The dust has settled from Edison’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Nashville late last month. It was my first, and the cumulative level of knowledge and expertise present at the event, between Edison’s partners, LPs, and portfolio company CEOs, was humbling, to say the least.
At the event, we had the opportunity to hear from leadership of three Edison portfolio companies: PurpleLab, GoHenry, and Prepaid Technologies. These three companies are all located outside of the traditional software VC geographies on the east and west coasts: PurpleLab outside of Philadelphia, GoHenry in south of London, and Prepaid Technologies in Birmingham, AL. Great representation of Edison's strategy focused on identifying and investing in fast-growing HCIT, fintech, and vertical enterprise solution companies in burgeoning tech hubs, which is also why we held the Annual Meeting in Nashville. We are bullish on these growing tech ecosystems - not only in Nashville, but also in Texas, the southeast, midwest, and the Rocky Mountains where the majority of our portfolio is headquartered. What we also like about companies in these regions is that founders tend to be more capital-efficient than their peers in the Bay Area, Boston and NYC.
In the weeks since, I’ve had the chance to reflect on these company presentations, and came to three key themes that underscore what exactly has made these companies so successful: 1. deep domain expertise, 2. mission-driven, 3. product-centric vision.
We were delighted to back Mark again seven years ago with the mission of driving immediate and decisive action based on precise insights from fully integrated RWD. With HealthNexus™, the company’s sophisticated no-code analytics platform, healthcare stakeholders are empowered with the RWD they need to solve conventional, new, and emerging challenges. Life science, payers, providers, and advertising companies use the platform to realize value faster, more cost-efficiently, and with ongoing confidence. Under Mark’s leadership, the company has seen tremendous multiples of growth on all key metrics.
The idea for the company came about in 2012, when Dean and his co-founder were funding their kids’ online gaming accounts with their own personal credit cards, paying weekly allowance in cash, and paying extra here and there. They wanted to create a simple all-in-one solution that was easy for parents and practical for kids.
Since launch, GoHenry has worked to provide essential financial education and family finance tools to help kids learn about and practice key areas of personal finance (i.e., earning, saving, spending responsibly, giving, investing, etc.). Parents, who ultimately pay the subscription fees for the platform, have appreciated the company’s unwavering focus on financial education and literacy for their children and driven the company’s tremendous growth over the last decade.
The company continues to build new payment products and enhance existing ones with an emphasis on diversity and quality. This is enabling strong cross-sell opportunity into the current customer base and opening up new markets.