Why We Started
Lakefusion Partners is a Chicago-based venture fund managing $280M across agritech, climate technology, and sustainable materials. Founded in 2012, we invest at Series A and B in companies rebuilding the infrastructure of how food is grown, what it's made of, and how land and water get managed. Thirty-one portfolio companies. Nine exits. Twelve years of focused conviction.
We started the firm because capital wasn't reaching the right problems. Thomas Brennan had spent a decade inside large-scale agribusiness and watched investment flow toward software and biotech while soil biology, water infrastructure, and input supply chains quietly strained. The opportunity was clear: the companies fixing those foundational systems would be worth backing, and no one was writing those checks systematically from inside the Midwest.
We set up in Chicago deliberately — not because it's a startup hub, but because it sits an hour from the most productive farmland in the world. That geography shapes what we understand and how we assess what's real versus what sounds good in a deck. The companies in our portfolio have revenue, land partnerships, and customers who measure outcomes in bushels, gallons, and soil carbon per acre — not DAUs.
