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Butler University on Monday announced the launch of a student-led initiative to give students hands-on experience in venture capital and entrepreneurship.
The Butler Angel Network, being developed by the university’s Lacy School of Business, will also work to connect early-stage ventures with Butler alumni and community investors, the university said.
The goal of the initiative is to create a platform for students, faculty, alumni and regional investors to “support promising startups with a particular focus on ventures aligned with Butler’s mission and values.”
Craig Caldwell, dean of the Lacy School, told Inside INdiana Business that one of his goals when he took the position in 2022 was to build a more extensive entrepreneur support network at Butler.
“You need some funding mechanism in there at some point…to really have a robust, 360 [degree] opportunity for people to have some dollars there available that they could advocate for,” Caldwell said. “I think people really understood some of the other advantages of having something like that, which would be opportunities to grow an endowment, a ready-made system that serves as a platform to engage 30 to 40 accredited investors. That’s never a bad thing for a university to have access to those kind of folks.”
Caldwell says the Butler Angel Network is more than just an investment vehicle; it creates a “living lab” for students, a bridge to Butler’s alumni and investment community, and a step toward making Butler a hub for entrepreneurial leadership in the Midwest.
As part of the network, students will actively participate in due diligence, deal sourcing, portfolio analysis, and angel investor communication as a way to gain real-world exposure to early-stage investing.
Butler plans to deploy capital as a co-investor along with accredited angel investors by using a portion of its endowment to strengthen its support network for startups. The university aims to raise $10 million in capital for those investments.
The Butler Angel Network will be led by Executive Director Paul Newsom, a Butler alumnus who will join the university in January. He previously served as an angel group manager with South Carolina-based VentureSouth, leading several early-stage investments.
Newsom will teach the three-semester course that is part of the initiative, Caldwell said.
“The course will be both the operations of an angel entity and how you run it, but also the actual financing behind whether we do a deal or don’t do a deal,” he said. “How you keep track of deals? What forces changes in cap tables, and what kind of reporting do you have to do for accredited investors? So, so that’s where the student involvement will come in. It’ll stop just shy of having them make the decision to pull the trigger…as to whether Butler deploys [capital] or not.”
Caldwell noted that he hopes the network creates more opportunities for startups to have access to much needed capital.
“We hear a lot of things about being a flyover state, and you have to go to New York and California for capital, and we’d certainly like to lean into that problem and help solve that so entrepreneurs don’t have to leave the state to go find that kind of support,” he said.
For the students, Caldwell said the network offers a chance to get a sense for what’s going on in private markets.
“The rate at which private markets and private activity [grow] is more than double the growth rate of public markets, [which] means that students really need to know this stuff,” he said. “When they leave university, they can’t wait and kind of learn it out there on the job. We’d love to be able to place some students directly with private equity firms, venture firms, and have them walk in with a skill set that makes them ready to go right out of the gate on day one.”
The Butler Angel Network is expected to begin pre-launch operations next spring. However, conversations with investors, student training, and prospecting for potential deals will begin immediately, and Caldwell said he hopes to make the first capital investment by late summer 2026.
The university said anyone interested in joining the network as an accredited investor and reach out via email.
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