Atlanta-based venture capital firm Vocap Partners has appointed a new General Partner.
Emery Waddell, who has been with Vocap since 2015, was promoted to General Partner this week after serving as the firm’s Principal.
Vocap is an early growth equity firm that works with post-product market fit companies in enterprise software, healthcare IT, Fintech, supply chain, and MediaTech. Its portfolio includes Southeast companies KetteQ (Atlanta), XOi Technologies (Nashville), Soundstripe (Nashville), Medicom Technologies (Raleigh), Harness (Tampa), among others. With the promotion, Waddell joins Vocap’s current General Partners Vinny Olmstead, Mike Becker, and Wendy Coya.
As part of Vocap, Waddell has served as a board member or board observer for XOi, YourSix, Boostr, KetteQ, Vydia (successful exit), Soundstripe, and AIO. Beyond Vocap, Waddell has made a name for himself in the Atlanta investment community over the last decade. He remains bullish on the growing Atlanta startup scene and has played an important role in expanding the community by serving as committee lead and now Board Member for Venture Atlanta, one of the largest and most popular VC and startup conferences in the Southeast.
Honing His Craft: Waddell’s Investor Journey
A graduate of the University of Virginia and a native of Louisville, Kentucky, Waddell joined the boutique investment bank VRA Partners in Atlanta to start off his professional career providing sell-side M&A advisory. After several years helping many founders achieve successful exits – “the end game” as he calls it – Waddell said he was drawn to the idea of working side by side with entrepreneurs to help them scale. He joined the venture capital world in 2015 as an Associate at Vocap where for the past decade he has done exactly that.
Waddell told Hypepotamus that stepping into the General Partner role at Vocap is a way for him to continue to “hone his craft” as an investor. For him, that means working outside of the traditional “VC hype cycles” and looking for “win-win outcomes” for all stakeholders involved in a round. And it’s worked well so far: Vocap has posted robust returns across multiple funds.
Initially, Waddell said he was drawn to Vocap’s investment approach, which he says “prioritizes quality over quantity so that we can be of more service to companies.”
Throughout his decade of experience in venture capital, Waddell said he’s learned that he likes to work with founders who have general management and industry experience. But he also looks for the “intangibles” in founders, such as having a “relentless will to win, learning agility, and the ability to mobilize [and] energize people.”
