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How to Attract Venture Capital as a Startup
Talks about Startup, Venture Capital and Investors
IW
Ira Weiss
Investor investor and Professor
Chicago, Illinois
Overview
Ira Weiss is a VC investor and Professor based in Chicago, Illinois, serving as a General Partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners and a Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship and Accounting at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. With a notable career in venture capital, he has invested in various successful companies like ShipBob, FourKites, and Avant, showcasing expertise in funding rounds ranging from Seed to Series E and demonstrating a keen eye for promising startups.
Work Experience
General Partner
2011 - Current
HPVP is an early stage venture fund focused on software startups in the Midwest. With offices in Chicago and Indianapolis and a network of advisors throughout the Midwest, the firm invests in startups raising their first or second institutional round of capital. Example investments include high growth B2B software startups FourKites, Farmlogs, BaseCRM, G2Crowd, ShipBob and Terminus.
Hyde Park Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on high-growth, mid-continent technology startups.
Clinical Professor of Entreprenuership and Accounting
2006
I teach overachieving MBA students about venture capital investing, entrepreneurship, accounting and tax strategy.
Investor/Board Observer
2022
Robots-as-a-service to load and unload any truck in 5 minutes.
Raised $16,034,321.00 from Tech Square Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners and EVE Atlas.
Investor/Board Observer
2021
Automated compliance and regulatory reporting for the energy utility industry
HData is a RegTech company that is digitizing the entire regulated energy industry by automating access to critical analytics.
Raised $13,350,000.00 from Hyde Park Venture Partners, Victorum Capital, Frontier Venture Capital, Buoyant Ventures and Firebrand Ventures.
Board of Trustees
2021
Secure Illinois Retirements is a non-profit organization committed to bringing public-sector workers and elected officials together to find resilient solutions to the state's public retirement shortfall.
Board Member
2021
Audit Sight is an enterprise software company that automated the testing and verification of transactions. It is used by accounting firms and diligence providers to automate testing and transaction verification.
Audit Sight uses APIs to access the client’s records, eliminating the tedious process of asking for them and waiting for a recordkeeper.
Raised $6,500,000.00 from Hyde Park Venture Partners, Kenneth Branson, Hyde Park Venture Partners, John Seybold, Aaron Rankin, Alumni Ventures and Johnson Cook.
Investor/Board Observer
2020
Leap develops a retail platform that enables brands to deploy stores and accelerate growth.
Raised $89,469,969.00 from Hyde Park Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Equal Ventures, BAM Elevate and Roman Smolevskiy.
Board Member
2018
LandscapeHub is a digital, B2B marketplace connecting buyers and suppliers within a central online platform.
Raised $24,560,000.00 from Aequum Capital and Silicon Valley Bank.
Board Member
2018
Company provides payment solutions for truck drivers, carriers, warehouses, repair & tow and 3PLs. Initially a board observer, and then a board member.
RoadSync is a digital payment software application platform for the logistics industry.
Raised $38,300,000.00 from Hyde Park Venture Partners, Excelestar Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Base10 Partners, Gaingels, Trajectory Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst and Bossa Invest.
Board Member
2016
Shipping and fulfillment platform for SMB eCommerce.