High Alpha

High Alpha is an Indianapolis-based venture studio and venture capital firm founded in 2015 by Scott Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of ExactTarget, which was acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion, alongside Eric Tobias, Mike Fitzgerald, and Kristian Andersen, who pioneered the venture studio model that combines institutional startup creation with venture capital investment to systematically produce B2B SaaS companies from concept through scale. The firm has raised more than $260 million across four fund vehicles and three studio vehicles, backed by Emergence Capital and Foundry Group, and has co-founded more than 30 enterprise cloud companies and invested in more than 60 total. The venture studio model is High Alpha's defining innovation: rather than evaluating founder pitches, High Alpha generates product and market ideas internally, recruits founding teams from its network of ExactTarget, Salesforce, and Indianapolis technology alumni, provides initial capital and operational infrastructure, and launches companies that are immediately staffed with experienced operators. Portfolio companies co-founded through the studio include Zylo, the SaaS management and optimization platform; Lessonly, the team learning software acquired by Seismic; Sigstr, the email signature marketing platform; and Visible, the investor relations and reporting platform. Additional investments include SalesLoft, project44, Attentive, The Mom Project, Mandolin, and MetaCX. Exits include Lessonly (acquired by Seismic), Pattern89 (acquired by Shutterstock), and Socio (acquired by Cisco). Beyond its original investments in Zylo, Lessonly, Sigstr, and Visible, the portfolio includes dozens of additional enterprise cloud companies co-founded and invested through the High Alpha studio and capital vehicles.