Smeal's Garber Fund Invests In DiamondBack Automotive Accessories
Smeal's Garber Fund Invests In DiamondBack Automotive Accesories
UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (July 27, 2006)—The student-managed Garber Venture Capital Fund at Penn State's Smeal College of Business has announced a $200,000 investment in DiamondBack Automotive Accessories, Inc., one of the fastest-growing auto accessory companies in the world.
The Garber Fund is the second institutional investor in the company, following Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and represents a major milestone for the rapidly growing business. The capital, which is the first of two tranches in a Series B Preference Stock transaction, will be used to augment sales and marketing efforts and expand manufacturing.
Based in Philipsburg, Pa., DiamondBack makes pick-up bed covers from diamond plate aluminum, turning the entire bed into a secure vault, while allowing users to carry a payload on top of the cover. The bed covers have become very popular among building and construction workers, as well as outdoor enthusiasts.
The company's first bed cover was designed by Matt Chverchko and Ethan Wendle in 2003 while they were still undergraduates at Penn State. They were both enrolled in an engineering entrepreneurship program that challenged them to come up with a new product idea.
As outdoor enthusiasts and avid hunters, Chverchko and Wendle wanted a better way to secure their gear in their pickups without sacrificing payload capacity. They priced out the market and found everything was either too expensive or impractical; so they created the first diamond plate aluminum bed cover. Their design has won multiple engineering and entrepreneurship awards.
The Garber Fund was established in 1999 with a $5 million commitment from Penn State alumnus John Garber and his wife Bette to bring reality to the teaching of entrepreneurship and venture capital. The fund is part of the Nittany Lion Venture Capital Association (NLVC), an MBA student-run management group that works with small companies and other investment groups in early stage business planning, execution and due-diligence assignments. NLVC forms part of Smeal's highly acclaimed entrepreneurship program, in which students are immersed in real-life situations throughout their studies.
Smeal is also home to the Nittany Lion Fund LLC, a $4.6 million student-managed investment portfolio with more than 60 private investors, making the college one of only a handful of business schools that have large student-managed funds for investment in both private and public equities embedded in their academic programs.
For more information on Nittany Lion Venture Capital or Penn State Entrepreneurs Network, contact Steve Christensen at nlvc@psu.edu.
For more on DiamondBack Automotive Accessories, visit www.diamondbackcovers.com.
REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu.
Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the Center for Digital Transformation, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.
