Utah’s RevRoad Capital collects $61m for debut fund

• Investors include entrepreneurs and operators in Utah
• Firm is led by executive managing director David Mann and managing directors Rachelle Morris, Scott Petersen and Bart Skalla
• RevRoad targets sectors that include AI, electric vehicles, SaaS and manufacturing

RevRoad Capital, a seed investor in start-ups located in Utah and other US Mountain states, has closed its initial fund at $61 million.

The firm began fundraising in August 2020, according to a regulatory filing. It has not submitted an updated filing with the SEC showing how many LPs are in the fund.

RevRoad did not disclose the names of its LPs, but said they include entrepreneurs and operators in Utah. Thirty percent of them are women, the majority of whom are self-made and include not only entrepreneurs but very senior corporate executives, philanthropists and women in senior government roles, managing director Rachelle Morris told Venture Capital Journal.

Based on her experience working with many such women as a client advisor at JP Morgan Private Bank and in private wealth management at Goldman Sachs, Morris said, “Women feel overlooked and underestimated as investors. So as hard as it was to raise this $61 million fund, the interesting thing is [for] many of the women who came into the fund it was a pretty efficient pitching process.”

Women were excited to have the opportunity to invest in our fund and by “what we’re doing and how we are de-risking the seed-stage investment process,” she added.

One LP is a portfolio manager for a small-cap mutual fund based in Utah. “She told me this is the first time that a venture or private equity fund has invited her to consider investing,” said Morris. “She’s a CFA on the public market side. This is literally what she does.”

In addition to Morris, the firm is led by executive managing director David Mann and managing directors Scott Petersen and Bart Skalla.

“Of all debut early-stage venture funds launched in the US in 2022, RevRoad Capital closed the largest fund between the coasts and counts 30 percent of its LPs as women investors,” the firm said in a statement.

Morris added, “Utah is one of the top states in the country for entrepreneurial women, and it has been exciting for our team to receive the financial backing of many successful women as we’ve raised our fund. When you look at what we’re building and how we’re building, you cannot separate women from men in the story of RevRoad Capital. We are all working together.”

Based in Provo, Utah, RevRoad Capital targets sectors that include AI, electric vehicles, SaaS and manufacturing. It works closely with sister company RevRoad, a business accelerator and venture services provide founded in 2017, whose portfolio consists of 74 start-ups.

The fund has already invested in five start-ups, including Particl, which has developed an AI-powered market intelligence platform that tracks e-commerce information, and Kinectify, whose anti-money laundering risk management technology enables gaming operators to manage risk in a single workflow. It will invest in a total of 15 to 20 companies with checks between $2 million and $3 million.

Three of the five investments are in start-ups from the accelerator. The fund’s close partnership with its sister company “gives us first row sight” into the early development of these companies, executive managing director David Mann told VCJ. What brought him back into the workforce after having retired from Amazon and other endeavors was “a desire to help founders scale faster,” he said.

Most of the investments from the debut fund will be in start-ups from the inter-mountain region of Utah and adjacent states. The accelerator recently opened a second operation in Florida, and Mann expects some of the investments from RevRoad’s next fund will come from there.

Having spent most of his career in Seattle, Mann sees Utah as a wonderful environment for start-ups. “It’s very different what I’ve experienced on the coasts for the last 20 years. There is a strong culture of building businesses from the private sector and the public sector. Fewer regulations to deal with and regulators who are leaning in to help those companies find a way to be successful in our state,” he said.

This article has been revised to include additional details about the fund’s LPs, its first five investments and its partnership with its sister company.