Bulletin: Minnesota's Medical Alley isn't #2 behind Boston's health cluster. It's #9.
And health is the only technology category where Minnesota cracks the top ten at all.
Minnesota is sure of exactly one thing in tech. With the Mayo Clinic and Medical Alley, it’s the country’s second health cluster, behind Boston. It’s the one foothold in the new economy we are certain we own.
Carta published its 2025 venture rankings a few weeks ago, and on the most charitable reading Minnesota comes in ninth in health-tech (if you look at Seed to Series B, we don’t rank at all).
Ninth is also Minnesota’s high-water mark. In every other tech category that matters, our state is not even in the top ten. Not software, or consumer, in the home of Target and Best Buy. Not fintech, in the home of US Bank and Ameriprise.
Let the 9th ranking sink in. The state that invented the pacemaker and spawned Medtronic, Mayo, and UHC/Optum, the largest employer of MDs in the country, ranks ninth in health tech funding, the one category where it places at all.
Carta runs the cap tables for tens of thousands of venture-backed companies, which makes it the gold standard for technology funding. It has no opinion about Minnesota. It summed up where 2025’s venture dollars landed, and Minnesota landed ninth.
Why does a state this wealthy, this educated, this practiced at medicine come in ninth in the one field it’s supposed to own, and doesn’t place anywhere else in technology at all? I examined the root causes in my previous essay.
The short answer is a market that hasn’t continually imported enough breakout founders doesn’t appear on a chart like this. The full diagnosis and the playbook for fixing it are in that piece, Escape Velocity.
After that piece ran, many of the comments were circling a different question, whether the real thing holding Minnesota back is its culture. I pick that thread back up next week.
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Links: Escape Velocity · Data: Carta, "Ranking the top startup ecosystems of 2025."