High Alpha Capital

Scott Dorsey and Mike Fitzgerald serve as managing partners leading High Alpha’s overall strategy. Dorsey is the former CEO of ExactTarget, and Fitzgerald is a fellow ExactTarget co-founder. Investment committees at the fund level are not publicly detailed, but the Studio’s startup-creation decisions are driven by the firm’s partners alongside recruited CEOs-in-residence for each new concept.

High Alpha operates a venture studio rather than a standard fund. It does not solely finance existing startups; instead, it conceives business ideas internally, hires a CEO to run each new company, and provides them with a shared services team covering engineering, design, and marketing. This method effectively incubates many of its portfolio companies from inception in exchange for a larger-than-normal equity stake.

High Alpha concentrates overwhelmingly on B2B enterprise software and cloud infrastructure sectors. Investment stages are pre-seed and seed for the internal Studio companies, while the venture fund side can also participate in Series A rounds. The firm does not typically invest in consumer internet, hardware, or life sciences.

Yes, High Alpha frequently co-invests alongside other institutional venture investors, particularly for Series A rounds of Studio-founded companies. The firm leverages a network of venture partners and its curated High Alpha Innovators Network of nearly 200 SaaS executives who often serve as angels or syndicate leads, creating a bridge from seed to later institutional rounds.

High Alpha Innovation is a distinct but related entity that co-creates startups with large corporations, universities, and non-profits, leveraging their internal intellectual property or research. It functions as an externally-facing venture builder using the same studio methodology. This arm allows High Alpha to seed companies built on deep institutional assets that complement its internally-originated Studio pipeline.

The ExactTarget experience fundamentally shapes High Alpha’s thesis that a Midwest-based, operationally-intensive studio can build and scale global enterprise SaaS companies. The firm applies the ExactTarget playbook — capital-efficient growth, deep marketing technology domain knowledge, and a talent ecosystem anchored in Indianapolis — to how it recruits CEOs and governs its Studio portfolio companies.

High Alpha is not a family office and does not manage outsourced wealth. It was founded as a traditional for-profit asset management venture by a group of ExactTarget alumni. There are no known philanthropic entities structurally integrated into the firm’s operations, and its investor base is composed of institutional limited partners rather than a single-family balance sheet.