Darcy Howe

Darcy Howe spent the bulk of her career in wealth management at Merrill Lynch, where she was a founding member of the firm's Private Banking and Investment Group in Kansas City. Over her tenure, that group grew from 30 advisors to roughly 350, with about $240 billion in assets under management and more than $1 billion in revenue before she retired in 2015. She was recognized as one of Barron's Top 100 Women Financial Advisors in the U.S. She is a graduate of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.

A roughly 20-year veteran angel investor, Howe was a founding member of Women's Capital Connection, a network of accredited investors backing women-led, early-stage businesses. In 2016 she founded the KCRise Fund to test a thesis that a hyper-local focus on high-potential technology startups in the Kansas City region could generate competitive venture returns. The fund operates as a "sidecar" co-investment vehicle, investing only alongside approved institutional investors in early-stage tech companies raising at least $1M.

Under Howe, KCRise has raised multiple funds — Fund II closed at ~$41M in 2021 and Fund III closed at ~$34M in 2023 — bringing the firm to over $100M in assets under management and a portfolio of roughly 45–52 companies. She has framed the fund's mission as "bridging the gap between promising technology entrepreneurs and strategic high-growth capital."

Howe is also a longtime board member and civic leader. Her board and governance roles have included Bama Companies (a global food manufacturer with operations in the U.S., China, and Poland), Heatron, Inc. (custom heating/LED engineering), Cariloop, eHawk, Healium, and Rawxies, alongside civic and nonprofit boards including the Kansas City Ballet, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (audit committee), United Way of Greater Kansas City, and the Kappa Kappa Gamma Foundation. She is a member of the International Women's Forum.

• Hyper-local mandate: Invests in early-stage technology companies with a strategic connection to the western half of Missouri or the entire state of Kansas. As Howe put it, the bet was "that hyper-local focus on high potential technology startups could bring competitive financial returns."
• Co-investor / sidecar model: KCRise does not lead rounds — it only invests alongside approved institutional investors (VC firms and corporate investors) in rounds of at least $1M, positioning the fund to "bridge the gap between promising technology entrepreneurs and strategic high-growth capital."
• Stage: Pre-Seed through Series A, with the largest share of deals at the Seed stage.
• Sectors: Industry-agnostic but concentrated in B2B software, supply chain/logistics, healthcare IT, fintech, cybersecurity, GovTech, benefits/HR, and increasingly AI-driven applications.
• What makes her say yes: High-quality technology startups solving meaningful problems that also create high-paying jobs and employee ownership in the region; she describes a passion for "back-of-the-napkin ideas which germinate into great businesses."