Ivan Rahman has spent nearly two decades betting on Milwaukee. Now, with fresh backing from VC 414, he’s proving what’s possible when that resourcefulness meets real investment.
Longtime #mketech community members may remember Ivan from Avistar’s early days, when he was validating his idea inside MKE Tech Hub’s FOR-M Startup Incubator and closing his first enterprise client. Since then, Avistar has kept moving. The startup is now working alongside Fortune 500 teams and has closed a funding round with VC 414, a Milwaukee firm known for backing historically underrepresented founders.
Milwaukee itself remains central to how Ivan thinks about building. He’s been part of the city’s startup community for nearly two decades, and what keeps him here is the willingness to collaborate. “[Founders] build for each other, not just for themselves,” he says. The collaborative culture, paired with the region’s deep bench of financial services and manufacturing companies, gives him an edge that’s hard to find in a bigger city. In a market this size, Ivan says we are often one introduction away from the person who owns the problem we’re trying to solve.
FOR-M’s influence on Avistar didn’t end at the incubator door. The clearest lesson Ivan took from the program was that a startup can’t be built in a silo. It has to be built with people in mind. Avistar has since had hundreds of conversations with potential clients, conversations that shaped both the problem the company is solving and how it reaches its ideal customer. FOR-M also left him with something less tangible but just as valuable: a community of founders who had already been through the fire, whose experience continue to offer lessons and insights.
“Don’t dream small,” Ivan says, reflecting on where he’d point other founders in the #mketech community today. AI makes building easier than ever, and he believes the moment calls for founders to go after big problems rather than safe ones.
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