TECHdotMN: News about Minnesota Startups

Despite a year’s worth of articles bemoaning the condition of U.S. venture capital investing (see here and here and here), venture capital firms invested $21.8 billion nationally in 2010 (3,277 total investments), according to the National Venture Capital Association & PwC’s annual MoneyTree report.

This represents a 19% increase in dollars invested over 2009.

Minnesota’s 2010 story ends quite differently. Cross-sector startups raised a collective $140 million, marking a 48% drop from 2009, and the lowest Minnesota amount since the MoneyTree reporting began 15 years ago.

For 2010, TECHdotMN documents 42 unique high tech deals (IT, SaaS, web/mobile, digital media, hardware, telecom), totaling in excess of $60m invested in Minnesota-based technology companies throughout last year. Excluding Cymbet’s $31m round, 36 different ventures raised approximately $30m combined in 2010, or $857k per average round, according to the data.*

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You know something is cookin’ when a Startup evolves from Minnesota LLC to Delaware Corporation, starts showing up on Edgar and qualifies for the Minnesota Angel Tax Credit.

ProfitSee is SaaS that allows small and mid-size business owners to gain “high level CFO insights” into their businesses: it helps them recognize what their real assets of the company are, how to better leverage them, and some key elements in creating financial stability, valuation and increasing profitability.

In addition to the $80k raised in May 2010, more recent SEC filings indicate ProfitSee has received a combined $90k over the past few months in preparation for a larger private placement in first quarter 2011.

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ProfitSee is a fiscal and asset management software that provide CFO level services to small and mid-sized companies.  As a strategic partner and applications developer with Intuit, ProfitSee was awarded the the “Best in Show, 2010″ at Intuit’s annual Cloud Jam Convention last month.

On Friday, it was reported that the company had secured $80k in funding, about which  CEO Peter Vessenes says,

“The raising of $80k from accredited angel investors will allow us to continue to advance our SaaS as we gain momentum coming off April’s award.”

For a detailed explanation of how ProfitSee works and where they’re headed,  see our previous interview with Mr. Vessenes.

ProfitSee is a financial insight tool that allows small and mid-size business owners to understand what multinational CFO’s do for their businesses: it helps them recognize what their real assets of the company are, how to better leverage them, and some key elements in creating financial stability, valuation and increasing profitability.

Decades in the making, ProfitSee is built over a data modeling system which (at times) applies up to 12 levels of Boolean logic sequencing to provide high level forward looking scenarios in a method that’s easy for business owners and decision makers to understand and act on. The technology was originally designed as a desktop software package but has recently been re-designed as a SAAS solution and will be launching next week.  Peter Vessenes, Creator of ProfitSee, has a lifetime of experience in financial consulting with multiple fortune 70 clients and many small to mid-size businesses as well.  Currently, he is Co-owner of Vestment Advisors, a financial coaching / turnaround company and Vestment Financial.  He created ProfitSee based on his “inability to effectively clone himself.”  When asked what the value proposition of ProfitSee is, Peter  said:

“We have a subscription rate, depending on how big you are, of either $45/month or $95/month that let’s you see and understand what a $400,000/yr CFO does.”

Powerful stuff!

Podcast Transcript with Jeff Pesek, Lief Larson and Peter Vessenes:

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