2024 Year In Review
Happy New Year from the Oval Park team!
2024 was another challenging year for most startups and many VC firms, with tightening customer budgets resulting in slower growth, the lack of market liquidity keeping the bar extremely high for companies seeking to raise capital from new investors, and most LP allocations flowing to large established managers rather than emerging managers.
The Oval Park Capital team spent most of 2024 working in the trenches with our portfolio companies, but we’re often reminded to slow down and celebrate even the small victories along the way. While there’s still a lot of hard work ahead, we are incredibly proud of the resilience and progress of our portfolio company founders and their teams over the past year. The outlook has never been brighter. We highlight a handful of these 2024 achievements below.
In a tepid M&A environment, several of our portfolio companies successfully completed M&A transactions, generating liquidity for investors:
Carpe was acquired by Topspin Partners in August 2024. Since our initial investment, Carpe grew from a small, single-product company selling hand lotion for excessively sweaty palms to a $50mm+ revenue business offering dermatologist-tested full-body sweat solutions across dozens of SKUs. Oval Park rolled over a portion of its equity in the transaction and is excited to continue partnering with the team through its next phase of growth.
SWIR Vision Systems was acquired by onsemi in July 2024. This strategic acquisition rewarded the SWIR team and investors for the company’s market-leading sensor technology and robust pipeline of growth opportunities in both the industrial and defense sectors.
On Track Technologies completed a strategic combination with In-Clinic Rx, combining On Track’s remote data collection and delivery platform with In-Clinic’s pharmacist-led care coordination business. The combined company, now operating as Axil Health , employs pharmacists and other clinical staff to help physicians monitor and manage their patients between visits. Axil has grown rapidly since the transaction and is poised for a breakout year in 2025.
Amidst challenging economic conditions, many of our portfolio companies accelerated their growth trajectory in 2024 and signed contracts with major new customers and strategic partners, demonstrating the enduring importance of creating critical “must have” solutions for customers.
TARGAN signed their first customer contract in late 2023 and began rapidly installing their WingScan systems (automated poultry sexing) throughout 2024. Targan’s customers have already sexed more than half a billion chickens using Targan’s systems, generating explosive revenue growth for the company – nearly a 10x increase in run-rate revenue from December 2023 to December 2024! After recent R&D breakthroughs, Targan also plans to begin offering its vaccine delivery systems to customers in the near future.
Medicom continued to rapidly expand its healthcare information network ("Medicom Connect"), ending 2024 with over 1,400 organizations (major healthy systems and radiology groups) utilizing Medicom Connect for their radiology image exchanges, almost 8,000 total connections between those organizations on the network, and 323k image exchanges/transfers in December 2024 alone. The company also raised a catalytic $9mm strategic round from major healthcare system investors UPMC Enterprises, Tampa General Health Ventures, and others.
Natrx more than doubled its run-rate revenue from the end of 2023 to the end of 2024, achieved profitability far sooner than anticipated, launched several innovative new physical and software product offerings, and built a project pipeline that should sustain accelerated growth for the next several years. Natrx is positioned for another exciting year in 2025, having expanded their dry-forming (a form of 3-D printing) capacity and improved dry forming efficiency in the second half of 2024.
Emrgy has added multiple additional solutions to its offerings, evolving from a pure-play distributed hydropower company to a diversified water infrastructure company, incorporating hydrokinetic turbines, floating solar panels, and canal lining. This enhanced offering significantly accelerated Emrgy’s sales and development efforts, ending 2024 with exclusive agreements covering over 9,000 miles of irrigation canals representing over 1.2 Gigawatts of potential power generation and $1.5bn of capital deployment (at attractive rates of return).
Zoee signed a major strategic partnership with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, the world's leading integrative health education and certification platform. This partnership, and other similar arrangements in the pipeline, position Zoee for transformative growth in 2025.
Finally, multiple portfolio companies achieved R&D breakthroughs that increase their customer value proposition and significantly accelerate their commercialization timeline:
Lemurian Labs pivoted from a hardware-first strategy to a software-first strategy in 2024, secured significant follow-on funding, assembled a dream team of elite talent from Google, Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia, and drastically accelerated the development of their game changing software stack. Lemurian aims to remove one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI, unlocking hidden performance in existing hardware to give orders of magnitude in performance and cost savings, while enabling seamless interoperability across hardware platforms. The market response to Lemurian’s pivot and development progress has been extremely positive, with strong interest from a wide range of major strategic partners and customers – stay tuned for some big updates this year!
Phinite made significant progress on their mission of creating a sustainable phosphorous production process by recycling hog manure during 2024. The company secured and developed a site for its advanced manufacturing plant in Eastern NC, developed significant IP around its waste-to-fertilizer production process, received initial purchase orders for its certified organic fertilizer, and is preparing to rapidly scale fertilizer production and sales this year.
NALA Membranes achieved multiple technical breakthroughs in 2024, demonstrating exceptional performance improvements in their chlorine-tolerant reverse osmosis membranes. These advancements have generated strong inbound customer interest across a wide range of industries and use cases, positioning Nala to rapidly enter commercialization in the near term.
Archaius recently achieved a significant performance milestone (measured in decibels of signal cancellation) in lab tests for its anti-jamming technology, well above the level of commercial viability. This achievement allows Archaius to move to field tests in 1H25 (with some performance cushion to spare) and positions the company for possible commercial launch of its first product (a drone-mounted jamming cancellation retrofit) later this year.
At the firm level, we’re pleased to announce that we held the final closing of OPC Opportunity Fund I LP in December 2024, raising nearly $10mm of LP commitments from 35+ existing and new limited partners. The Opportunity Fund will primarily invest in existing Oval Park portfolio companies as they hit inflection points in both growth and enterprise value, providing fund investors with venture upside with reduced volatility.
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, our conviction is stronger than ever that we are focusing our investment efforts and capital in right place: Deep technology startups solving mission critical problems in global industries that have traditionally been underserved by technology.
We couldn’t be more excited about the years ahead for Oval Park, our portfolio companies, and our investors. And as always, we’re grateful for everyone that has helped us get to where we are today – we would not be here without you.
Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2025!
The Oval Park Capital Team