H Venture Partners has brought together more than 75 consumer and retail industry experts to invest in its first fundraiser, raising $10 million targeting consumer brand startups backed by science. Founder and managing partner Elizabeth Edwards (pictured above) formed a Cincinnati-based venture capital firm 15 years later as VC at other firms, investing primarily in firms including Peloton, Bill.com, and Roots and Freshly.
“Venture capitalists will stay away from consumer and science-based investments because they don’t believe that consumer brands can be technological,” Edwards said in an interview.
“However, you can see the packaging technology needed to get from point A to point B without destroying all the technology and pointing that is growing lettuce, we like that kind of thing – where Mother Nature, science and human behavior come together in a consumer brand.” Check out the $500,000 size from the fund average and look for H Venture female founders and color founders.
Edwards says that consistent with the statistics, 85% of consumer purchases are made by women, and 93 percent of enterprise capital is managed by white men. Also, consumer purchases represent 69 percent of gross domestic product in the United States, but only 3 percent of venture capital investment, he added. He said H Venture has already disbursed capital to 10 companies with a target of 15 investments. Edwards added, it looks for a brand that can be imagined in any retailer’s store shelves.
A Sephora store shelf and a painkiller, actually how he found out about the CBD brand primer, were started by Christopher Gavigan, founder of the Henst Company and former chief purpose officer. Led Primer with H Venture Primer May May $9.2 million seed round with Mete Defie partners, Grycroft and Layer Hippo. Edwards said he “believed” in love, not only because it was a brand he discovered when needed, but also because of the abundance of third-party testing and certification agencies, as well as the desire to leverage primer and more than the CBD brand in the supply chain. H Venture’s initial portfolio includes baby food maker Cerebelli and clean wine company Avalaine, founded by Cameron Diaz and Katherine Power.
