Fellowship Spotlight: Metallum Ventures

Founder and Managing Partner of Bronze Valley, Neill Wright, can trace his current professional focus and success to the fact that he followed in his father’s footsteps. “I was fortunate to have a father who instilled in me the value of hard work,” he says. “I watched him get up every day and go to work early.” After a long career in banking, Wright’s father embarked on a journey of entrepreneurship, eventually acquiring a bank that was originally founded in 1894 by Booker T. Washington on the campus of what was at the time Tuskegee Institute.

A Finance-Focused Entrepreneurial Legacy 

“After my own rewarding career in corporate finance in New York City,” Wright explains, “I had the transformational experience of leading the bank my father resurrected from an insolvent institution into a recapitalized, full-service, state-chartered bank.” Most importantly to Wright, the bank was a pillar of community in the low-wealth region it was in, and provided a strong base from which the community could thrive. 

“Through the experience of leading the bank through the Great Recession,” Wright reflects, “I was able to leverage my banking career and translate my experience into impact. I saw how investing capital into small businesses helped not only to improve the lives of business owners, but also improved the lives of their clients and entire community.”

Making Change with Metallum Ventures

Fast forward 15 years from when Wright took over the bank, he’s now working every day to create impact for startup company founders  and the entire landscape of VC as solo GP of his latest endeavor, Metallum Ventures. 

Metallum Ventures is an industry-agnostic, seed-stage venture capital fund focused on catalyzing innovation outside of the conventional tech hub regions in the U.S. Based in the Southeast, the firm is positioned to be able to concentrate its efforts in places with a wealth of untapped potential and an undersaturated market. “We’re really focused on opportunities that are beyond traditional technology hubs, where there’s generally a dearth of venture capital,” Wright shares. “Where there’s less capital and less competition, we can potentially create additional value as we help founders.” 

Wright and his team are raising a $50M fund to invest checks between $500K and $2M across approximately 30 companies, reserving approximately 40% of the fund for follow-on investments. They’re seeking companies that are solving massive problems and disrupting processes in service of enhancing productivity and improving the overall quality of human interaction. 

While the fund is industry agnostic, Metallum Ventures does have particular areas of interest, including: healthcare, education, consumer products, and sustainability. Metallum is also intentionally investing in high-growth startups led by founders who’ve historically been excluded from accessing VC. 

The Power of Diversification

“Having worked in very fast-paced, high finance environments and then also having an opportunity to work in what some would call Main Street finance,” Wright says, “it strikes me that the VC industry is so homogenous.” And the lack of diversity in the field is far more than an issue of optics. “The data is very clear that more diverse teams outperform those that are not,” Wright points out, “and quite frankly, there’s a structural defect in the process of how investment capital is allocated in this country. Beyond the fact that it’s simply inequitable, it’s counter to the foundational concept of diversification, which underpins most outsized performance portfolios.” 

Wright and his team are banking on diversification in more ways than one to deliver outsized returns in capital as well as in transformation of the industry. “If we continue to open the aperture of opportunity around including those who have been historically excluded from this space,” he offers, “then the new outcomes will far outpace those of the status quo.”

A Lean, Nimble, and Effective Team 

“What differentiates our firm,” Wright states emphatically, “is clearly our people.” Wright’s own 30 years of transactional finance experience across many industries, coupled with his operational experience in a heavily regulated industry, uniquely qualifies and positions him to manage investor capital in a private fund environment. His team of five—four investment professionals and one person overseeing compliance and administration—has a combined 70 years of investing in, operating, and exiting private capital-backed companies.

“While we’ve built this high-powered network of folks around us, we are lean and nimble,” Wright says of his core team. But this hasn’t stopped them from generating performance in the platform they’ve been investing from. Five years ago, this powerhouse team launched their pre-seed investment platform, Bronze Valley, which is a community development financial institution (CDFI) venture fund that shares a thematic focus with the work of Metallum Ventures. 

