Today we are launching the new i2E blog, Stories of Oklahoma Innovation. Each week, we will publish a blog taken from our actual experience working with Oklahoma’s entrepreneurs to build new, innovative technology companies.
Expect a real-world view.
i2E’s mission, pure and simple, is to walk shoulder to shoulder with entrepreneurs to turn their technology-based ideas into successful businesses.
i2E venture advisors go into the community with their sleeves rolled up. We dig for opportunities to build exciting new companies. That front-end work usually starts with helping founders who haven’t started a company before. i2E’s micro-accelerator, the E3, helps founders vet and validate the path to market. They learn how to see the holes in their deals and either solve for those—or come up with a different path.
We operate in the riskiest stage of a company’s path. What we do might not make sense in California, Boston, or Austin, where deal flow happens almost automatically. The landscape in Oklahoma is different. i2E performs a critical role: Finding. Assessing, Remediating, and Advancing. Without the early-stage deal flow we develop, and the venture services we deploy to take these startups to the next level, Oklahoma cannot build a pipeline of new, advanced technology companies.
Access to capital.
i2E is an integral part of Oklahoma’s Innovation Model, receives state support from OCAST, and operates in partnership with Plains Ventures, an independent investment arm of our company that manages both private and public funds. Plains invests in well-vetted deal flow out of i2E and from other sources in Oklahoma’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Since 2007, i2E and Plains have invested more than $61 million of equity funding in 58 companies. The two organizations are integrated and work together to build Oklahoma’s future economy literally from the ground up. The success of the companies that Plains invests in creates a “virtuous cycle” that feeds back into the pipeline of deal flow support at i2E.
i2E has been helping build new companies in Oklahoma for more than 20 years. Since inception, we have made 378 investments (equity and debt) totaling more than $87MM in 218 companies. There is no organization in the state, or any state that is not a major population center, with a track record like ours.
Everyone in the state has a vested interest in building more advanced technology companies in Oklahoma. We invite you to return to this blog as we post stories of high-growth companies, entrepreneurs, and funding success right here, in the State of Oklahoma.
