Kimberley Nixon is Founder and Managing Partner at Open Venture Capital (OVC), an early stage, health, care and wellness based venture capital fund. OVC is focused on conventional drivers of health and wellness such as sport, fitness, nutrition, mental and physical health, as well as social determinants of health including access, advocacy, and financial health.
OVC searches for early stage companies with the ability to expand from product to platform via a unique product, marketing and/or community engagement approach. Open Venture Capital began as an advisory practice, and for several founders has continued to invest time and expertise to help build a clear value proposition and a path to scalability before investing capital.
Kimberley is an Operator turned VC. She has led teams across digital transformations and new product launches for brands including Under Armour, Manduka Yoga, and Health House, a fitness based startup in LA. Her industry expertise has also extended to consulting engagements with brands like Headspace and Tonal. Kimberley is uniquely adept at solution building for businesses as they scale.
Grit Daily: When did you first become aware that being a VC investor could be a career path for you?
Kimberley Nixon: I can’t recall a specific moment of awareness. It was more like a drip campaign. During my work at Manduka Yoga and Health House (which were PE and VC backed, respectively) I gained a deep appreciation for our investors’ measures of success. It wasn’t just about this one portfolio company hitting a revenue target or having a good quarter. It was about systems and processes that could be replicated, tracked, and scaled. They were applying learnings from one portfolio company to another, sometimes in real time. They were deploying experts and investing heavily into critical areas of the business, giving their portfolio company access and advantages over competitors.
Well, as luck would have it – I’m a former management consultant, and really good at building frameworks and systems and processes. That was Drip 1. I also stayed industry focused and know the health and wellness landscape well. I could apply that knowledge across a portfolio of companies. Drip 2. Venture as an approach was Drip 3. It was the answer to how I could deploy expertise and use that to identify strong founders and concepts and to create an advantage for my portfolio companies.
Grit Daily: What were the challenges and steps to launch your own fund?
Kimberley Nixon: Starting a fund is part fundraising / business development, part marketing and branding, part sourcing and part investor relations. Being good at all four is a challenge. This goes back to having really good systems and operations in place. You’ll need to identify the needs and deliverables in each area, spend time setting up the right frameworks, tools and operations and then you can bring on help, and outsource as you need.
Grit Daily: What do you look for when planning to invest/considering an investment from your fund?
Kimberley Nixon: Our fund centers around a few key drivers of the health and wellness industry, which currently exceeds $4 trillion in market size and is projected to grow beyond $6.5 trillion by the end of the decade. We invest around the fundamental drivers in health and wellness, such as sports, fitness, nutrition, rest and recovery, preventative care, early detection, and mental and physical health solutions. We have also identified several social determinants of health, such as access, advocacy and financial health that we also believe must be considered as part of the pathways to health.
Within this area of focus we look for Founders who can answer “yes” to the following questions: Which significant underserved population can your product or solution support? Can you establish yourself as an authority in the sector in which you aim to operate?
Once we can answer yes to both, we can move on to business model, founder fit, product market fit, size of market, and scalability.
Grit Daily: What investments are you most proud of or can you share?
Kimberley Nixon: A few of Open Venture Capital’s current investments include Pear Suite, a B2B SaaS elder tech solution that tracks social determinants of health and empowers care navigators in support of our aging population; No Limbits, adaptive apparel for amputees, wheelchair users, and people who experience limited dexterity and sensory sensitivities; Op e n, a mindfulness studio that shifts your state through a combination of breathwork, music and guided meditation and Break the Love, a recreational sports tech platform, starting with tennis and pickleball; connecting players to each other and to available courts near them.
Grit Daily: What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs?
Kimberley Nixon: I advise founders to be well versed in the business and market dynamics of their customers, and their customers’ customers. So often, founders are busy building and testing and identifying product market fit, without understanding what the goals are of the folks they intend to sell to. Do you know their sales cycles? Their margin concerns? Are you aware what market pressures they have faced in the last 12-18 months? A great way to gain these insights are from earning call transcripts from a public company in your target customer market.
Any partnerships or news you’d like to share ? What are your plans for the next few years?
We’re incredibly excited to announce that Bank of America has joined the fund as a limited partner. We are sharing this news via press release soon. Over the next few years, we intend to build out our portfolio for Fund I and to prove out our ability to be a value-add investor at an early stage. Between Fund I and Fund II, I’d like to build on my early advisory work. I want to continue to find the right founders to work with on an advisory basis, and as they’re able to build traction, we can build a pipeline for the Fund. This is a long term due diligence process. This helps me to de-risk investments for my LPs and stay close to changing market dynamics.
