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Venture capital investments in Indiana tech companies are slow but steady, according to a recent report compiled by TechPoint.
The report, published July 15, analyzes venture capital activity in the technology sector during the first half of 2025. Through June, TechPoint recorded 58 deals totaling $161.7 million in disclosed funding, a difference of more than $130 million compared with the first half of 2024.
Chelsea Linder, vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship at TechPoint, said the state’s slowdown largely mirrors national trends, which are being affected by uncertainty in the financial markets and a slower march toward liquidity.
Nationally, $23 billion was raised through May, according to PitchBook, far less than the forecasted $90 billion. Across the country, the average time between fundraising rounds is reaching close to three years.
In the venture capital cycle, where money is raised, invested and returned to investors after a point of liquidity, Linder said a slight holdup can cause rippling delays.
“If there’s a traffic jam in any one of those areas, it stops the cycle, and activity is paused throughout the entire cycle,” she said.
Broadly, some of the slowdown can be explained by rapid policy changes unsettling the financial markets.
“There’s definitely a lot of uncertainty around policy, and just the rate of change of policy that’s happening in our country right now,” Linder said. “As with everything, investors who are prudent money managers are trying to make decisions that have a healthy amount of risk and not too much risk. And when there’s so much change with policy and the implications of that are unknown, it makes investors think more carefully.”
In addition to fewer deals and dollars raised, TechPoint found no high-level M&A deals in the first half of this year, and only one initial public offering, or IPO. However, Linder said there’s reason for optimism: national trends indicate growth in IPOs and M&A activity, which she thinks will make its way to Indiana.
“Starting to see that trickle of liquidity events means that there are starting to be a trickle of activity increasing throughout the rest of the cycle,” she said.
A closer look at Indiana tech VC deals
According to the report, some of the first half’s biggest venture deals included a $40 million capital infusion to Fishers-based Arrive AI by Streeterville Capital; a $20 million Series A funding round by Fiber Global, led by DBL Partners; and an $11 million Series B funding round by Olio, led by Fulcrum Equity Partners.
Other takeaways include:
- Most of the investments are in the pre-seed, seed and Series A segments, with the average deal size clocking in at $3.7 million.
- Technology and life sciences sectors saw the most venture activity, with artificial intelligence dominating.
- Of the deals: 25 were pre-seed; eight were seed; 23 were early stage; and three were late stage.
One of the more surprising aspects of the first-half data, Linder said, was the lack of statistical outliers. Typically, there would be one or two companies that raised an especially large round. But that didn’t happen, she said, and there’s no data to suggest it will happen in the immediate term.
“Which I think is the last impact of the traffic jam, where companies are stuck where they are and they’re not able to raise that huge next round,” she said. “I hope that, as we start to see everything start to move again, we’ll get back to where those major winner companies that we have in our state will be able to raise that huge round or get to IPO or a major exit.”
The first-half 2024 data was revised after a first-quarter statistical outlier—a $270 million raise by Mammoth Technology—had been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a potential fundraise, but didn’t come through and was incorrectly reported by PitchBook, which TechPoint uses to source data.
Indiana data marked by ‘resilience and consistency’
This marks the first year TechPoint has done a first-half report—in years past, the organization assembled quarterly reports on tech investments. Last year, the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, TechPoint’s parent organization, compiled a year-end report that looked at venture capital investments across sectors.
Moving forward, TechPoint will produce reports every six months focusing specifically on venture capital in the tech sector, while CICP will continue to produce a year-end, holistic look at venture capital investments.
“(I) wanted to give a little bit more breathing room and time for change to happen in between reports,” Linder said.
Despite lags, Linder said “the resilience and consistency that we see in Indiana is second to none.”
“That’s something that I think people should feel really good about when they look at this data.”
Read more from the report here.
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