GRAND RAPIDS ? Blue Medora has received $1.25 million in investments from Start Garden and Grand Angels. Blue Medora develops software for IBM Tivoli Monitoring and Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Start Garden, a $15 million seed fund created by Rick DeVos, the grandson of Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, invested $500,000. Grand Angels, a regional group of angel investors, announced that 20 of its 44 members cumulatively invested $750,000.
The five year-old Grand Rapids company, which currently has 21 employees, will use the funds to add staff and develop more products for its international client base. CEO Nathan Owen says Blue Medora hopes to hire another 10 employees by mid-2014.
?We are extremely grateful for the support that Start Garden and Grand Angels have provided for Blue Medora,? Owen said. ?We feel that we have a significant opportunity to build a successful business and to be able to find others right here in our own community that share that belief and are willing to provide the resources to help make it possible is pretty remarkable.?
The $500,000 investment by Start Garden is the largest to date.
?With the Blue Medora investment, we invested aggressively into seasoned entrepreneurs already working in a space with huge potential that they know very well,? said DeVos. ?It?s the aggression to jump on opportunities, whether it?s $5,000 or $500,000, which is vital to making our region a great place for entrepreneurs.?
DeVos said another factor to invest heavily in Blue Medora was the existing partnerships the startup already has in place. Owen?s industry expertise and background combined with the expertise of local software development firm Atomic Object, an early investor in Blue Medora, helped the company secure partnerships with technology leaders IBM, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Citrix.
In nine years, Grand Angels has invested nearly $11 million in 25 different companies ($2.5 million in 2012). Its investments have ranged from $50,000 to $1.6 million per deal, sometimes over multiple rounds of investment per startup.
?We are pleased to partner with Start Garden on this investment in Blue Medora and look forward to partnering with them in more deals in the future,? says Jody Vanderwel, President of Grand Angels.
