Our Investment in High Alpha

We are very excited to announce our partnership with Scott Dorsey, founder and former CEO of ExactTarget, and his new startup studio High Alpha. I have known Scott for over a decade and have always admired how he built ExactTarget into such a successful SaaS company that Salesforce just had to buy it! When the opportunity arose to collaborate on his next venture, Emergence jumped at the chance.

Over lunch last December, Scott shared with me his vision to team up with the best talent in the Mid-West to build a new generation of enterprise cloud companies. Around the same time, three of the top entrepreneurs in Indianapolis (Mike Fitzgerald, former EVP Corporate Development at ExactTarget, Kristian Andersen, designer, founder and investor, and Eric Tobias, Founder of iGoDigital) were brainstorming about creating a “venture studio” to build new B2B businesses in Indy. These four founders shared a vision, and High Alpha was born.

The mission of High Alpha is to build world-class B2B startups in the Mid-West, and Emergence Capital is thrilled to invest with this team. We relish the opportunity to gain a fresh perspective outside of Silicon Valley while being able to leverage new pools of talent. At Emergence Capital, we like to focus on what’s next for the enterprise, and during high growth times in Silicon Valley, it is easy to get somewhat myopic about the most important business problems of tomorrow. We are excited to look at enterprise opportunities from a new angle with the High Alpha team, while being able to contribute our insights from 12 years of investing in leading enterprise cloud companies.

With our investment in Quasar Ventures (a successful “company builder” in Latin America) we have experience investing in strong executives who can build great companies. My partner Santi Subotovsky led the Emergence investment in Quasar, and I’m excited that he is also closely involved in our new investment in High Alpha.

The passion of this High Alpha founding team combined with both the decades of enterprise cloud experience and the deep Mid-West network makes for great opportunities. Emergence Capital is proud to be a part of this winning formula.