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European early-stage investor Seedcamp has introduced the $180M shut of its “Fund VI”.
It’s a good distance from a London college lecture corridor 15 years ago in September, when Founding Accomplice and co-CEO Reshma Sohoni stood up and launched the primary Seedcamp cohort (By the way, this was the identical day TechCrunch launched in Europe, and my first day as a full-time TC journalist).
Seedcamp’s Fund VI is sort of double the dimensions of Seedcamp Fund V, raised some 2.5 years in the past ($95 million, raised in 2020), and thus the most important fund so far. The brand new fund will again about 100 firms. Though the fund is sector agnostic, Seedcamp tends to avoid capital-intensive startups in areas like mobility, preferring to stay to software program platforms in areas corresponding to Synthetic Intelligence, cybersecurity, open supply software program, healthtech, and fintech.
The brand new fund intends to guide rounds from the Angel and Seed stage (as much as $1 million), whereas additionally having the ability to take part in rounds as much as Collection B, given it now has a lot larger fire-power. This implies Seedcamp will profit from exits at a later stage than beforehand.
Whereas later stage funds have discovered it just a little more durable to boost on this unsure market, Seedcamp’s laser-like concentrate on early-stage has saved it a favorite amongst traders. It additionally advantages from a 15 yr heritage and a fairly unrivalled community throughout Europe.
Establishments backing Seedcamp embody LGT, Reference Capital, Harbourvest, Authorized & Normal. Angels embody the likes of Michael Pennington (Gumtree), Will Neale (Grabyo), Paul Forster (Certainly), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Shakil Khan (Spotify), and Kärt Siilats (GoBeyondCapital).
Former Seedcamp Founders embody Taavet Hinrikus (Smart), Daniel Dines (UiPath), Jeppe Rindom (Pleo), and Johnny Boufarhat (Hopin).
Seedcamp’s portfolio now consists of over 460 firms together with 9 unicorns: UiPath (NYSE: PATH), Smart (LON: WISE), Revolut, Pleo, Hopin, Grover, Viz.ai, wefox, and Sorare.
A few of Seedcamp’s rising stars embody Synthesia, Buyonomics, Griffin, Ramp, Sylvera, Superscript, Primer, Appwrite, PortalOne, and Peppy.
Its most notable exits embody Skew (to Coinbase); Kitch (to Supply Hero); and Nordigen (to GoCardless).
Seedcamp can also be launching the Seedcamp Skilled Collective, a group of 100+ operators who’ve been concerned in firms together with Uber, Stripe, Cloudflare, Revolut, Deliveroo, NextDoor, Skyscanner and Smart.
A LONG HISTORY
For a few years, Seedcamp was roughly the one early stage investor recreation on the town. No less than in Europe.
There’s maybe a “sliding door” second when Seedcamp may have merely aped US-style accelerators, and churned out loads of also-ran firms. And sure, for about half it’s life-span it did certainly have “cohorts”.
However then one thing completely different occurred, and maybe one thing uniquely European.
As an alternative of taking up the fairly centralised and aggressive “Tech Bro” tradition of Silicon Valley, Seedcamp morphed right into a extremely collaborative “group” community of former Seedcamp-backed founders, European Tremendous-Angels, and even different VC funds that wished entry to its pipeline, constructed on this networked strategy.
For instance this, I as soon as requested Paul Graham backstage at a TechCrunch Disrupt convention if he would ever scale YCombinator to Europe. He indicated that YC would merely keep within the Valley, and “everybody would come right here”. Whereas that strategy served YC simply high quality, it meant it was by no means going to have the ability to have interaction with Europe’s distributed and complicated ecosystem. Seedcamp was on the bottom’ within the early days, in a approach most funds, and even most European funds weren’t.
This was echoed in one thing co-CEO Carlos Espinal advised over an interview: “We’ll proceed to be community-led. The second is being entrepreneurially-minded. Which signifies that we’re carving our personal path and never cloning what different individuals are doing. We’re developing with issues that I feel work for the European ecosystem, that work for the founders which might be primarily based in France or Romania or anyplace else. And the final one is a teamwork centric. Once we began, mainly, we didn’t know something. So that truly formed the tradition fairly than assuming that we had been some profitable magnate that got here in desirous to bestow knowledge on others.”
In an period the place each VCs appears to speak endlessly about their ‘data-driven strategy’ to investing, Seedcamp pioneered it’s personal model: people-driven.
Seedcamp’s popularity as a VC which founders may merely fill in a form to entry has served it effectively, nevertheless it’s this community that has been its strongest asset.
And since the fund hold its stakes beneath 10%, it will possibly herald Angels right into a spherical, writing small cheques, and thus extending and incentivising this community impact.
The truth that it matured on this natural method is testomony to the curation of Sohoni and Espinal, who’ve justifiably earned their popularity as calm, considerate traders and advisors, in addition to being totally signed-up to the “European challenge”.
Sohoni mentioned the brand new fund had been over-subscribed: “Fundraising is rarely straightforward, however we had been oversubscribed, which tells you the consistency of the community. Now we have at all times been pre-series A. That’s outlined us and it’s a constant report of 15 years of delivering the affect.”
She added: “We planted plenty of flags again within the day, and a few of that expertise we backed ended up with the US. Now that expertise is coming again to Europe and in a form’ve reverse mind drain. They do not forget that we backed European position fashions, and entry to capital and data to European founders.”
Companions Tom Wilson and Sia Houchangnia joined Seeedcamp some time in the past to scale up the Seedcamp providing. Extra just lately Antonia Whitecourt and Natasha Lytton have develop into Administrators. Felix Martinez is now promoted to Principal, and Kate McGinn is promoted to Affiliate.
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