Next Level Ventures

The firm does not publicly list a full investment committee or managing-partner roster. Public record shows that IPERS — the Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System — is the anchor limited partner and monitors the firm through its regular board reporting, making pension-staff governance and named principals’ tenure the two primary allocation-decision dependencies for outside allocators evaluating the relationship.

Sourcing relies on institutional relationships inside Iowa’s public university system — principally Iowa State University and the University of Iowa — as well as principals’ direct networks across Des Moines-based insurance, agricultural, and manufacturing ecosystems. Because the firm’s mandate is geographically captive, it can credibly claim to see nearly every institutionally ready startup inside the state before out-of-region funds do.

It is a traditional institutional venture capital firm, not a family office. Its limited partners are large state pension plans rather than a single family, and it reports under the same SEC and ILPA frameworks as any third-party-managed venture fund.

The firm makes direct investments into operating companies; it does not operate as a fund-of-funds. Its primary activity is leading or co-leading equity rounds in Iowa-headquartered startups, typically at Seed through Series A, with follow-on capacity for growth-stage inflections inside the existing portfolio.

The firm invests from Pre-Seed and Seed through to expansion and growth-stage rounds. Public portfolio data confirms involvement in earliest-institution check sizes, alongside later-stage follow-ons when portfolio companies raise larger syndicated rounds with coastal co-investors.

IPERS is the firm’s largest and most structurally important limited partner, having committed across multiple fund vintages. The relationship makes each fundraise effectively a biannual state policy decision as well as a private-markets allocation, which introduces both concentration risk and recurring institutional validation.

There is no public evidence of a related philanthropic foundation, donor-advised fund, or impact-investment sleeve separated from the commercial venture funds. The firm appears to run a single strategy in a single fund family without a parallel impact or charitable vehicle.