After earning his degree from the University of Oklahoma (OU) on a Navy ROTC scholarship and serving six years as a Marine Corps captain, James Spann built a 30-year executive career in the life sciences industry. However, his long-standing service on OU boards and his role as Vice Chairman of the Advisory Board for OU’s Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering revealed a critical gap: high-potential university startups were stalling due to a lack of venture capital.
So, Spann joined forces with Jeff Moore, a veteran of the U.S. Navy who worked with McKinsey & Co., and several entrepreneurial firms and agencies, to change that. The result is Boyd Street Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on uncovering high-potential startups rooted in OU and across the state’s broader innovation ecosystem. The firm makes Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, and follow-on investments in companies that they believe larger coastal venture capital firms typically overlook.
The firm’s dual mission is to drive economic growth for Oklahoma and deliver competitive returns to investors. “BSV is not strictly a university commercialization fund,” explains Moore. “But the BSV team does have deep insight into the technology and talent coming out of the university.” That proximity to innovation has become a cornerstone of the firm’s strategy, one that uniquely positions it within the regional venture capital landscape.
Backing Startups Others Miss
Boyd Street’s strategy targets sectors in which Oklahoma holds unique strengths, including life sciences and healthcare, aerospace and defense, energy tech, climate tech, and fintech. While the fund began with this broad sector focus, it has increasingly emphasized healthcare and life sciences, where Spann sees substantial, scalable innovation emerging from the OU ecosystem. “There are days when I see faculty-presented technology and think, ‘Wow, if this is real and we can get it scaled, it’s a game-changer,” says Spann.
The firm has also organized its investment thesis around infrastructure-enabling technologies – solutions that underpin advancements in energy, climate, materials, and digital systems. Recent investments include a company applying nanotube and nanoparticle technology to global infrastructure challenges.
Boyd Street Ventures’ model blends traditional venture capital with a private equity-style operational approach. Central to this is the firm’s Venture Studio, which provides hands-on support in areas like marketing, finance, technology, and talent, ensuring startups scale efficiently and avoid early missteps.
“The Venture Studio is our secret sauce. It de-risks our investments and helps founders go to market sooner.”
James Spann, Founder & General Partner
Beyond sector expertise and operational support, Boyd Street Ventures strongly emphasizes diversity, actively backing startups led by women, people of color, and socially and economically disadvantaged individuals (SEDI). The firm also launched the Boyd Street Endowment Fund to deepen this commitment. “We’ve got several female founders on our platform,” Spann notes. “And a very diverse team between the core BSV staff and our advisors.”
Exponential Growth
Boyd Street Ventures has completed 16 investments to date, one of which is Luna, a digital health company that delivers physical therapy services directly to patients through a tech-enabled, concierge-style platform. Founded in late 2018 by technology professionals in Palo Alto – including a former Uber engineer – Luna offers in-home physical therapy visits coordinated through a mobile app, streamlining the process for patients, providers, and insurers.
The platform distinguishes itself by creating a frictionless user experience, automating scheduling, insurance verification, and billing. “They’ve solved the hardest part of digital health – making it simple for the patient to connect to the insurance company, the provider, and the hospital without lifting a finger,” says Spann.
Now operating in 28 states and 55 markets, Luna has partnered with over 60 major health systems nationwide, including UCLA Health, Baylor Scott & White, Scripps Health, and Atrium Health. In 2024, the company surpassed $80 million in annual revenue and closed its Series C funding round. Boyd Street Ventures has participated in six funding rounds, beginning with its initial investment and continuing to the most recent Series C.
Filling a Gap
The idea for Boyd Street Ventures took root in 2015 when Spann returned to the OU campus as part of his ongoing involvement with the university. While serving on the board of the newly established College of Biomedical Engineering, Spann recognized the strong commercial potential of the technologies being developed and the absence of a clear pathway to bring them to market.
The new college had been launched with donor support, including major contributions from Charles Stephenson Jr., a petroleum industry executive whose philanthropy also underwrote the Stephenson Cancer Center at OU Health. While the academic foundation was strong, OU, like many universities, lacked a robust commercialization model. As a founding member of the new college, Spann proposed forming a venture capital fund to fill that gap.
Around the same time, Moore had been leading the Ronnie K. Irani Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth (I-CCEW) on campus for over a decade. I-CCEW is an innovation consulting group that uses student talent to help entrepreneurs, researchers, and early-stage companies develop business plans and growth strategies. Despite working with hundreds of promising technologies, Moore saw firsthand that a lack of early-stage capital was the single greatest barrier to execution.
Introduced by a mutual colleague, Spann and Moore discovered a shared vision: to build a mission-driven venture fund focused on advancing OU-originated innovation while generating competitive returns for investors. Over several years, they refined their strategy, benchmarking best practices from peer universities and engaging stakeholders across academia, local government, and the private sector.
In January 2021, Boyd Street Ventures hosted a summit to formalize the plan. The firm was officially incorporated later that year, launching a $25 million fund in March 2022. With backing from six institutional investors, the firm has built a growing portfolio and developed a venture studio model to support operational scale-up. This platform provides hands-on guidance in areas such as marketing, finance, tech, and talent, helping de-risk investments and accelerate commercialization.
Boyd Street Ventures now serves as a catalyst for economic development in Oklahoma, linking academic innovation and Oklahoma-related ventures with private capital to generate jobs, retain talent, and build scalable companies from the ground up.
A Pivotal Point
Moore offered a candid assessment of the current environment for venture capital, noting that macroeconomic uncertainty is likely to pose continued challenges, particularly with fundraising. With Fund I nearly fully deployed, Moore says the firm’s current focus is on maximizing outcomes for its existing portfolio. “BSV’s real focus now is how to support the winners in the portfolio and invest what we can into the companies that are going to make a difference for the fund,” he said.
External factors, such as global trade shifts, also impact portfolio companies. “In the portfolio are companies that source components from Canada—those will be affected by tariffs. There’s a company manufacturing in Vietnam. Obviously, tariffs are going to affect them,” Moore noted.
“There’s going to be an opportunity over the next six months to really dig in with the portfolio and the Venture Studio team to help them manage the environment.”
Jeff Moore, Co-Founder & Strategic Advisor
Looking ahead, Spann and Moore see this period as pivotal for stewarding existing investments and preparing the firm’s evolution beyond a single fund. “It’ll give the BSV leadership and advisors a chance to pivot and turn attention to Fund II and national and international partnerships to grow Boyd Street Ventures beyond an Oklahoma focus into a global investment company.”