Blake Patton

Blake Patton is the Founder and Managing General Partner of Tech Square Ventures, an Atlanta-based early-stage venture capital firm he launched in 2014. Under his leadership the firm has backed more than 130 startups and built its platform around a distinctive proposition: helping founders get access to enterprise customers and markets. Patton also co-founded and helped launch Engage, described as a first-of-its-kind corporate innovation and startup accelerator that connects large global enterprises with early-stage entrepreneurs.

Before founding Tech Square Ventures, Patton was General Manager of Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), an incubator Forbes named one of the "Top 12 Incubators Changing the World." Earlier in his career he was President & COO of Interactive Advisory Software and an Executive Vice President at iXL, the internet services company he helped scale from startup to more than $400 million in revenue and a public offering. He began his career as an associate at SEI Corporation.

Patton is a longtime fixture of Atlanta's technology community. He serves on the boards of Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures (GATV) and High Tech Ministries, sits on the ATDC advisory board, and is a former Chairman of both Venture Atlanta and the Center for American Entrepreneurship. He is also a part-time Professor of the Practice at Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business, where he teaches Entrepreneurial Finance.

He holds a Bachelor of Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech, where he was captain of the swim team. He was later inducted into the Georgia Tech College of Engineering's Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni and served as a Georgia Tech Alumni Association Trustee.

• Invests primarily at the Seed stage (with select Pre-Seed and Series A), writing checks of roughly $500K–$2M out of a ~$75M fund (Fund II/III).
• Focuses on B2B software, marketplaces, applied AI, logistics/supply chain, infrastructure & productivity, and sustainability/energy — often companies coming out of universities like Georgia Tech.
• Concentrated on the Southeastern U.S.: "When I started Tech Square Ventures, it was largely around that conviction that this is one of the fastest-growing innovation markets, and the level of investment didn't match the opportunity here."
• Backs companies for the long haul: "This is really us being able to level up, invest in these early-stage companies and stick with them… helping them get to that first couple million in revenue and being a partner in that journey."
• Core differentiator is customer access: "We've essentially built our whole platform around helping entrepreneurs get access to customers and markets. That's what we do uniquely well" — reinforced by the Engage corporate-partner network.