Detroit Venture Partners charges ahead with 8 VC investments

Detroit Venture Partners is moving aggressively to invest in local companies. The downtown Detroit-based venture capital has funded eight start-ups and has another two under contract. More deals are in the offing.

“We expect to do 12 investments this year,” says Josh Linkner, CEO of Detroit Venture Partners. “Most of them are local. We expect all of them to create jobs in the city.”

Detroit Venture Partners started late last year with money and resources from three primary investors, Linkner (chairman of ePrize), Dan Gilbert (CEO of Quicken Loans) and Brian Hermelin (Rockbridge Growth Equity). The VC firm is based in Compuware right now, but plans to move to the Madison Building tech hub later this year.

Among the companies Detroit Venture Partners has invested in are hiredMYway (a staffing firm) and Are You a Human, a tech firm that is reinventing CAPTCHA technology. Both are headquartered in Birmingham and Ann Arbor respectively, but will be moving to downtown Detroit.

The co-founders of Detroit Venture Partners started the company as a way of helping fulfill Gilbert’s Webward vision of creating a concentration of technology-based companies in the lower Woodward corridor between the Detroit River and Grand Circus Park.

Source: Josh Linkner, CEO of Detroit Venture Partners
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.