Two Baird portfolio companies will highlight Milwaukee WIN Event

MILWAUKEE — A homegrown employment and recruitment processing firm in Brookfield (Pinstripe LLC) and a life sciences company that moved to the Madison area from Chicago (Caden Biosciences Inc.) will share the stage with lead investors the Nov. 13 Milwaukee meeting of the Wisconsin Innovation Network.

Susan Marks, CEO of Pinstripe, and Bill Checovich, president and CEO of Caden Biosciences, will join investors from Baird Venture Partners at the Nov. 13 meeting at the Hyatt Regency, 333 W. Kilbourn.

Registration is available online through the Tech Council website or at the site beginning at 11:30 a.m. Lunch will be served at noon and the presentation will begin at 12:30 p.m. Registration is $25 for individual WIN members, $35 for non-members and included with WIN corporate memberships.

“A presentation by Caden Biosciences or Pinstripe alone would be instructive because each company has a great story to tell,” said Tom Still, president of WIN and the Wisconsin Technology Council. “But the story is even more powerful because investors from Baird will describe why they invested in each deal – and why they’re happy to have those companies growing in Wisconsin.”

• Pinstripe LLC aims to carve out a new niche in the fast-growing recruitment-process outsourcing arena. With a proprietary software platform Pinstripe designs, builds and manages talent management systems exclusively for the financial services industry. Susan Marks, Pinstripe’s CEO, is a serial entrepreneur who has started and sold companies – and been an investor herself.
  
• Caden Biosciences, which is developing screening tools to identify new drugs to treat a variety of diseases, has moved to the Madison area from Evanston, Ill. The move was announced in September along with a $5.85 million financing round that include Milwaukee-born Baird, Madison-based Venture Investors and Illinois Ventures, a Chicago firm. Bill Checovich, former director of operations for Invitrogen Corp.’s Madison unit, is Caden’s president and chief operating officer. Checovich was one of the first few employees of PanVera, a Madison company founded in 1993 that made biological research tools.

Checovich and Marks will be joined by Bill Filip and Michael Liang of Baird at the Nov. 13 WIN-Milwaukee meeting. A similar presentation took place Oct. 24 at the WIN-Madison meeting. Filip and Liang work out of Baird’s Philadelphia and Chicago offices, respectively.

WIN is the membership subsidiary of the Wisconsin Technology Council, the science and tech policy advisers to the governor and the Legislature. To join WIN, go to www.wisconsintechnologycouncil.com or call Andrea Johnson at 608-442-7557, ext. 27.