Strategy - Mercury Fund

Investment Themes

Work

Build

Journeys

Data

Power

Talent screening, aggregation, sourcing, and enablement, for the emerging “flex” economy

Digital transformation of the energy, manufacturing, construction, supply chains, and logistics industries

Frictionless product journeys transforming customer/buyer experiences

Enterprise tools for tracking, capturing, integrating, proving, and securing data

Broadening access to capital, knowledge, and opportunity through fintech, blockchains, and data

Talent screening, aggregation, sourcing, and enablement, for the emerging “flex” economy

Digital transformation of the energy, manufacturing, construction, supply chains, and logistics industries

Frictionless product journeys transforming customer/buyer experiences

Enterprise tools for tracking, capturing, integrating, proving, and securing data

Broadening access to capital, knowledge, and opportunity through fintech, blockchains, and data

Deal Attributes

Geography

Mercury looks to invest in entrepreneurs with a Middle American presence or seeking to leverage Middle American resources.

Stage

Mercury seeks out entrepreneurs who have demonstrated product-market fit and are ready to scale their software startup.

Size

Mercury looks to invest between $1 million and $4 million in Seed extension and Series A financings. We will also consider initial seed investments as small as $250,000 for startups with a strong thematic fit. Mercury expects to invest between $6 million and $8 million over the life of our portfolio companies.

Lead
Investor

Mercury is almost always a lead or co-lead investor. We look to collaborate with other venture investors, seed-stage VCs, strategic investors, and angel investors, but can also make an independent decision and catalyze and syndicate a company’s first institutional investment round.

The Mercury Method

The Mercury Method is a proprietary framework by which we evaluate startup investment opportunities. The framework includes a series of assessments and playbooks for improving a startup’s operational hygiene. After standard diligence on a startup has been completed, Mercury scorecards a startup on multiple business building aspects that are critical on the pathway to product-market fit.

Mercury’s mantra is “go slow to grow fast.” By slowing down our startups at a critical stage, we can address any operational process deficiencies early. The result is operationally clean and scalable startups that grow faster and fail less often than their early-stage counterparts.

Growth Partners

Mercury’s playbooks highlight key areas in which many Middle American entrepreneurs lack critical operational expertise needed to scale. While these playbooks may be implemented by our startup management team or Mercury partners, Mercury has also built a shared services platform for our portfolio companies to access best-in-class resources from fractional executives and consultants that know how to help improve and scale their businesses.

Data Science

Launched by Mercury co-founder Dan Watkins, Mercury Data Science is a mission driven team of data science experts that partners with Mercury portfolio companies to build AI and machine learning solutions to create strategic data sets and enable data-driven decisions.

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Growth Scaling + Customer Journey Mapping

Launched by Mercury Venture Advisor and former Compaq/HPE executive Roberto Moctezuma, Fractal River partners with our entrepreneurs to improve their customer journey mapping, helping startups become data-driven organizations while improving sales, customer success and service delivery operations.

Product Marketing + Messaging

Launched by Mercury Venture Advisor and former Nielsen executive Michael Himmelfarb, HG Partners works with our B2B startup executives to identify market opportunity, elevate their product strategy and positioning, and developing successful go-to-market strategies.

Org. Change + Culture

Deutser is a team of business consultants, organizational psychologists, social scientists, and creatives that provide executive coaching and leadership development. Deutser creates and leads innovative workshops designed to spur individuals, leaders, and teams toward the best version of themselves.

Tech Scalability

AKF provides companies with technical consulting services that make their software solutions faster and more efficient by increasing the quality of their technical product while reducing the cost of development.

Finance, Accounting + Fund Administration

Launched by Mercury finance executives Winston Gilpin and Andreas Galliker, GSqr provides financial and operational consulting to our companies and our ecosystem partners helping them with financial modeling, forecasting, and fund administration.