Look out ladies, there’s a new fund in town: late last night, an announcement spread through bloggers’ emails announcing a new fund – Global Founders Capital – started by Oliver Samwers (of Rocket Internet, among other things) and Fabian Siegel.(Delivery Hero). The fund’s announcement is fairly general:
Global Founders Capital will invest into all stages from seed round to growth capital.
Funds have a tendency to be as open as possible about their ticket sizes (why close any doors, right?), so I asked Fabian Siegel about the reality behind them investing in small rounds as well as Series A,B,C etc. Here is Fabian’s response:
We are not focused on stage – we can write a check from €100K onwards and will probably not write bigger checks than €10M. We want to be fairly active, meaning more deals than a traditional VC might do in a year.
The fund, which will be based in Munich, also says it will invest all around the world – again, I pressed Fabian on this point, as there is often a correlation between VC office location and investment portfolio location:
Both Oli and I happen to have a global network that allows us to source deals specifically in markets that are underserved by traditional VC firms (Apac, Africa, Latam).
It sounds a lot to le like they’ll be leveraging Rocket Internet’s big network, and it sounds even more like they’ll be competing with KIMA Ventures for the “most active fund” award and Jeremie Berrebi covers so much.
Siegel also says that, while much of the money comes from the Samwers Family, there are also other successful entrepreneurs who have backed the fund, though Siegel left out any details on the LPs.
If you’re thinking of pitching Global Founders Capital about your awesome app, think again:
We like transaction based businesses – be it in form of Internet retail, market places and offline-to-online models. But we will invest as well in b-to-c services where the data shows strong user engagement and retention. We typically will not invest into pre-launch companies.
So while they will be investing small tickets, it will only be in transactional startups who have already launched, who have the ability to be huge, but who only need a small amount of capital. Sounds like they’ll be looking for the same Next Big Thig as everyone else.
I guess time will tell how this fund will play out in the ecosystem, but, with the little details that we have at launch, I’m not expecting big things for European startups – Latin American startups may be happy, though.
