A second look at the Wisconsin Portfolio

Last week, the Wisconsin Technology Council released the Wisconsin Portfolio, its “annual snapshot of early stage investment activity.” MKEStartup.News reviewed the 2024 Deal List published in the report to gain a clearer picture of which Wisconsin companies attracted investments last year and where those investments originated.

Because early-stage investing is often private, no single source offers a complete record of all startup deals in the United States.

The Wisconsin Portfolio notes that its data is drawn from public reports, databases, filings, press releases, company websites, and investor surveys, with follow-up from entrepreneurs and investors when information is incomplete or contradictory.

For this review, MKEStartup.News relied on PitchBook, a leading global database for venture capital, private equity, and M&A transactions, widely used by investors and analysts for its comprehensive deal coverage. We ran a report of Wisconsin raises in 2024 and applied the following filters:

• Excluded companies more than 10 years old
• Excluded deals of $10,000 or less
• Excluded deals in which both the amount and the investor were undisclosed

Using this methodology, we identified multiple documented deals that were not included in the Wisconsin Portfolio’s “2024 Deal List.” The table below outlines those omissions, along with the information available about each transaction.

When contacted, Wisconsin Tech Council President Tom Still provided the following response: “Due to one-time oversights on our part, the 2025 edition of The Wisconsin Portfolio did not include some deals from the 2024 calendar year. That will be corrected in the online edition of the report. We’re happy to see more deals than less each year, because it reflects an emerging Wisconsin early stage economy that includes eight cities in the Midwest’s top 64, as measured by M25 in Chicago.”

These omitted deals represent $67,299,311 in 2024 transactions: $33,140,000 in venture capital and angel funding, $220,000 in accelerator funding and $33,939,311 in grant funding. The Wisconsin Technology Council does not include grant funding in its annual deal report.