Laura Kilcrease
Laura Kilcrease is founder and managing director of Triton Ventures, LLC, a venture capital fund investing in spinout and early-stage technology companies. With more than 25 years of hands-on experience in commercializing technology, Ms. Kilcrease has a deep understanding of how to cultivate new opportunities to “grow businesses around businesses” as well as how to deconstruct and reconstruct business models to achieve significant results.
Ms. Kilcrease founded Triton Ventures in January of 1999 to provide management and operational leadership to emerging technology-based spinout companies formed to acquire and commercialize technology developed by Fortune 500 companies and other large domestic and foreign corporations, universities, and government or private research institutions. As managing director of the firm, she sources, structures, performs due diligence for, negotiates, and manages venture capital investments focused on information technology, energy-related technologies, advanced materials, and communications. She provides ongoing counsel to portfolio companies regarding management teams, industry and financial marketplace issues, introduction of strategic and investment partners, and positioning the company for public offering, merger, or sale. She has served as director on the boards (including audit and compensation committees) of portfolio companies Applied Science Fiction, Charitygift, Exterprise, Hart Intercivic, and LNNi.
Ms. Kilcrease was one of the key participants in changing the economic landscape of Central Texas into the high tech environment that is widely recognized today. From 1992 to 1997 she served as executive director of The University of Texas IC2 Institute’s Center for Commercialization and Enterprise (C2E), which developed commercialization strategies for universities, government laboratories and research consortia, and R&D departments of major corporations. The largest of these projects, the NASA Ames Technology Commercialization Center in Sunnyvale, California, spun out 32 new businesses that raised over $55 million in venture capital in three years.
