AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer and user of malt barley, partners with agriculture technology firm Agrible
Champaign, Ill., Sept. 20, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) and Agrible, Inc. today announce a global partnership to improve barley production while minimizing environmental impact. The two companies are joining forces to help farmers around...
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DNA, RNA and the Coming Reality of Personalized Medicine
Medicine has always been a science of averages. Most people in the population tend to suffer from most of the same diseases, and most of those diseases respond to most of the same treatments. If one therapy doesn’t work, doctors always have other drugs and other...
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The iSelect Focus: Resource Efficiency
Energy is an incredibly complex sector. There's an abundance of conventional fossil fuel available that is relatively inexpensive, but it is meeting with consumer revolt at some level on the basis of its impact on climate change. You've got essentially three primary...
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10+ Questions Facing Agriculture and Where to Find the Answers
The agriculture industry is facing a series of intertwined, complex issues over the next several decades. Conventional wisdom suggests that we face a critical supply shortage driven by four key questions: Can we produce enough food? The world’s population will...
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What Is the Future of iSelect?
When I conceived of iSelect I conceived that it would initially be a series of small, individual funds focused on individual communities. We would go and set up maybe iSelect St. Louis, iSelect Kansas City, iSelect Cleveland, and we'd have a small portfolio that we...
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Sound Waves, Predictive Analytics and the Future of Medical Diagnosis
It began as a straightforward, everyday procedure. The patient, a 34-year-old man, entered the hospital for abdominal surgery to treat his persistent colitis, a disease typified by the inflammation of the inner colon. The treatment itself was unremarkable and the...
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Innovation Anarchy: Doctor, Please Stop, You’re Killing Me!
I learned three important lesson about innovation early in my career as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas. It was 1989 and I was assigned to work on the Navy’s F/A-18 Hornet, a carrier-based fighter jet. Originally designed in 1976, the F/A-18 was planned to remain...
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David Yocom, Venture for America Fellow, Joins iSelect Ventures Team
iSelect is pleased to welcome David Yocom, a 2017 Venture For America Fellow, to its Ventures team, where he will be focused on investment due diligence and portfolio maintenance. As a Venture Analyst, he will also be helping to build out iSelect’s Market Networks program and assisting in other outreach efforts.
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What Is the iSelect Diligence Process?
Our diligence is pretty extensive. It's about a 60-day process. We have a dual path of both business and legal diligence. From a business standpoint, once the internal review's over and we made a decision to go forward, we engage an outside group of advisors....
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What Is the Appeal of iSelect to Investors?
I spent my career representing companies that were raising capital and funds that were investing capital in those companies. And, I think the key thing that was the light bulb that came on for me, for iSelect, and what was the fundamental discovery that gave rise to...
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iSelect Portfolio: Neuros Medical Closes $20 Million Funding Round
Neuros Medical, part of the iSelect healthcare portfolio since 2016, closed a $20 million Series AA financing round, led by U.S. Venture Partners and joined by iSelect, Boston Scientific, Aperture Venture Partners, Osage University Partners, and JumpStart, Inc. Neuros...
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Don’t Worry Dad, We Are Just Editing Our Genes
I was in Phoenix recently meeting with some prospective investors. At the end of the dinner presentation, I sat with a table of younger investors and we started talking about genomics, CRISPR and 23andMe. Then the floodgates opened... These young people not only are...
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Sorry Chicken Little, the Sky Isn’t Falling
Last weekend I was in Grayling, Michigan for the famous canoe marathon, a 14-hour, non-stop race through the night. The Ausable, known as the Holy Waters, is a beautiful river with many naturally fallen trees, obstacles, and tight bends. Given the obstructions, some...
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iSelect and Agriculture: Why We’re Investing
So we're focused on four sectors: agriculture, healthcare, energy, and technology. We've picked those four because we really do think that they have the ability to be game-changing globally for the world. If we look at agriculture, we are at one of the most complex...
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Why Is Now the Time to Invest in Venture Capital?
Some people sometimes ask why is now the right time for venture. The answer is now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is no better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? If we look...
