“There’s a ton of things that could really have an impact on everyone’s life on Earth, that are not coming out of the lab and being applied in practice,” said David Van Wie, founder and chief investment officer of Aventurine Capital Group. This summarizes the problem you are trying to solve with your IP-forward accelerator. He hopes that start-ups, and letting inventors and academics continue to do what they do your best — it’s a winning formula.
Aventurine targets where venture capital doesn’t usually go: It arrives early to support people who aren’t natural entrepreneurs and invests in IP for the long term using what it calls a perpetual IP income pool, or PIPI fund. If it sounds like it’s the antithesis of rapid growth and timely exit, you’d be right. But the team thinks that’s okay, and that maybe VCs don’t need to be in a big rush all the time anyway.
“This is a researcher who spent 20 years of his life chasing a certain thing,” said Joe Maruschak, CEO of the company’s Aventurine investment study. He thus described who Aventurine seeks to finance. “They caught the chemistry bug, and have spent their entire lives doing chemistry. They got their Ph.D., they got a job at the university, and then they discovered something.”
Aventurine’s central thesis is that academics should not have to be entrepreneurs to ensure that their discoveries or innovations can be developed and brought to market to eventually have an impact on the world. She acknowledges that a researcher’s skill set isn’t necessarily the same as a founder’s, and that they shouldn’t be forced to learn how to do it overnight.
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