In 2000, when John Neis, co-founder of Madison, Wis.-based Venture Investors, tried to convince venture capitalists on the West and East Coasts to fund TomoTherapy, a Wisconsin cancer-radiation company he had seeded, they weren’t interested. “It was not in the comfort zone for them,” he says. So he returned to Wisconsin and pulled together a group of Midwestern investors.
His firm culls eight states for deals; most come from research done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan.