the PULL #151

June 8, 2016

I've spent the past few weeks looking through SEC filings to try and get a handle on the total amount of money invested in Iowa startup-ish companies over the past few years. If you'd like to see the results check out 2010-2015 Iowa Fundraising Roundup over on the Gravitate blog.

I filtered and sorted the data and then aggregated it a few different ways in the post. I purposefully didn't try to offer any analysis because I'd like to see what you all think of it first. Do these numbers seem high or low? Is anything in particular surprising? What other data on investments would you like to see going forward? Reply here and let me know.

I should note that SEC filing data that is currently publicly available (and what I used for this post) comes from the Form D which isn't a fully comprehensive measure. Bill Daly, from Shuttleworth & Ingersoll in Cedar Rapids, wrote a guest post for our blog helping explain how the Form D is used. You can dig into that here (thanks Bill!).

Geoff

P.S. You'll probably notice that we only have two stories in the "3 Things to Know" section this week. It's not an error—it was just a bit of a quiet week in the local tech press.

Where do two efforts to boost Iowa's female investor count stand?
Des Moines Register (Matt Patane, June 3)

Two new groups are focused on attracting more female investors to Iowa. While he Iowa Center for Economic Success is working to establish FIN Capital, individuals in Cedar Rapids—including Iowa Women Lead Change and NewBoCo—are working on setting up a local chapter of Pipeline Angels, a national network of female angels that invests in women-led startups. According to the Des Moines Register, both groups "plan to mix educating women on how to be angel investors with getting deals in front of them."

"I think the more the merrier. Just having known accredited female investors who are interested in being angels, knowing who those people are, and having a way to bring deals to them that are curated and filtered is a huge step forward," Eric Engelmann, the executive director of NewBoCo, an nonprofit organization that also runs the Iowa Startup Accelerator, told the Register.

Driving simulator gets new environment
Daily Iowan (Kaylyn Kluck, May 31)

Researchers at the University of Iowa's College of Engineering have unveiled one of the most advanced driving simulators ever created. The 258-square-foot virtual town, named Springfield, that researchers created allows would-be self-driving vehicles to experience a variety of settings including urban, residential, interstate, and rural areas.

“In a test track you can put up a mannequin, but you can’t have a person walk across the path of that car,” David Heitbrink, a software engineer at the simulator, told the Daily Iowan. “We can do things that definitely aren’t safe to do on a proving ground.”

2010-2015 Iowa Fundraising Roundup
Geoff Wood

Access to investment capital is something that every startup community is trying desperately to improve and we all know the old axiom that you only improve the things you measure. With that in mind, I've done some research and created a baseline of investments raised by Iowa companies over the last five years.

Raising Capital—Private Offerings, Reg D Exemptions, and Use of a “Form D”
Bill Daly

Raising capital for a new or growing company can be a challenging process, not only because it involves convincing people and investors that the company is worth investing money into and its growth potential, but also because it can involve a myriad of complicated legal issues. Most capital raises involve the use of an attorney, ideally one that is knowledgeable in the area of the private offering of securities and understands the complexities of private offerings at the federal and state levels. This blog post will spend a few paragraphs setting the background for private offerings and the “exemptions” used and then go to describing the Form D that is filed with the Regulation D exemptions and what info, if any, parties interested in obtaining information on “deals” in Iowa can take from those Form Ds that are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”).

6/9 — SecDSM Monthly Meeting
6/11 — Tim Dodd Photography Class: No More Auto Mode
6/14 — Des Moines JS User Group
6/16 — .NET at Noon
6/22 — DevOps DSM User Group
6/27 — WordPress DSM June Meetup
7/1 — First Friday Open Coworking
7/1 — Gravitate Community Happy Hour
7/6 — Gravitate All-Member Potluck
7/7 — Iowa .NET User Group

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The Pull is curated by Geoff Wood and produced with help from Megan Bannister. I could be the walrus—I'd still have to bum rides off people.

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