Author: Ara Topouzian

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. –Piton Capital, the specialist marketplace investor, and Beringea, a private equity firm providing growth capital to market-leading businesses, have invested $10 million into Watchfinder, the UK’s leading pre-owned watch resale marketplace. The investment, which was funded by Piton and Beringea’s London office, Beringea LLP, will be used to broaden the company’s inventory […]

moovel GmbH, a subsidiary of German car giant Daimler, has acquired Huron River Ventures portfolio company RideScout, which offers a mobile app for transportation choices in cities. The move is part of Daimler’s continued push beyond car manufacturing and into developing technology for urban mobility, as a next generation of city-dwellers is increasingly giving up on car […]

When Linda Chamberlain became a MVCA Venture Fellow at Grand Rapid’s Michigan Accelerator Fund-1 in 2012, she assumed her previous experiences leading corporate innovation business units, a high tech start-up, a life sciences incubator and a university center for entrepreneurship made her experienced enough to remain objective, even skeptical, of investment opportunities.  As she nears […]

Plymouth Ventures today announced that it has made its second investment out of Plymouth Venture Partners III, which had its final closing at the end of June.  The investment was made into the Chicago-based 3D virtual simulation technology company InContext Solutions as part of a $12+ million Series D round.  www.incontextsolutions.com  The round was led […]

BERINGEA LEADS INCONTEXT SOLUTIONS’ $12 MILLION SERIES D ROUND Investment to Support Company’s Rapid Growth, Expansion and R&D FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich.—Beringea, LLC, a private equity firm providing growth capital to market-leading businesses, today announced its Fund has made a $5 million investment in InContext Solutions, Inc., a Web-based company providing three dimensional (“3D”) virtual store […]

BERINGEA LEADS INCONTEXT SOLUTIONS’ $12 MILLION SERIES D ROUND Investment to Support Company’s Rapid Growth, Expansion and R&D FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich.—Beringea, LLC, a private equity firm providing growth capital to market-leading businesses, today announced its Fund has made a $5 million investment in InContext Solutions, Inc., a Web-based company providing three dimensional (“3D”) virtual store […]

Former entrepreneur Adrian Fortino is nearing the end of his MVCA Venture Fellowship, but after leading the venture capital funds at Invest Detroit, First Step Fund (FSF) and Detroit Innovate (DI), he says there’s one challenge he’s found common to both VCs and entrepreneurs: fundraising.  “I spent several years as a venture backed entrepreneur prior […]

ANN ARBOR, Mich., August 20, 2014 – Sakti3, Inc. (www.sakti3.com) announced that it has produced a battery cell on fully scalable equipment with over 1100 Watt hours per liter (Wh/l) in volumetric energy density.  This translates to more than double the usage time in a wearable device like a smartwatch, from 3.5 h to more than 9 h. It also translates to […]

Detroit Free Press: LaSorda adds Birmingham start-up space and money from Dr. Z A few years ago, Tom LaSorda was a top executive steering Chrysler and its tens of thousands of employees on a harrowing survival journey, as control of the automaker lurched from Daimler to Cerberus then to the U.S. government and Fiat. Now, […]

We tracked down Daniel, our newest Venture Fellow, as he starts his MVCA Venture Fellowship at Fontinalis Partners in Detroit, to learn more about why he’s excited to be a Fellow, his thoughts about our venture community and the one deal his wishes he’d found first. MVCA: What advantage do you think the Fellows program […]