Red & Blue Ventures Joins Coworking Community at Pennovation Center
Media Contact: Jennifer Rizzi, Director, Communications, Facilities & Real Estate Services, 215.573.6107, rizzi@upenn.edu, or Heidi Wunder, Associate Director, 215.746.0123, hwunder@upenn.edu
October 14, 2016
The University of Pennsylvania’s Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services announced today that Red & Blue Ventures is leasing office space in the Pennovation Center – the University’s new business, technology and laboratory incubator which opened this month.
Red & Blue Ventures is a venture capital fund focusing on seed- and early-stage investments in information technology companies originating from the University of Pennsylvania’s ecosystem. While Red & Blue Ventures is wholly independent of, and not affiliated with, the University of Pennsylvania, the fund seeks to invest in companies that have key founders or managers who are students, faculty members, or alumni of the university. Sometimes, the companies are based on intellectual property that originated at Penn.
“Our location in the Pennovation Center strengthens our connection to the people at Penn who are bringing incredible new technologies to the market. Red & Blue will have a direct line of sight to companies where we know we can bring value, including but not limited to, investment capital” said Brett Topche, a Managing Director at Red & Blue Ventures.
Red & Blue Ventures is a new firm created by Michael Aronson and Brett Topche, former partners in MentorTech Ventures. With MentorTech no longer making new investments, Red & Blue allows Aronson and Topche to continue supporting promising start-ups generated at Penn. MentorTech’s record of success includes Jet.com, an online retailer that was acquired by Walmart in August of this year for $3.3B, the largest purchase of a U.S. e-commerce start-up ever. Jet.com, considered to be an Amazon competitor, was started in 2014 by Penn alumni.
A long list of successful start-ups received support from the Red & Blue team through prior investment vehicles: Warby Parker, Quidsi/Diapers.com (sold to Amazon, also by creators of Jet.com), Yodle (sold to Web.com), PayQuik (sold to Citi), Curalate, Medivo, Cloudmine, and Quad Learning.
“Oftentimes, securing funding is the final vital step that entrepreneurs need to get their new ideas off the ground,” said Anne Papageorge, Vice President, Facilities and Real Estate Services at Penn. “Having Red & Blue Ventures in the building at the Pennovation Center completes the circuit of the innovation ecosystem.”
As members of the coworking community at the Pennovation Center, Red & Blue Ventures staff can take advantage of membership benefits and all that the shared space has to offer: multiple community areas reserved for events and programs, and other activities that foster collaboration among faculty, students, entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate and economic development partners.
About The Pennovation Center
The Pennovation Center is a 58,000 square-foot three story facility designed for startup companies, entrepreneurs, and inventors looking to be part of a unique community of innovators and includes a full service technology incubator, basic wet and dry laboratories, private offices, inventor garages, and a coworking space for up to 200 members operated by Benjamin’s Desk. It officially opened in September 2016 as the centerpiece of the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennovation Works, a 23-acre development adjacent to the University campus on the southern bank of the Schuylkill River providing facilities and amenities to bridge intellectual and entrepreneurial initiatives among university researchers, private sector innovators, and startups.
Visit pennovation.upenn.edu and follow Pennovation Works on Facebook, @Pennovation on Twitter, and @pennovationctr on Instagram.
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