Matchstick Ventures raises $30M to back startups in the northern US and the Rockies

Matchstick Ventures, a seed-stage firm that says it invests in “rapidly growing, yet underserved startup ecosystems,” announced this week that it has raised $30 million for its second fund.

That’s a lot more money than the firm’s $5 million first fund. This time, Matchstick says it will write initial checks of around $500,000, and in some cases make follow-on investments of $1 million or $2 million.

The firm’s partners, Ryan Broshar and Natty Zola, are based in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Boulder, and they said the underserved ecosystems they’re focused on include “the North, the Rockies, and companies across the Techstars ecosystem.” This is the first fund Matchstick has raised since Zola (the co-founder of Everlater, acquired by our parent company AOL) joined as a partner last year.

And even though Broshar and Zola only recently closed and announced the fund, they’ve already used it to make a number of investments, backing Onward (San Francisco), Soona (Denver), Upsie (Minneapolis), Pana (Denver) and Ordermark (Los Angeles).

The investors in the fund include Foundry Group, which discussed the relationship between the two firms in a blog post: