This year marked a defining milestone for M25: celebrating a decade of investing in the Midwest. We’ve built a firm rooted by our founders with conviction, community and consistency. This year was a full circle moment as we announced our Fund IV, our largest fund to date, doubling down on our commitment to back exceptional early-stage founders across the broader Midwest. We also recognized a key member of our team, Abhinaya Konduru, by promoting her to Partner. Rounding out the year, M25 was honored to receive the inaugural IVCA Rising Star Award, a meaningful acknowledgement of the firm’s impact over the past 10 years and a signal of what’s ahead.
The M25 team traveled across the Midwest this year for both work and leisure. We tracked everyone’s activity through the region and turned it into map form. Not shocking, Chicago and Indianapolis were the most popular stops on the map, with Grand Rapids ranking at the top of the charts following our 2025 Team Retreat. This year, Katie took the lead, visiting a whopping 13 states (!!). Overall, the team hit 42 different cities in the Midwest in 2025.
We ask our team to track some data each year. Below, you’ll find a snapshot of each team member’s data and how it all came together in 2025.
Victor
Victor is on track to hit 1,500 running miles this year. He has progressed in his goal to run all the streets of Chicago, over 44% of the way through now, finishing 6 more neighborhoods (23 total, now including Beverly and Morgan Park).
In addition, he increased his annual swimming yards to 176,528—the vast majority in open water (Special shoutout to Pat Cerone for kayaking next to him for the fourth year in a row during the epic swim 2 miles out and 2 miles back to the 63rd Street Water intake crib.) Victor also tracked 550 miles biking this year (mostly commuting home from work on the Lakeshore Bike Path, but also occasionally mountain biking with his kids at Big Marsh Park) and rowed over 550K meters on his Ergatta water rower.
Perhaps more interestingly, Victor memorialized the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald by participating in a memorial swim relay from the wreck site to Detroit—he was part of a crew that crossed Whitefish Bay in Lake Superior and swam almost ten miles as part of it!
Mike
Mike got old and stiff, so he finally started stretching. According to his Peloton stats he stretched for 20 hours and 44 minutes this year. In between the stretching, he got a few rounds of golf in, playing 12 different courses this year and averaging 95.2 for 18-holes.
Abhinaya
This year, Abhinaya rolled up her sleeves and dove into building workflow automations, from an internal Chrome extension to a new Club M25 Summit website to tools helping portcos match with investors. Her GitHub contributions tell the story: 107 commits and counting. (Though if we’re being honest, the green squares don’t show the Claude Code sessions behind them.)
Katie
In 2023, our friends at Hyde Park Venture Partners gifted some of us their custom branded sunglasses. Katie was a huge fan, grabbing a couple of extra pairs and wears them often. This year she tracked everywhere they've been together and used her Google photos history to map out everywhere she's taken them since 2023. Some key highlights: In addition to the states listed, the HPVP sunnies have been to Canada twice, Brussels and Germany, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. + made it to Niagara Falls, Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone this year. Where they'll go in 2026 is anyone's guess, but she's looking forward to toting them along!
Arianna
To kick it off, my top five genres were Pop Rap, Soul, Space Music, Rap, and Oldies, and I spent about 57,146 minutes (39 days) listening to music this year. My top five artists, in reverse chronological order, are SZA, Megan Thee Stallion, Justin Bieber, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift, maintaining her first-place position for the second year in a row. To wrap it up, in 2025, I listened to 3,843 artists, 33 albums "cover to cover", and was even inducted into the Spotify Cloud State Society, which includes only 16% of the world's population.
Ruth
Some say nothing beats a Chicago summer, but Ruth would argue that a certain Chicago-style deli patio during the Indianapolis summer comes pretty close. In 2025, visits to Fat Dan’s followed a clear seasonal rhythm, peaking in the warmer months before tapering off. December, notably, suggests she’s overdue for a return.
Fun fact: Ruth's first patio sit of the year was on March 11 amidst some unseasonably warm temperatures in Indianapolis.
As often the case, 2025 was another great year of events with the M25 team. We celebrated Omaha (finally!) winning our annual Midwest Madness tournament and got to party in style with the startups, investors, and community champions that played a critical role in the victory. This year’s Midwest Madness tournament in March saw heated competition between 64 Midwest cities in a voting competition for supremacy via LinkedIn, and as usual, the rallying of the communities, the underdog stories along the way, and the general celebration of Midwest startup ecosystems did not disappoint.
M25’s annual Match Week event–where we connect our companies and investors to each other in a virtual, asynchronous setting–proved to be another one for the books: Over 2200 double opt-in meetings were booked as part of Match Week in Spring 2025.
In June, the M25 team traveled to Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan for a few days of team bonding and goal-setting for the next 12 months. We enjoyed breweries, a cooking competition, beachside views and some grilling while we celebrated the team and strategized on the firm’s long-term plans. The team is already kicking off discussions on which Midwest city we’ll visit for our team retreat in 2026.
Our flagship event, the Club M25 Summit, returned to Chicago once again for 2 days of networking, parties, and double opt-in meetings. This year we welcomed nearly 200 investors to the Windy City to meet with our portfolio companies and with each other. We held a separate founders-only summit on Day 2, where we welcomed our largest concentration of portfolio founders since pre-Pandemic 2020. This year’s event was held in and around Northern Trust, providing pristine views of Lake Michigan, an unforgettable happy hour at Millennium Park, and 1100 meetings. We also debuted the Big Chicago Party, a new pre-Summit event for investors and startups in the Chicago area.
As always, the M25 team visited many a Midwest city and attended startup and VC events along the way. We hosted happy hours in Ann Arbor, Fargo, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Saint Louis and Kansas City. Collectively, the team covered visits to all 13 states in our definition of the Midwest (and then some!). These trips across the ecosystem continue to energize and inspire us as we connect with community champions and the startups and investors that make each city so special.
Our portfolio saw strong momentum across the Midwest in 2025, highlighted by a couple of acquisitions and a big late-stage financing. Chicago-based Rentgrata was acquired by Opiniion, while Minneapolis-based Plural joined SAI360. We also celebrated acquisitions across Ohio and Missouri, with Columbus-based Loop acquiring Wonderment and St. Louis-based Whistle Rewards being acquired by One10. On the growth side, Chicago-based Kin Insurance raised a $50M Series E led by QED and Activate at a $2B valuation, underscoring the scale and durability of Midwest-founded companies competing on a national stage. Earlier-stage companies continued to make meaningful progress in 2025, with strong seed and Series A activity across the region. We invested in ConstructionClock, Swept AI, Moonnox, Hinckley Medical, Qwyn AI, along with three companies yet to be announced. Find more news from across the portfolio in 2025:
