Mid-American Angels

Mid-America Angels is one of the oldest angel networks in the Kansas City region, started in 2006 and run today through the Enterprise Center in Johnson County, a Kansas economic-development nonprofit. It runs as a club of accredited investors, the high-net-worth individuals allowed to back private startups, who pool their own money and their own judgment to write the first outside checks into local companies. Members pay annual dues and vote with their own wallets, and the network either leads a round or joins a syndicate, the group of investors that shares a single deal.

Mid-America Angels invests across the Kansas-Missouri corridor at the seed and early venture stage, the very first institutional money a startup raises, with checks that run from about $250,000 to $1.5 million. Two names anchor its reputation: Zave Networks, which Google acquired in 2011, and the animal-health company Aratana Therapeutics, which went public in 2013. That is the track record of a generalist regional network, not a thematic fund, and water has never been its headline.

Mid-America Angels shows up in my Leviathan database for a single reason, and it sits well outside Kansas. In 2021 the network joined the Series A syndicate behind Gross-Wen Technologies, a Slater, Iowa company whose patented revolving algal biofilm system grows algae on slow-rotating belts to strip nitrogen and phosphorus out of municipal and industrial wastewater. It is the kind of opportunistic, out-of-region water-efficiency bet a generalist angel group reaches for once, rather than a standing water thesis.

Mid-America Angels is, for a newcomer scanning water investors, an honest edge case: a serious regional angel network with deep Kansas City roots and exactly one water company to its name. (don't) Waste Water rates its water commitment Occasional for that reason, and whether a second water check ever follows depends less on a water mandate than on the next algae or treatment startup happening to land in front of its members.