Cheers to Columbus: M25 & Friends and catching up with the portfolio
Victor Gutwein, Managing Partner, and Leandro Bedolla, Associate, recap their January trip to Columbus, OH.
The M25 team kicked off our travel plans early this year with a quick trip to Columbus, OH. Victor and Leandro traveled to the Buckeye State for our first M25 & Friends event of the year. Special shoutout to Customers Bank and Gunderson Law for helping us make this happen!
Victor and Leandro spent most of their two-day trip in one-on-one meetings with friends and new folks from key organizations in the ecosystem and met with a few locally based Club M25 founders including: Joe Vancena, Chris Pinchot and Dustin Tevis of Status; Mason Entingh and Reis Renneker of Vigil; Seth Miller of Rapchat; Angie Ammon of Tesouro; Luke Buchanan, Nate Rehm, Jaimin Gandhi and Kyle Grimslid of Redi Health. A few other friends of M25 included Alex Frommeyer of Beam Benefits.
We hosted an amazing mix of M25-backed founders, local investors, other founders we’ve been keeping in touch with and community champions at our Columbus M25 & Friends event. Nearly 50 of our friends from across the Ohio ecosystem stopped by during our happy hour. Victor even made time for a run with a couple founders along the Scioto and Olentangy rivers during the visit.
“I enjoyed meeting with a variety of local investors and community champions learning more about what they’re focusing on investing these days. It was awesome to see so many of the Columbus-based startups — including many full founding teams — we’ve invested in make the time to hangout while we were in town,” Leandro said.
All meetings, dinners and events were held between the Short North and the Arena district. Both were super vibrant areas that can compete in great vibes and good density of startup activity against the best hubs across the Midwest and rest of the country. Even the U.S. Figure Skating Championship were being held at Nationwide Arena and the Columbus Crew soccer team recently won the 2023 MLS Cup Championship. There were also plenty of great food options in this area—shoutout to the Lake Erie fish and chips at The Pearl or the pimento cheeseburger at Northstar Cafe. Nationwide seems to have really leaned into Columbus being their HQ as shown by their large visual presence around town including near the convention center.
“Columbus has been through a rough patch — coming off the Olive shutdown, Root’s demise and some other ecosystem turmoil — I didn’t know what to expect. But there was so much to be excited about. We’ve got some portfolio companies growing at a phenomenal rate and the energy in the room at the happy hour was equivalent or surpassing events we’ve done in other cities. There’s so much to be optimistic about — this is a city that will learn and grow from it’s successes and failures,” Victor said.
Excited to kick of the new year! We’re looking forward to hosting more great events like this one in 2024.
About M25: M25 is an early-stage software-focused venture firm based in Chicago, investing solely in tech startups headquartered in the Midwest. Since launching in 2015, M25 has become the most active investor in the region, quickly becoming the preferred seed investor for the next generation of Midwest unicorns. Portfolio companies include Kin Insurance, Loop Returns, Astronomer, Summersalt, SteadyMD, Branch, Authenticx and more. For more information, please visit www.m25vc.com.
