MATH Venture Partners

MATH Venture Partners is a Chicago-based early to growth-stage venture capital firm founded in 2014 by Mark Achler and Troy Henikoff. Managing Directors Troy Henikoff and Dana Zachgo Wright lead a team of six including four partners. The firm closed its second fund (MATH II) at $46 million in April 2019. Collectively, the MATH team has built, scaled, and sold businesses worth more than $7 billion and has partnered with more than 200 companies as investors. The firm invests $1 million to $5 million per deal, leading rounds across Seed, Series A, and Series B stages. MATH focuses on teams building companies with an unfair advantage in customer acquisition — seeking founders for whom customer acquisition is embedded in their core DNA. Key sectors include B2B and B2C software, marketplaces, e-commerce, SaaS, tech-enabled services, hardware-enabled software, and IoT, with a primary geographic focus on the Midwest and other under-capitalized US markets, plus broader coverage of the US and Canada. Across 73 portfolio companies, the firm has produced 2 unicorns — Acorns (micro-investing) and REEF (logistics and real estate) — along with 14 acquisitions and 13 exits. The latest exit was Mission Control in September 2024. Other notable portfolio companies include BuiltIn (tech job platform), SpotHero (parking marketplace), Chowly (restaurant technology), EatStreet (food delivery), ChefHero, Cardflight, ClearCOGS, and Pie Systems (Series A, November 2025). MATH operates as a hands-on investor, offering portfolio companies access to the team's collective network of operators, customers, and executives accumulated across decades of building companies in the Midwest and beyond. The firm's conviction that customer acquisition discipline separates durable businesses from one-hit products shapes both its selection process and its post-investment involvement.