Mairs & Power Venture Capital

Mairs & Power Venture Capital

Mairs & Power launched its venture capital practice as a formal extension of the firm's foundational commitment to long-term, growth-oriented equity investing. The parent company, founded in 1931, built its reputation managing the Mairs & Power Growth Fund — a flagship mutual fund known for holding companies like Target and 3M for decades — and the venture strategy applies a similar patience to earlier-stage companies, targeting durable businesses rather than momentum plays. The venture capital group runs a concentrated portfolio of direct early-stage and growth-stage investments, typically leading or co-leading rounds in technology-enabled service and enterprise companies located in the Midwest and on the coasts. The firm does not operate a fund-of-funds model or manage external LP commitments; it deploys capital directly from the firm's balance sheet and affiliated managed accounts, allowing it to hold positions without the forced exit timelines that shape traditional venture fund dynamics. Known portfolio holdings have included names like When I Work and Gravie. The team operates from St. Paul, Boston, and San Francisco, bridging the firm's historical Upper Midwest base with the two dominant coastal venture ecosystems. The partnership structure reflects this distributed model, with investment professionals embedded in each market. In recent years, the firm has increased its pace of deal activity, writing checks into early-stage rounds across health-tech, workforce-management software, and fintech infrastructure. Structurally, Mairs & Power Venture Capital occupies a rare position: venture capital deployed from a permanent capital base with a multi-generational institutional parent. The strategy is neither a family office venture arm nor a traditional blind-pool fund, which means the group answers to the same long-horizon investment committee that oversees the firm's public equities portfolios. That inheritance of patient capital — rather than a 10-year fund cycle — is the defining architectural difference.