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Dr. Todd Mockler on Plant Science, Genomics, and the Future of Food
Dr. Todd Mockler is one of the world’s leading experts on plant genetics and has dedicated his career to better understanding how the genetic code of different types of plants impacts their behavior and responses. As a member and principal investigator with the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, his research has focused on the development of plant genomic tools, with the end goal of improving crop performance and yield.
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Innovation and the Law of Accelerating Returns
An issue with government subsidies, whether in IT or energy, is that they suppress the natural forces of innovation that would otherwise drive growth.
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Inside the iSelect Fund Product
iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into it's parts it's fairly easy to understand. On the front end, we're a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process, we have an investment process, we have certain categories of...
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7 Steps to Building Client Relationships That Last
Customers aren’t just important to the success of your business. They’re the only thing that really matters. In fact, success in business -- whether it is in financials services, sales, manufacturing, or any other industry -- relies on clients that are happy, engaged...
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The Role of Diversification in Venture Investing
A key component of venture capital is diversification. Some people have made investments in startups, and they’ve taken off for a while, and then failed. If you invest in one or two companies, you have a high risk that you are going to lose your money. If you look at...
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Part-Time Labor: A Feature or a Bug?
iSelect just completed an investment round in Popbookings, a company that is working to streamline the temporary employment market. Its first focus is in the event-staffing segment, and its tools automate the entire hiring, scheduling, attendance, payroll, and...
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What Can iSelect Do For You?
Silicon Valley is famous and successful for some very good reasons. It attracts some of the best talent in the world, is a nexus for billions in available funding and is a one-stop shop for customers in need of any sort of IT technology. But that focus is also one of...
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What Role Does Venture Capital Play in a Portfolio?
Venture capital is exciting, for one thing. People like it, and shows like “Shark Tank” have proven it on television. But the real reason you want venture capital in your portfolio is that it's consistently, for the last 35 years, been the highest returning asset...
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Fibrosis: One of the Most Common Disorders in Modern Medicine
Fibrosis is a category of diseases that covers a lot of bases, striking everything from the lungs, to the heart, to the skin and more. And its causes are just as diverse, ranging from diabetes, to environmental factors, to genetics and even certain medications. At its...
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PopBookings Raises $1 Million in Oversubscribed Funding Round
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 6, 2017 Contact: Erika Klotz PopBookings (312) 722-6422 hello@popbookings.com PopBookings Raises $1 Million in Oversubscribed Funding Round Capital Will Support New Product Development and Further International Expansion KANSAS CITY, MO –...
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ProteoSense: Do You Really Know What’s in Your Food?
Food safety represents a major new front in consumer safety and public health. The risk of foodborne illness isn’t just for the history books, and thanks to recent cases such as those that struck national brands like Chipotle, Chi-Chi’s, Peter Pan Peanut Butter and...
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10 Common Mistakes Made When Investing in Startups
For new venture investors, selecting a startup to invest in can be overwhelming. There are hundreds of different industries to focus on, companies to research and CEOs to get to know. The rewards of venture investing can be great, but the barriers to entry as nearly...
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How iSelect Got Its Start
I conceived of iSelect the day that Congress passed the JOBS Act. What the JOBS Act said is that, in the past when people were raising money for private deals for new startup companies, they couldn't advertise or solicit to broad audiences. You had to have a...
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Resistant Hypertension: Ending the Death Sentence
Physicians have been fascinated with blood and the circulatory system for hundreds of years. Records dating back to early Roman times prove that bloodletting was in wide use as a treatment for disease at least 2,000 years ago, and leeches have been used in medicine...
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Better Weekdays: The Future of Hiring Is Here
On today's podcast we discuss how startup company Better Weekdays is reducing friction in the talent acquisition process. With their interactive platform that provides tools and services, improving the hiring process for students, colleges, and employers. Carter...
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College Grads Aren’t Fitting Into the Job Market, and Here’s Why
First, the good news: Corporations are on track to hire more recent college grads this year -- up 5% versus last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers -- making 2017 the eighth year in a row that companies have increased their...
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What Is iSelect?
iSelect is a venture firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies as potential investments and we chose the best of those to invest in.
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FairWords: Automating Compliance for Enterprise Communications
The term “Information Age” is generally associated with the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, as human history shifted from the era of industrialization to the modern age in which information and communications are the...
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