If you’re in downtown’s Western Gateway and aren’t a habitual Starbucks sipper, Ritual Cafe is a wonderful, local alternative. Located just east of the Pappajohn Sculpture Park, the cozy coffee shop focuses on all things vegan, vegetarian, and organic in a bright, inviting atmosphere. 

Big news, friends! We're bringing Paul Singh's Results Junkies Tech Tour to Iowa the week of July 17. Paul (formerly of 500startups, DisruptionCorp and more) is a serial entrepreneur, investor and startup ecosystem expert that has been criss-crossing the country in an Airstream camper for most of this year. Each week he drives to a different community and packs his schedule full of meetups, keynotes, round tables, office hours, etc. to get to know local founders, investors and policy makers

If you’re looking to grab coffee at a non-chain shop on Ingersoll, there’s no better place than Zanzibar’s Coffee Adventure. Located just far enough from downtown to offer free and plentiful parking, but close enough that you could easily walk or bike, Zanzibar’s is a homey haven from whatever craziness the week may have thrown at you.

This is a continuing series reporting on fundraising activity by companies in the Iowa startup community. The information is refined from publicly-available SEC filings as available online at sites like formds.com. It's not intended to be a perfect dataset but something to be measured over time to help in measuring changes in the ecosystem.

I've spent the past few weeks looking through SEC filings to try and get a handle on the total amount of money invested in Iowa startup-ish companies over the past few years. If you'd like to see the results check out 2010-2015 Iowa Fundraising Roundup over on the Gravitate blog.

Access to investment capital is something that every startup community is trying desperately to improve and we all know the old axiom that you only improve the things you measure. With that in mind, I've done some research and created a baseline of investments raised by Iowa companies over the last five years.