We have evolved Seedcamp into an intensive and productive experience for entrepreneurs to tap into an international platform of mentors to get great advice, build an awesome network, get validation and gain access to capital. At Seedcamp Week in September we were thrilled to announce the strengthening of our team with Carlos and Phillip coming on board to further build out Seedcamp’s international reach and capabilities to support the entrepreneurs, mentors and investors we work with better.
This expanded team is the foundation for us being able to better support every year: the thousands of applications we receive across 11 geographies, our network of 2,000 local mentors, the 200 teams we meet, and the investments that we make and support.
Now, we’re delighted to announce the €3m first closing of Seedcamp’s second fund.
What are our plans for the new funds?
Simple: (1) make more investments and (2) strengthen the breadth and depth of our international platform.
Our first closing is already 50% larger than the first fund we raised in 2007 – this is great news because it means that we can invest in more of the 200 teams we meet and mentor every year through our Mini Seedcamps.
In our first fund, we were able to invest in 22 companies. Already in our second fund we have been able to invest in 11 companies and we are likely to be able to at least treble that number over the next few years.
It seems that every year, the quality of teams gets better. We are continually blown away by the talent we see in every location we visit. This is true in both our mainstream hubs like London, Paris, Berlin and Tel Aviv as well as the regional events we also host in the Nordics, the Balkans, Central Europe and now in Singapore, Johannesburg and Mumbai.
The teams from our first fund came from 12 countries and it was s surprise to many that the teams who attracted top-tier venture backing came from Estonia, Romania and Slovenia. In fact 19 of the 22 companies received more than an aggregate of €15m in follow-on funding, created over 100 jobs and two teams so far – Jordan’s Talasim and Palo Alto’s Mobclix – had successful exits.
Seedcamp is an international network both by design and necessity. The fragmentation in the European market required us to bring a network together and it has been a blessing we have embraced. In fact since 2007, we have grown from our original roots in London, Paris, Berlin into the rest of continental Europe and now into a truly international platform supporting entrepreneurs with on the ground networks from San Francisco and New York to Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Singapore.
We have only been able to do this with the support of: our fantastic initial investors; superb and increasingly creative collaboration with corporate partners including Google, Microsoft,IBM and Paypal; and an amazing collection of mentors who offer time, energy and expertise to help build the next generation of great start-ups. Thank you to you all.
But when we raised our first fund over the summer in 2007 we didn’t have the chance to really extend the reach of our investor as widely as we would have liked. So we are thrilled to welcome new investors in our second fund who further this goal of being deep, not shallow, in local markets.
New additions like Notion Capital, 360 Capital Partners, management team of Team Europe, Ahti Heinla and Lars Hinrichs bring even more of an international and entrepreneurial dimension to Seedcamp – we welcome them, thank our mentors and returning investors and look forward to bringing on additional new investors in the months to come.
We started Seedcamp with a big vision and a long-term ambition – we continue to recognize that we are at the beginning of this journey but we are excited that an international platform is starting to fall into place to let the next great founders from Amman or Tallin continue to launch products in London, raise money in NY, Silicon Valley, or Europe, and have a network to support them wherever they want to do business.
