On May 15th, 2025, White Rose Ventures and Braided River Collective hosted our Annual Meeting—this year’s event marked our Five Year Anniversary from the founding of White Rose Ventures and Braided River Collective! We want to give a very special thank you to Fulton Bank for being our 2025 Annual Meeting sponsor, as well as to our friends at Keystone Kidspace for hosting us, to Morales Kitchen and The Pretzel Company for providing the delicious catering, and to members of the White Rose Impact Fund Investment Committee and Advisory Board, and the Braided River Collective Board of Directors. Thank you as well to all our community partners and supporters, whether you were able to join us in-person this year or not—it was wonderful to see so many of our key regional connectors and doers together in one place!

The overarching theme of the evening was one of a Central Pennsylvania regional economic landscape that is increasingly interconnected, and poised to take advantage of the emerging technology opportunities that will power the business ecosystems of the coming decades. From our incredibly central mid-Atlantic location, to a relatively affordable cost of doing business, to world-leading research institutions and a legacy of scrappy can-do industrialism, our Central Pennsylvania tech ecosystem has it going on. This community stands ready to help empower the next generation entrepreneurs who will build transformational new businesses here that make an impact not only in our own region, but across the country and around the world. 

After some open networking time with friends and colleagues over drinks and tasty hors d’oeuvres, White Rose Ventures Managing Partner Martin Fedorko opened the event’s remarks with a welcome and introductions, and shared an update from the White Rose Ventures side of the house on achievements and developments from the past year of the fund and its thirteen portfolio companies.

Next Sharee McFadden, Chair of the Braided River Collective Board of Directors, shared an update on the various initiatives that the nonprofit organization side of the house is currently undertaking to help support entrepreneurs across Central Pennsylvania. Focusing on Braided River Collective’s mission to provide access, connection and visibility, Sharee unveiled a video reel of highlights from the past year of impactful Keystone Merge events, as well as spoke about the strategic value of the WayFinder EcoMap for entrepreneurs to plot their path forward in navigating regional resources—while also hinting at a possible next iteration version of the ecosystem mapping tool to come. 

In addition to saying thank you to the full Braided River Collective Board of Directors, Sharee gave a special shout-out to Keystone Merge’s Entrepreneur Liaison Helen Tafesse, whose tenure with Keystone Merge will be coming to an end shortly, but who has provided so much support to early stage founders over the last several years in making this event series possible. We’d like to also thank Austin Gingerich of Silo Creative for putting together the Keystone Merge events highlights reel, as well as the many more videos on YouTube that showcase the entrepreneurial doers who share their passion in presenting each month at Keystone Merge. 

Then Jay Jayamohan, Executive Director of the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Harrisburg University and a White Rose Ventures investment committee member, spoke about regional impacts across the startup ecosystem. 

As an entrepreneur who himself has previously raised tens of millions from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Jay provided a number of personal anecdotes and lessons learned the hard way from his own career as a founder, and how those learnings translate into his role today in helping to build the Central PA regional business ecosystem through HU’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

Jay spoke about the critical role of ‘recycling’ capital and talent within more mature technology ecosystems, whereby exited founders and early employees become the next generation of angel investors and founders themselves, resulting in innovation flywheels that become place-based tech hubs. He emphasized his optimism about seeing another notable exit for a startup in our region within the coming years, which will help to further ensure Pennsylvania is included ‘on the map’ in discussions of rapidly emerging and developing tech ecosystems.

White Rose Ventures Managing Partner Martin Fedorko then rejoined the stage to share a few updates on new developments coming in the year ahead. He spoke about the progress and commitments towards a first close in the next few weeks of our upcoming Keystone Innovation Fund II, how the idea for this co-administered fund 2 initially came together through his co-investor relationship with 1855 Capital, and how the management team of Matt Rhodes from 1855 Capital, fractional CFO Alec Galanti, and our partners at Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northern and Central PA came together to make it possible. 

