What

Edison Partners is a New Jersey-based growth investment firm. For 37 years, the firm has leveraged financial and intellectual capital to help CEOs scale their companies and missions. With more than $1.6B in assets under management, Edison Partners focuses on high-growth fintechs and other startups outside Silicon Valley with $10M-$30M in revenue.

The firm also offers Edison Edge, a personalized value-creation platform for portfolio companies. Through the Edison Director Network, C-level experts can help guide portfolio companies in their growth as board directors, mentors, and consultants.

Why

To Jennifer Lee, Partner at Edison Partners, the firm’s investment in fintech is central to its efforts to modernize core parts of the economy. “Money movement is one of those fundamental things in everybody’s lives,” Lee said. “And that’s frankly what keeps me excited.”

Investment in fintech therefore touches a wide range of consumer types and communities, Lee continued. It requires especially thoughtful investment, because “money is behavioral and emotional as a whole, which plays into many different areas.”

How

Given Edison Partners’s investment focus, Lee aims to invest in companies that have demonstrated products and income, rather than the more experimental or conceptual missions of many pre-Seed companies. Instead, Lee looks to a company’s fundamentals and operations to understand whether and how it can grow and “really make it big.”

For companies whose products are without full precedent—a truly innovative solution or early entrant into a nascent market—the firm looks to see how relatively similar products have played out when introduced into the market.

But a company’s operational focus is arguably more central to Lee’s investment priorities. “Do you have the right processes, people and systems in place to not only continue to adapt, but to do the right thing, or do what you think is the right thing, at every point in time?” Lee asked. “This is where things like corporate governance come in.”

Through Edison Edge, Edison Partners can further ensure that companies it’s invested in sustain the right operational frameworks and outlooks. This turns investment into a form of collaboration and knowledge transfer, helping portfolio company and investor in the process—learning more about growth strategies and the sector, respectively.

“We're actually looking to partner with CEOs and the management team,” Lee said. “We trust the CEO and the management team already in place and as they continue to grow, to not only understand the market, but be the industry experts and know the business really well.”