capital: Advising the founders of an angel-backed company how to address the challenges of rapid market growth and then leading the company’s first round of institutional funding.
• Spin-out: Partnering with the management team of a public company to spin-out a suddenly orphaned growth division into a “startup” with a proven product, existing customers, and global operations.