From left to right: Adam Burrows, Hayfa Aboukier and Chris Erickson of Range Ventures. (Courtesy Range Ventures)
Range Ventures has added two more startups to its portfolio.
The Denver-based venture capital fund recently invested in Cime Therapeutics, a Louisville-based drug discovery company, and BettrData, which helps streamline data integration.
These are the ninth and tenth investments out of Range’s $39 million Fund II. Other portfolio companies include artificial intelligence-powered teacher’s assistant Magic School, veterinary scribe HappyDoc and Nomad Lease, a property management firm that guarantees rent for small-time landlords even if their unit is vacant.
The firm, which Burrows started alongside Apartment List-founder Chris Erickson, primarily invests in Colorado-based companies and raised an initial $23 million pot in 2020.
“We are founder-driven,” said Adam Burrows, co-founder and managing director of the fund. “And when you meet someone as impressive as (these people) with such a unique command of their space and vision for the future, we are inclined to dig in.”
Range put in $1 million of Cime’s $2.1 million raise and about $400,000 of BettrData’s $2.8 million.Â
It was the first institutional funding for Cime, pronounced “seam,” which chemist James Brewster launched. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, his company is able to synthesize thousands of molecules a day in hopes of finding cancer-curing drugs, he said.
James Brewster (Courtesy)
The typical chemist using traditional methods, according to Brewerster, can only create about 100 per year. Though the hit rate is still quite low, he said, being able to throw more options to throw at the wall will speed up the timeline to see what sticks.
“It’s really a suite of medicines, a catalogue of drugs that you can apply to all at once,” he said of the regimen typically needed for oncology patients. “The idea is to speed up the development of medicines across the board.”
Brewster said Cime, which is named after a French scientist who took a different approach to studying the rainforest in French Guinea, will soon move into a 3,000-square-foot office in Louisville and add two to three chemists to its team.
Though there are some AI-driven competitors, Brewster said Cime’s process of creating chemical compounds rather than validating pre-existing ones is a differentiator.
“Those could (take) 5 to 10 years,” he said of the traditional drugmaking process, which Cime hopes to get down to one or two years. “We’re going to make drugs faster. We just need medicines to help these people.”
BettrData, while not saving lives, helps companies process data 10 to 100 times faster for a tenth of the price, co-founders Chris McDonald and Aaron Dix said.
Chris McDonald, left, and Aaron Dix, right (LinkedIn)
“The problem that we’re solving for is dirty data at scale,” McDonald said, noting the typical customer is a mid-size company with about $100 million in annual revenue. “Everything from data driven marketing to supply driven procurement, everyone is so reliant on data and we have a particular specialty in second and third-party data.”
The typical data refinement process takes a team of 7-10 engineers, but Golden-based BettrData allows them to go back to more productive things, McDonald said. His company currently has 30 clients, a number that is doubling every year.
The tool is subscription based, and the median contract is around $50,000 to $60,000 per year. McDonald said the business has tripled its revenue every year since its 2023 founding and is tracking to do around $3 million in sales in 2025.
The $2.8 million raise brings its total to $5 million across two rounds. Range co-led the most recent one and also led BettrData’s first funding in 2023.
“Colorado has so many great entrepreneurs and success stories, but we have a very immature VC community still,” McDonald said. “But Chris and Adam have had a big hand in changing that.”
