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| Home : Volume 32 : Winter 2006 | |
| Entrepreneur joins Madison venture capital firm | |
Winslow Sargeant |
Less than a decade ago, Winslow Sargeant (PhDECE '95) co-founded AANetcom, a fabless semiconductor integrated circuit design company, with $1.2 million in seed money from Cisco Systems. Located not in Silicon Valley, but rather in Pennsylvania, the venture was a gamble. It paid off: The company's first chip was a huge success and, less than two-and-a-half years after they founded it, Sargeant and his colleagues sold AANetcom to British Columbia-based PMC-Sierra for nearly $1 billion.
After the sale, Sargeant worked for about a year as a senior design engineer with PMC-Sierra, then left to become a program manager with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research program. “I was able to direct funding to innovative technologies all across the nation,” he says. “I had the pleasure to steer research dollars in underserved areas. This gave me a good look at where the next breakthroughs that will be commercialized will appear.”
It also gave Sargeant, a native of Barbados who grew up in Boston, a chance to revisit opportunities in the Midwest, where he earned master's (Iowa State) and PhD (Wisconsin) degrees. “By being at NSF, I was able to see that the Big Ten area, the greater Midwest, had some of the best schools in the country, and the world, with innovative research,” he says. “I also saw that not enough venture funding was available to take advantage of these technologies.”
So despite lucrative offers from top East and West Coast firms, Sargeant chose the next step in his professional life based on where he thought he could make the greatest impact. In May, he and his family — wife Ikanyeng, sons Kgosi and Marang, and daughter Lorato — will move to Madison and Sargeant will become the sixth partner in Venture Investors, LLC, a firm that provides seed and early-stage venture capital to technology-based companies in Wisconsin and the Midwest. “I saw the opportunity to work with researchers and entrepreneurs to build companies that would commercialize their technologies,” he says.
To date, Venture Investors can count UW-Madison spin-offs Third Wave Technologies, Gala Design, Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals, Nimble-Gen Systems, TomoTherapy and Virent Energy Systems among the companies it has offered seed funding or helped to form.
Sargeant's goal is to build viable companies in Madison and the greater Midwest from this university-led research. “Corporate America has, to some extent, abandoned doing research,” he says. “Research universities have become the de facto research arms for corporate America and the world. Venture Investors will provide the critical infrastructure — marketing, corporate governance, advisors, funding — for ground-breaking research.”
Living in Madison has its perks, too: “It is a great place for family and I enjoy being involved with the university,” he says.
Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu
Date last modified: 03-Feb-2006
Date created: 03-Feb-2006
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