A few recent highlights:
Hangar Investors & Advisors,
Many thanks for your partnership, support, and positive feedback on last month’s investor letter. As we continue to grow, we plan to use these notes to update you on portfolio company milestones announcements, market developments, and other relevant trends and opportunities.
We continue to see tremendous opportunity in our public-sector first focus and are proud to be featured in TechCrunch highlighting our strategy to maximize growth at this moment of market uncertainty. In our piece, we write that “despite the gloom, doom and scramble for yield, one sector is too often overlooked by investors, where backing technology will produce returns no matter the state of the economy: government spending in tech.” We talk about how investing in government-focused tech provides an opportunity to both drive growth as well address critical societal problems long in need of private-sector lead innovation. The full piece is attached to this email.
On June 23, Hangar Partner and former head of the White House Office of Innovation, Matt Lira, testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the need to think of the public as the true government customer and that we can improve the way the government delivers critical services by investing in commercial technology. By leveraging modern technology, we can deliver exceptional customer experiences and, in the process, restore the public’s faith in our national institutions. You can read his testimony here.
At the portfolio level, we wanted to highlight two significant accomplishments for those teams.
First, Outcome announced a new partnership to manage and expand Jessup University’s outcome-based financing program. Jessup offers one of the nation’s leading outcomes-based lending options for their students and, under the new partnership, our team at Outcome will work with Jessup to significantly scale up the program, reducing out-of-pocket costs for up to 400 students a year. Please see the full announcement here.
Second, we are also extremely excited to report that Cornea has completed Phase I of its Small Business Innovation Research (SIBR) grant through the United States Department of Agriculture. In 2021, Cornea initiated its grant work to develop a novel wildland fire management technology solution that builds upon the latest fire analytics research to support incident responders and decision-makers before, during and after a wildfire. With completion, the government is agreeing that Cornea’s new offerings accomplish its goals successfully, providing a helpful endorsement in working with other government customers. Further, with Phase I complete, Cornea expects to proceed to an expanded partnership with the USDA in Phase II as well as direct commercial opportunities.
In addition, Buzzfeed recently featured a new report from Cornea on this year’s record-breaking wildfire season and the company has been serving as a resource for Axios and others providing key wildfire data and analytics to inform their reporting.
We expect additional updates and announcements as the summer progresses and are looking forward to continuing to work with all of you to advance our growth strategy. We remain focused on maximizing this unique opportunity as hundreds of millions of federal dollars continue to flow to state and local governments to help them invest in new technology and data-based solutions. Our companies are aggressively pursuing those relationships and contracts across the country as well as building out and expanding commercial partnerships.
Thank you all again for your support.
Josh