Utah Investment Fund BankTech Ventures Raises $115M

BankTech Ventures (BTV), an investment fund serving community financial institutions (FIs) and bank technology entrepreneurs, raised $115 million to support innovation and investment return for community banks and bank tech companies.

“It’s been a whirlwind nine months since we launched BTV,” BTV Managing Director Carey Ransom said in a Monday (Aug. 15) press release.

“The support and engagement that we have already received from our community banks have been better than we anticipated, which drives us to find the best banking technology companies in the market, and continue developing this unique ecosystem that pairs these tech companies and banks together for synergistic benefits,” Ransom said.

Headquartered in Sandy, Utah, BTV is a venture capital (VC) fund that aims to invest in tech firms that provide products for community banks. The partnership structure is comprised of two community banks — Coastal Financial in Everett, Washington, and Sunwest Bank in Irvine, California — as well as the Independent Community Bankers of America, the Venture Center and Hovde Group.

See also: Republic Bank Launches Bank Tech Incubator

The fund works to discover and support promising FinTech companies that would complement its financial institution partners and also earn a return.

Ransom said he anticipates that the BTV ecosystem will become a primary source of innovation support and outsized investment return for community banks and FinTechs “for the foreseeable future.”

With six full-time employees and general partners across various FI innovators — community banks, investment banks, a leading bank technology accelerator and the industry’s largest advocacy organization — BTV’s fund is well supported with numerous sourcing opportunities, per the release.

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“Our vision was to take a different approach to investing in the future of community bank innovation with BTV. We are thoughtfully creating an ecosystem of LPs and portfolio companies that when combined together can enable our LPs to quickly transform into leading community banks with an improved customer experience, better marketing capabilities and robust suite of internal and external solutions,” said Carson Lappetito, BTV general partner and president of Sunwest Bank.

“Our LPs and portfolio companies are seeing the exponential impact of this strategy and we are becoming a strategic and distribution partner for technology companies instead of solely a capital partner,” Lappetito said.