THE LEADING EDGE OF VENTURE CAPITAL: EDGE VC
What would you say if you found out that tiny Burlington, VT had the highest per capita investment in Venture Capital outside of the Bay Area around 2022? And that the place best known for Maple Syrup, Ben & Jerry's and Sharp Cheddar had a $7 billion IPO last year in world-leading eVTOL company BETA Technologies? And that more such companies are on the way? In a county of around 200,000 on the edge of the US...
What if this phenomenon is replicable across thousands of smaller cities in American, Europe and Worldwide? For decades venture capital operated around a relatively simple assumption: innovation concentrates. Talent, capital, elite universities, media attention and startup formation all clustered into a relatively small number of superstar geographies led by Silicon Valley.
But AI, distributed infrastructure and new patterns of talent mobility may be beginning to fundamentally reshape the economics of geography itself. The next great venture opportunities may increasingly emerge not from the most crowded ecosystems, but from “edge” ecosystems where technical capability, industrial infrastructure, housing affordability, energy access, universities and ambition are compounding faster than institutional capital recognizes.
I call this Edge VC (a term coined by my colleague Alasdair Greig). It is not simply regional venture capital. It is a new model of investing in regional operating environments and capability stacks rather than isolated startups alone. The future winners may be firms and family offices capable of understanding housing, infrastructure, universities, advanced manufacturing, energy systems and quality of place as deeply as they understand software and finance. In this world the leading edge of venture capital converges with the future of civilization design itself, helping create the environments from which the next generation of transformative companies — and communities — naturally emerge.
