At Propelify, a Conversation with Edison Partners’ Michael Dirla
Propelify, the tri-state area’s tech and innovation festival run by TechUnited:NJ, takes place in Hoboken each year. The event offers a great place to catch up with members of the New Jersey technology community. At June’s festival, NJTechWeekly.com spent some time with Michael Dirla, vice president of Edison Partners (Princeton and Nashville), which has been supporting New Jersey companies since its inception in 1986 as a venture capital firm.
Today Edison is a growth-equity firm that provides the financial and intellectual capital that CEOs and their executive teams need to grow and scale their companies, according to its literature. Edison invests in financial technology, vertical software and healthcare IT companies.
Over Edison’s lifetime, the firm has invested in 52 companies in New Jersey, at a total of $260 million. Currently, it has $75 million invested in New Jersey companies across their active portfolio, including Health Recovery Solutions (Hoboken), Zelis (Boston and Morristown) and Suuchi (Kearny).The firm’s last New Jersey investment was in SPHERE (Newark), a growth-stage company that offers solutions around identity hygiene-related cybersecurity. Solutions By Text is another portfolio company with a significant portion of its employee base located in New Jersey (Princeton). Edison looks for investment opportunities with growth-stage businesses located in underserved markets, like New Jersey, hence its location in Princeton.
Dirla joined Edison in 2021 after stints as an investment banking analyst at Credit Suisse (New York) and the private equity firm Lightyear Capital (New York). In 2024, Dirla was promoted to vice president at Edison, where he focuses on identifying and evaluating potential investments in financial technology and enterprise solutions, and works with Edison’s portfolio companies.
One thing is certain: Dirla loves his job. After we spoke to him, he was on his way to a meeting with SPHERE’s founder and CEO, Rita Gurevich, and he was enthusiastic about that New Jersey company.
Edison started out as a venture fund, but now “we have 10 funds and are in the growth equity space. The companies we invest in have already found product-market fit, and we figure out how we can throw fuel on the fire, from a go-to-market perspective, to help them really scale up. Typically, we are looking for businesses with anything from about $10 million to $30 million in revenue.”
We asked him about Edison’s current relationship with New Jersey tech companies. He answered that Edison is doing a lot on that front. “We partner a lot with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, we are supporters of their Evergreen Fund, we are always trying to find businesses. We have a healthy pipeline of companies in New Jersey that we’re tracking, that are earlier-stage companies that are incubating and scaling up. We are looking to deploy capital in the state,” but it’s hard to find startups that have grown enough to qualify as revenue targets, he said. Dirla added that there is a lot of innovation going on in the Princeton area, where Edison has its offices, and this will bode well for possible investments in the future.
Edison recently opened its offices in Nashville to continue to invest in underserved markets similar to New Jersey. The firm is looking for companies in places where capital is hard to get. “We wanted to be closer to the southeast, which has become a hub for us,” he said.
Asked about the prospects for an additional deal in New Jersey any time soon, Dirla suggested that he expected the firm to be doing more than one in the next 12 to 18 months if growth within these opportunities happens as planned. He noted that a lot of things can go wrong, even when an opportunity gets near the end of the “funnel.” For example, Dirla’s specialty is deal execution, and sometimes, when he is looking “under the hood” of a company, he sees something that isn’t a fit for Edison.
We asked Dirla if Edison is seeing more AI companies as it evaluates companies for deals. He said that, instead of investing in pure AI companies, Edison is seeing more companies utilizing AI as part of their existing solutions and platforms. “Adding AI not only delivers measurable value to our portfolio companies’ customers, but you can also see companies increase their margins substantially, just by optimizing through AI. It’s extremely exciting.”
