Firstminute Capital, a London-based pan-European seed fund, has final close of $100m.
Firstminute Capital, a London, UK-based early stage venture capital firm, has closed its first seed fund at $100m.
LPs include 50 entrepreneurs, 30 of whom have founded billion dollar businesses, as well as global institutions, strategic CEOs, and entrepreneurial family offices. The closing includes Henkel, the €60bn publicly-listed FMCG giant, and Lombard Odier, one of Europe’s largest private banks.
The venture firm has a European focus with the flexibility to follow local leads in the US and Israel. It typically invests $1m into seed-stage businesses and will deploy a sector agnostic remit within tech.
According to the company it will have particular interest in Robotics, vertical AI, Healthtech, Blockchain, SaaS, Cyber, Gaming and D2C.
Its portfolio already includes Templum, a regulatory compliant solutions for Tokenised Asset Offerings (Initial Coin Offerings as securities) and subsequent secondary trading, Cybermdx, which specialises in cybersecurity for medical devices, and Evolution AI, a company building enterprise-grade AI systems which perform high-volume ‘document-work’ tasks without needing explicit instructions.
The geographic spread of their 17 investments to-date has been UK, Germany, Portugal and Israel, as well as four investments in the US. To coincide with the final close, firstminute is announcing the scale-up of its full-time operating team.
Spencer Crawley, co-founder and general partner at firstminute Capital said: ”We believe that emerging European technology startups will continue to excite, and build on the momentum that has seen 50 unicorn companies built in Europe in the last 10 years.
“We hope to help the next generation of top entrepreneurs by giving them credibility, empathy and an extended reach. We invest not just in the UK, but across Europe, as well as in Israel and the US. We were aiming to raise $60m for our first fund, and so to have closed our first fund at $100m is a strong signal for European technology.”
Copyright © 2018 FinTech Global
