Native-owned Relevance Ventures builds Indigenous access into health investing

By Erik Stein, Impact Alpha

Dean Newton, a former music and technology lawyer in Los Angeles, and his brother Cameron an investment banker, are members of the Patawomeck Indian Tribe of Virginia.

In 2018 they bought out the partners of a small Tennessee venture firm called Relevance Ventures (see profile on ImpactAlpha Edge), raised $50 million and relaunched it as one of the first independently owned Native American venture capital firms in the US. The brothers have since launched a second fund, aiming to raise $150 million, backed by family offices that supported the original, with an explicit commitment to Native communities built into its investment thesis.

“We either find people who are already leaning into Indian country, or we build into our investment program an obligation for them to do so,” Newton told ImpactAlpha.

Relevance has made two investments from the new fund and is in talks with a Montana tribe about an anchor partnership. The new fund is organized around four forms of health: personal, community, digital and financial. A Native Impact Council vets investments for their potential impact for Native communities and works with founders to create and track impact KPIs

Intentional impact

The new fund sharpens a mandate that emerged from a gap the Newtons discovered when they tracked the diversity of their portfolio for the first time, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Just over half of their portfolio companies had founders who were people of color, women or members of underserved communities. But there was no Native American representation. Not in the portfolio companies. Not in the pipeline. Not on board.

The broader ecosystem, they realized, looked the same. Indigenous founders received just 0.004% of the $330 billion in venture capital deployed in 2021. “It was like somebody had come in and sucked all the Native American people out of the financial system,” Newton told ImpactAlpha

The realization forced a shift in how Relevance thought about impact — from incidental to intentional.

Health, not wellness

One of the firm’s seed investments is Talkiatry, an app that connects patients with psychiatrists and accepts insurance — something roughly half of US psychiatrists do not do. Native American teenagers have among the highest suicide rates of any demographic in the country.

“They look out the window and the world that they see is not a world they want to be in,” Newton said. “And that is a pretty bleak statement.”

Newton joined the board of Boys and Girls Club of Indian Country to build a presence on reservations and bring services like Talkiatry’s to the communities it is trying to reach. “Part of me joining the board was trying to see if we could use their infrastructure to help deliver some of this stuff,” he said.

Cameron and Dean Newton