The 81 Collection, a Chicago-based venture capital firm whose backers include Grubhub and Cameo veterans, has raised $41 million for an inaugural fund to back what it calls “hard industries.”
(Bloomberg) — The 81 Collection, a Chicago-based venture capital firm whose backers include Grubhub and Cameo veterans, has raised $41 million for an inaugural fund to back what it calls “hard industries.”
The Chicago-based firm aims to invest locally in sectors including manufacturing, real estate, retail and construction, using automation, artificial intelligence and smart hardware, founding partner Vijen Patel said in an interview. The goal, he said, is to disrupt the traditionally low-margin, capital intensive industries that make up 81% of the US economy.
“There’s a shared experience in so many entrepreneurial stories in hard industries, being undersubscribed early and then oversubscribed later, and we have a passion to solve that issue,” Patel said.
Part of the difficulty in modernizing hard industries is that they are complex.
“It would normally take four years to create the flywheel and we know that if we come together we can help shortcut that to three years and improve the odds of success,” he said.
The 81 Collection draws part of its name of its “collection” of entrepreneur investors, who provide coaching, access, and relationships to portfolio company executives, ultimately helping them scale more quickly. Patel was a co-founder and previously the chief executive officer of Pressbox, a Chicago-based fabric-care company acquired by Procter & Gamble Co. in 2018.
Others involved in the group include: Grubhub co-founder Mike Evans, who is also the founder of home-repair service Fixer; Jackson Jhin, the CEO of talent-development site Protege, who was a chief financial officer of celebrity-focused Cameo; and shipping service ShipBob co-founders Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati, according to a statement. Institutional backers include the Pritzker family office DNS Capital and the State of Illinois, Patel said.
“We believe 81 Collection’s thesis of backing startups in industries underserved by traditional financing sources and leveraging the firm’s founder network to shorten an entrepreneurs learning curve and catalyze growth represents a differentiated approach in the market,” DNS Capital Managing Director Charles Tollinche said in a statement.
The 81 Collection, was founded in 2021 and has a full-time team of five staff, which makes initial investments of $500,000 to $1.5 million. The firm has made nine investments to date, including in car-care subscription service CarmaCare and home maintenance automation provider Mezo, according to the statement.
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