The cofounder of BOLD Ventures has helped build an 18-company firm while championing a founder-first approach to investing.
Danielle Blount had a pretty good night at 43North Finals earlier this month.
She watched as Playground, a women's wellness company backed by her venture capital firm, BOLD Ventures, was named one of five winners of a $1 million investment.
Playground represents everything Blount loves about venture capital: Ambitious entrepreneurs, innovative products and the potential to build a nationally significant company. Now it has another $1 million to help make that vision a reality.
It was a gratifying moment for Blount, who never imagined she'd become a venture capitalist in the first place.
She considered law school and a corporate career. She earned an MBA from the University at Buffalo and thought project management might be her calling.
Then, in 2015, she landed an internship at Launch NY, a nonprofit that supports and invests in startups across New York State.
Something clicked.
"I didn't really understand venture capital or what a startup was," Blount said. "But I've always been someone who says yes to opportunities and sees where they lead."
Blount spent the next eight years at Launch NY, working across everything from grant programs and marketing to advising entrepreneurs and helping deploy investment capital.
Along the way, she discovered a natural ability to see the big picture: understanding where a company wanted to go, identifying obstacles and helping founders make the decisions necessary to get there.
"I compare venture capital to the concept of sports IQ," she said. "It's about seeing the field, understanding where things need to go and recognizing the steps to get there."
That experience ultimately led Blount, now 35, to become a cofounder and partner at BOLD Ventures, an investment firm launched in 2023 with longtime colleague Lindsay Karas Stencel, now a partner in the new ventures practice group at Thompson Hine, a law firm based in Columbus, Ohio.
Today, BOLD has four partners, including Alex Kilian and Scott Terhaar, and a portfolio of 18 companies spanning the Great Lakes region and beyond. Three of its partners live in Buffalo, giving the firm a meaningful presence in the city's growing venture capital community.
Its investment thesis is relatively straightforward: Back promising entrepreneurs building companies that can improve people's lives.
That includes everything from cybersecurity and battery technology to women's health products, sustainable packaging and the future of work.
BOLD invests across industries, generally at a somewhat later stage than some of the earliest-stage funds operating in Buffalo.
"We're looking for founders and technologies that can fundamentally change the world we live in for the better," Blount said. "At the end of the day, we want to see a net benefit to people."
The firm has received $3.35 million in public investment commitments from Ohio, requiring matching private capital. That has helped drive a concentration of investments in Ohio companies, though its geographic ambitions extend across the Great Lakes.
So far, BOLD has invested in one Buffalo company: Dentite, a startup that Blount believes has significant potential.
Its broader portfolio includes Halfdays, a women's skiwear company that has surpassed $20 million in annual revenue; Dexa, a Dayton-based drone delivery company working with Grubhub; and Playground, the Rochester-based company that has expanded into more than 1,500 Ulta Beauty stores.
Blount and Karas Stencel have also made founder well-being a central part of their work.
In 2020, they established BOLDER, a nonprofit focused on supporting entrepreneurs as people, not just business operators. Its initiatives have included founder book clubs and efforts to develop financial assistance for everyday needs that can ease the pressures of building a company.
The philosophy carries into BOLD's investment approach.
"There's so much support out there for building a business, but not nearly enough for building up the person who's running it," Blount said. "We want to make sure we're taking care of founders as people first."
It's an outlook shaped by a decade working directly with entrepreneurs, many of whom face enormous pressure to raise money, hire teams and build companies simultaneously.
And Blount believes Buffalo has an opportunity to become an increasingly important home for those entrepreneurs.
"We have incredibly intelligent founders here," she said. "As an ecosystem, we need to keep removing barriers and surrounding them with great advisory boards, investors and talent."