Martin also spoke to the perennial challenges our regional tech ecosystem has faced for years, including fragmentation, limited early stage risk capital, and an underwhelming number of intellectual property spinouts successfully commercialized from the region’s major research institutions and universities. To address these concerns, he outlined the broad strokes for a cohesive regional plan that includes building an investment flywheel to attract and recycle sophisticated risk capital locally, and a statewide network of key partners willing to break down the traditional silos and make the direct connections that can accelerate the innovation pipeline. Ultimately, this plan culminates with the vision Martin shared for establishing the Keystone Innovation Collaborative. The KIC is a structural framework designed to fund what works, connect what has been siloed in the past, and deliver a greater consistency in how we collectively work to support founders across Pennsylvania.

While the Keystone Innovation Collaborative is still in an early stage of development, a number of initiatives were introduced as ways to deliver upon to the challenges faced by our region’s entrepreneurs—those include a Keystone University Consortium, to ensure the billions of public dollars going to support our state’s R1 university research in science and technology has the early risk capital partners needed, to commercialize these world-leading innovations into new companies built here in Pennsylvania.

Other initiatives of KIC involve similar innovation consortium among corporate partners, a white-labeling of the curriculum from Harrisburg University’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to help further spread resources supporting ideation and incubation of innovations at the earliest stages, and a next-stage ‘seed accelerator’ program at the CIE itself, to bridge local companies between the CIE incubation stage and readiness for first outside capital investment from an entity like Ben Franklin Technology Partners or White Rose Ventures.

Saving the best for last, Amanda Orson, CEO of White Rose Ventures portfolio company Galleon (https://galleon.io/), took the stage to deliver the night’s closing keynote. Galleon is a FinTech and PropTech company reimagining the way residential real estate is transacted, by using technology to remove legacy industry gatekeepers and fees from the equation. However, Amanda didn’t speak much about Galleon itself in her talk—she focused her remarks instead on great potential she sees for the South Central Pennsylvania region, particularly from her unique vantage point as someone who is not from the area originally, but who deliberately chose to move to Lancaster as the place from which to build her next software startup. 

Amanda contrasted our region, and York PA in particular, with other parts of the former midwest ‘rust belt’ like Detroit, which have made more deliberate attempts to brand themselves around the current ‘reindustrialization’ moment of economic opportunity. Amanda shared screenshots and anecdotes from posting on X (formerly Twitter) about why manufacturing and industrial companies should consider moving to York—what she encountered was a ton of interest, from existing entrepreneurs all across the country who were curious about all the advantages she shared our area has to offer, but who had never really heard anything about York or the South Central PA region before. Amanda concluded by saying, “People don’t invest in, or move to, places they don’t know exist,” and reiterated the call for making sure our region puts itself on the map as open for business, and ready to meet this moment of ‘reindustrialization’ happening across the economy.

This 2025 Annual Meeting of White Rose Ventures and Braided River Collective served to underline the many accomplishments our two sister organizations have achieved in their first five years of operation—but also, the ongoing need to continue the work we’ve started, and build upon these initial successes to further push Pennsylvania’s entrepreneurial ecosystem to truly meet its full potential in the years ahead. We believe more strongly than ever that Pennsylvania innovation can lead the way into the future, and seeing so many of our community stakeholders and partners together in-person always helps to further reinforce this belief in us.

As we look to the year ahead, we are honored and excited to continue this work alongside our network of collaborator investors, entrepreneurs, community leaders and key supporters, who share our vision for Pennsylvania’s future—a future where this Commonwealth is recognized as the innovation powerhouse that it is, and where more downstream value is preserved and recycled locally, to build more of our nation’s next generation of great companies here in PA.

Thank you—White Rose Ventures extends our gratitude to all the participants and partners who make our mission possible. Here’s to another year together in growth, innovation, and collective action toward building the vibrant future for Pennsylvania that we all envision!