Bronze Valley is a non-profit, early-stage venture investment platform that supports high-growth innovation and technology-enabled companies created by diverse, underrepresented, and underestimated founders. The difference between the two efforts is the stage at which the team is investing and the impact they are seeking to create. 

“With Bronze Valley, we’re investing at the earliest stage and we’ll often invest the first institutional check into a founder’s capital raise.” Through launching Bronze Valley, Wright and his team quickly saw that they would need to be more than a bridge to early-stage capital to create the impact they were after. 

Expanding Impact with The Bronze Valley VentureLab

“That’s when we created the Bronze Valley VentureLab,” he shares, “which offers several accelerator programs that vary by stage. This has really given us an opportunity to meet founders at the infant stages of growth, develop deep relationships, and provide tangible value-add beyond investment capital.” 

As a part of the VentureLab, Wright’s team has also curated a robust advisory service that provides founders with 50 to 75 hours of best-in-class consultation at no cost. “Many of our advisors are current or former c-suite professionals whose expertise includes strategy, software engineering, product development, revenue generation, go-to-market, and much more.” 

This extensive platform has given Metallum Ventures a jumpstart on being able to create far-reaching impact for the founders they serve, helping to de-risk their companies at the earliest stages of growth. To date, Bronze Valley has invested in 33 portfolio companies, while they’ve advised well over 500 companies through the VentureLab, with over 50 of those companies participating in one or more of their accelerator programs. 

Wright says that the founders they’re investing in are 90% diverse, which translates to over 70% African American; 58% female; and 87% residing outside of traditional tech hubs. He clarifies that, “Our team as well as the advisors we collaborate with reflect that same level of diversity.”

Financial Returns alongside Social Impact 

“Of the companies we’ve invested in,” he shares, “they’ve created in excess of 500 jobs; they’ve generated about $70M dollars in revenue; they’ve raised approximately $68M in follow-on capital; and we have also had nine mark-ups in the portfolio.” Many of these same companies will embark upon Series A financing over the next two quarters. “We’re pretty proud of the performance thus far. This portfolio was not necessarily constructed for a financial return only, given its economic development focus in areas like job creation, etc. However, the Metallum fund we are launching will not only generate a financial return, but also create impact alongside it.”

Wright’s been naming his work with his intentions for impact embedded in the names. “The ‘Bronze’ in Bronze Valley signified the location where we were investing: Birmingham, at the southern terminus of the Appalachian Mountains in Jones Valley, where the earth is rich with iron ore and minerals,” Wright explains. “And we’re also investing through the lens of giving people who have a bronze hue more opportunity.” 

Bronze Valley was really the fund zero that came before Metallum Ventures, which also bears a name that’s full of meaning. “Metallum is Latin for metal, and represents the strength of our resolve to make sure that we give those who are deserving an opportunity to participate in technology entrepreneurship.” 

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

Wright reflects on his participation in the VC Include Fellowship with high regard. “Going into the fellowship, I really did not know what to expect,” Wright acknowledges. “I was even a little hesitant to participate. At this stage in my professional life, I don’t know everything, but I think I’ve seen everything. I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at VCI and to my team, who pressed to make sure that we applied.” 

He feels this sense of gratitude in response to the care he perceived that went into shaping his experience in the program. “It was really a perfectly woven tapestry of people. The opportunity to plug into and build with this cohort, amongst a network of professionals that are building similar but different platforms, really enriched the interactions.” 

Perhaps without consciously attempting to reinforce his own beliefs about the power of diversification, Wright underscores his claims by elevating the effect that diversification has on the fellowship itself. “Many folks were at different stages. Some were focused on different asset classes. I think all of that helped to augment the healthy discussion that we had throughout.” 

He also celebrates the expertise, insights, and lived experiences shared by all of the invited guests and speakers. “Salute to Bahiyah and team,” he says. “You’ve built something special with VC Include and I’m really grateful for the experience.” 

We’re equally grateful to be able to offer this experience and to be a part of the Metallum Ventures story.