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Hello Friend,

Whoa, 2025 felt like a roller coaster ride. While we all have so much to be grateful for, below is my top 10 list from 2025:
 
Halda Therapeutics, founded by Craig Crews of Yale and Tim Shannon of Canaan, was acquired by J&J for $3B (another unicorn in Connecticut!). J&J bought Halda’s technology, which helps cancer drugs more easily reach tumors, delivering a powerful treatment with fewer side effects. While the financial returns to CI are terrific (10x), more importantly, this promising tech gives renewed hope to patients with prostate cancer.
 
CI’s impact is measured in financial returns, but also in terms of the jobs created by our portfolio companies. CI’s human capital services team directly filled 192 jobs (62 percent in Connecticut) for 49 companies this year. These are highly skilled, well-paid positions, filled by talented individuals recruited from across the globe.
 
The third key metric CI uses to ensure we deliver quantifiable results for Connecticut is capital raised by our portfolio companies. In FY25, our companies raised $653 million to add talent, develop products and expand their business. These funds are key to propelling the state’s innovation economy forward.
 
This one’s bittersweet…CI sees itself as a training and proving ground for amazingly capable individuals, which means sometimes we have to say farewell. This past year, several of our teammates moved on to terrific positions at Samsung Ventures, Sabanci Ventures, Shelf (one of our portfolio companies) and beyond. We are always sad to see people go, but we are also proud of their accomplishments and eager to see what they do next (with us at CI included).
 
Staying on the talent theme, CI had 20 interns last summer, and we hosted our first talent fair matching our portfolio companies and college students. At the talent fair, we welcomed 300 attendees and 20 hiring companies from CI’s portfolio, as well as guest appearances from Handsome Dan (Yale’s bulldog) and other Connecticut college and university mascots. Famed Yale “Science of Happiness” lecturer Laurie Santos gave an uplifting talk as well.
 
In a show of how work and play do indeed go together, in September we completed our third and final (for now) Tour de Connecticut (like the Tour de France, only better). We rode from one side of the state to the other visiting with portfolio company executives, policymakers and university/corporate partners. We continue to be blown away by the beauty of Connecticut and the level of innovation happening in every corner of our state.
 
We traveled to India with Indra Nooyi, Governor Lamont, AdvanceCT, Commissioner of DECD Dan O’Keefe, UConn President Radenka Maric, CI Chairman Michael Cantor and Mike Crair from Yale and led VentureClash India at IIT-Madras. CI added two fantastic Indian companies to our portfolio that we met on our VentureClash journey, CloudSEK and P-TAL.
 
The governor announced our new $50M AI/Q Fund, led by the newly added polymath-trilingual Gwen Cheni (she speaks bio, quantum and AI). On the quantum side, Quantum Circuits Inc. is making tremendous progress with their error-corrected quantum machine, and the Yale-UConn $160M competitive NSF proposal for QuantumCT is advancing.
 
CI portfolio companies helped elevate our venture ecosystem to new levels. CI now boasts:
  • $500M in assets under management (AUM)
  • 4,100 portfolio company jobs in Connecticut
  • $400M in returns over past 10 years
  • $7.3B total capital raised by portfolio companies cumulatively
 
I’m continually grateful for my teammates, who show up each day determined to contribute more, for our fearless board and for the portfolio company founders who entrust us with their partnership.
 
I wish all of you a year filled with faith, hope and love. As always, if you have ideas on how we can better serve you and the state in 2026, I look forward to hearing from you. Have a happy and transformative New Year!
 


Matt McCooe
CEO, Connecticut Innovations
matt.mccooe@ctinnovations.com
Cell: 917.750.5453
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Connecticut Innovations
470 James Street, Ste 8  | New Haven, CT 06513 | 860.563.5851
www.ctinnovations.com

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