M33 Growth, a venture and growth stage investment manager that partners with founders and CEOs and seeks to rapidly scale and build companies, held its first and final closing today for its debut fund, M33 Growth I with USD180 million in limited partner commitments.
The M33 Growth founders are excited to apply their experience and deep networks to fuel the sales and marketing engines of its portfolio companies, and will seek to drive acquisitions and build value through data assets to propel portfolio companies to success in their respective markets.
“M33 Growth was born out of the idea that to truly catapult a business to the next level, it takes not only operational and investment proficiency, but also the empathy of a founding team that has spent years successfully working with bootstrapped companies to accelerate their growth,” says Brian Shortsleeve, a co-founder and managing director of M33 Growth. “Our mission is to fuel the growth of the next great success stories in American business.”
The founding team members, including Shortsleeve, Gabriel Ling and Michael Anello, are seasoned operators and investors who have worked together for nearly a decade. The team combines strategy and operating experience gained at a number of well-respected firms, including Bain & Company, General Catalyst, HIG Capital and Valor Equity Partners.
In addition to his background in financial investing, Shortsleeve has experience in public sector leadership, most recently serving as the Chief Administrator and Acting General Manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA). There, he led efforts to put the MBTA on a path to fiscal sustainability by reducing the operating deficit, leveraging technology and industry partnerships to modernise business processes and accelerating the pace of state-of-good-repair capital investment.
M33 Growth – a name inspired by Mach 33, which is the speed at which an object reaches escape velocity and breaks out from the gravitational pull of the Earth – will seek to help leaders of successful, bootstrapped businesses rapidly achieve scale. The M33 Growth team brings a distinctive philosophy to its model, combining capital with operational expertise and empathy for founders and CEOs eager to grow.
“We know from experience that getting a deal done is only the beginning,” says Ling. “We designed M33 Growth’s strategy to focus on operational excellence and growth – as contrasted with driving returns through financial engineering. We are in this business because we love to work hard alongside our entrepreneur partners, and to help transform already successful businesses to achieve even greater success in their markets.”
M33 Growth enjoys strong support from some of the nation’s top endowments, institutional investors and philanthropic foundations in raising the Fund, as well as from highly regarded founders and CEOs with whom the M33 Growth team has developed strong ties over the past decade. The Fund will initially target between eight and ten investments in bootstrapped companies with more than USD5 million in revenue in the software, healthcare and services sectors.
“As a native Midwesterner, I know firsthand the vast number of high-quality, founder-owned businesses that operate in geographies outside of Silicon Valley,” says Anello. “We founded M33 Growth so we could work with who we believe to be the best entrepreneurs in North America. I look forward to applying my experience, as well as best practices gleaned from collaboration with leading technology sales executives at companies like Tesla and project44, to help our partner companies realise their true vision.”
