Why Wisconsin

BETH DONLEY and GABRIELA CEZAR are putting a fresh face on investing in tech-based start-up companies. Donley, formerly chief legal counsel at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and Dr. Cezar, a leading human embryonic stem cell scientist at the UW-Madison, are co-founders of Stemina Biomarker Discovery. This company has attracted state loans and grants, as well as angel and other early stage investment dollars. Stemina’s cell-based assays arise from the strategic convergence of two groundbreaking technologies – metabolomics and human ES cells. Stemina will use its technology to discover and validate small molecules as biomarkers for high-throughput drug screening and drug development. “Madison has had some wonderful success stories recently,” said investor Terrence Wall of DaneVest Tech Fund. “We feel confident the I-Q Corridor between Chicago and Minneapolis will provide even more promising stories in the future.”

“Why doesn’t anyone buy toilet paper online?” As simple as that question might seem, it was the spark behind the creation of Alice.com, the latest web-based brainchild of MARK MCGUIRE and BRIAN WIEGAND, two of Wisconsin’s serial entrepreneurs. Consumers who sign up at Alice.com can buy toilet paper, toothpaste, laundry detergent and other household essentials at reasonable prices and have them delivered to their homes with no shipping charges. Alice.com raised $4.3 million late last year in a first financing round led by Kegonsa Capital and DaneVest Tech Fund. McGuire and Wiegand left Microsoft Corp.’s Madison office to start the company. They joined Microsoft when it acquired their last start-up, Jellyfish.com, for a reported $50 million. This dynamic duo’s other startups were Bizfilings.com (sold to Wolters-Kluwer in 2001) and NameProtect.com (sold to Corporation Services Corp. in 2007).

KEVIN CONROY likes Wisconsin’s entrepreneurial climate so much that he sold one publically traded company, assumed leadership of a Boston-area public firm – and moved it back to Wisconsin. Conroy was CEO of Third Wave Technologies, a NASDAQ-traded molecular diagnostics company acquired by Hologic for $582 million in mid-2008. He and another former Third Wave executive, Maneesh Arora, became CEO and CFO of Exact Sciences Corp. in early 2009 and within months they moved the company, which focuses on colorectal cancer, to Madison, Wis., with the help of a $1 million state of Wisconsin loan. “The assistance provided by the governor was a critical part of our relocation decision,” Conroy said. “We know from past experience that Wisconsin, and the Madison area, in particular, is a great place to build a biotechnology company.”

For LEE EDWARDS, Virent Energy Systems is a glass beaker more than half full. Edwards came to this renewable energy company in early 2009 after leading BP Solar, a global solar technology provider with 2,200 employees and $1 billion in annual sales. Virent’s BioForming technology converts plant sugars into a variety of hydrocarbon molecules identical in structure to the petroleum-based hydrocarbons used in modern fuels. The company will use its platform to develop green gasoline, then renewable jet and diesel fuel. Investors and strategic partners so far include Shell, Cargill Ventures, Atrium Capital and Advantage Capital Partners. “Lee Edwards is emblematic of the fact that Wisconsin companies can and do attract world-class, C-level talent,” said John Neis, managing partner of Venture Investors LLC.

JIM HAGSTROM is a small-town kid from Ashland, Wis., who helped land a big-time deal. Hagstrom is one of the founders of Mirus Bio Corp., which was acquired by Roche for $125 million in 2008. The Swiss-based pharmaceutical company is keeping Roche-Mirus is Madison, where the company continues to work on its proprietary RNAi (Ribonucleic Acid interference) delivery platform. This was the second purchase by Roche in the Madison market. A year earlier, the company acquired NimbleGen for $272.5 million. NimbleGen is active in high-density DNA microarrays. “It’s almost been like a perfect dream for us,” Hagstrom told the Wisconsin State Journal in April 2009. The Madison staff can keep conducting research and technology, he said, while Roche pursues the costly and complicated process of turning the discoveries into potential drugs.

For KELLY FITZSIMMONS, entrepreneurship is no laughing matter – even though one of the companies she co-founded is Comic Wonder, a competitive joke-telling site used by radio stations to drive ad sales and listener interest. Fitzsimmons is a serial entrepreneur whose latest company is HarQen, a Voice Asset Management system. Its “VoiceScreener” software platform was featured in the Wall Street Journal in May 2009. Another Fitzsimmons company, Sun Tzu Security Ltd., sold to Chicago-based Neohapsis Inc. about six years ago. “There has been a sea change in terms of receptivity among angels in Wisconsin,” Fitzsimmons said. “We’ve done a really good job as a state of cultivating that community, and helping to put good deals in front of them.”