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Venture Capital - Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Meet Me In St. Louis

Sand Hill Road seems to have a stealth connection point in St. Louis, MO in a building near Spirit of St. Louis Airport's air traffic control tower. There a new and very large venture firm is being born without wanting to call attention to itself. Acartha Technology Partners is a new $800M fund that will invest in mid- to late-stage tech companies. Acartha's total capital under management is expected to reach $1.5B by the middle of 2006. Acartha's largest shareholder is Morriss Holdings, a family holding company run by Doug Morriss (family money comes from Reuben Morriss III, a former vice chairman of Boatmen's Trust.) In 1994, Doug Morriss founded Kinexus a data aggregation platform that was used by the wealth management units of large banks and broker-dealers. San Francisco-based Advent Software acquired Kinexus in December 2001 for $68.5M, plus a $115M back-end earnout. This gave Morriss the bug to continue to invest in tech.

Acartha has 14 companies in its current portfolio including:
- Bellevue, WA-based GraniteEdge Networks, an early-stage security company
- New York, NY-based Tervela (Data Messaging Appliances)
- Princeton, N.J-based Clearbrook Financial (Investment management platform)
- Sunset Hills, NJ-based Exegy (Data search and Storage)

Read - Morriss builds billion-dollar venture firm (St. Louis Business Journal)
[The firm does not appear to have a Web site]