Venture Carolina

The mission of the Venture Carolina Center for Entrepreneur and Investor Education is to bridge the gap that exists between entrepreneurs and investors within South Carolina by providing comprehensive programming and a best-in-class educational curriculum, while also facilitating a strategically aligned workforce development program to provide long-term sustainability to our ecosystem.

Along with an exceptional Board of Directors, Venture Carolina is led by its Executive Director, Charlie Banks, an experienced angel investor and operative within our ecosystem. Charlie is accompanied by Venture Carolina's Operations Manager, Chris Willingham, and Administrative Assistant, Alene Willingham. Both Chris and Alene have extensive experience in the initiatives related to our mission statement, as well as an exceptional ability to remain focused on delivering effective results. Additional partners outlined in this proposal include VentureSouth, a leading South Carolina-based early-stage venture firm that has invested more than $60M in 80+ companies and was recently named a Top 10 Angel Network in North America by the Angel Capital Association, and partners from Furman University's Innovation and Entrepreneurship team.

Testimonials

Due to a historically underserved capital marketplace throughout the region, our area entrepreneurs have a tough time raising the needed capital to scale companies. The problem we seek to solve is the gap that exists between the founders and the investors. With the ever-changing pandemic regulations/requirements and attempting to return to more in person events, we continued the need to navigate these unchartered waters. We continue to make great strides to remain impactful. To an extent, the pandemic has forced us to become even better at remote access to capital, which is the exact problem we seek to solve. The following are our some of our more recent achievements from 12/1/2020 to present.
• Secured space at 101 North Main Street in Greenville for our Pitch Lab 2.0
• Hired a consulting firm called Advanced Video Group (https://www.avgroup-sc.com) and completed the build out of our state of the art "Streaming Studio" which is equipped to produce the highest quality educational content, as well as the ability to accommodate mobile content production.
• Held 25 entrepreneur workshops
• Held 26 investor meetings
• 23 companies received investment from our sister organization, VentureSouth with $7,445,354 invested into the region.
• Our annual conference was held virtually on December 8th and 9th with 139 attendees.
• Hired a full time Venture Carolina Director of Operations
Our project has had the following impact on the problems we seek to solve:
• Entrepreneur workshops resulted in over 250 individuals being educated on the intricacies associated with early-stage capital formation
• Investor meetings resulted in over 400 investors being educated on the intricacies of early stage investing
• Investor meetings resulted in 143 new members joining VentureSouth