Announced today, Seedcamp has closed its fourth fund at £60m in an oversubscribed round that also saw a new partnership come into play. Equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs joined the round at £2m, which includes individual investment from various Seedcamp founders and mentors.
The fund’s first close was at £41m in November last year, and now at £60m the fund is more than 30 times bigger than Seedcamp’s founding fund of $2.5m back in 2007. Seedcamp plans to use the fund to invest in up to 100 start-ups from across Europe at pre-seed and seed stages, with 15 new investments already made backing the likes of step-counting cryptocurrency app Sweatcoin, and proptech start-up Homie. A “significant amount of money” from the fund is also to be held back for follow-on rounds up to Series B stage, and also holds the additional approval to invest in crypto tokens.
As a potential first for the venture capital and equity crowdfunding sectors, Seedrs was chosen to raise a portion of the fund from the founders of Seedcamp-backed companies. As a result, new investors in the fund include founders from two of Seedcamp’s three unicorn companies: Daniel Dines, CEO and founder of UiPath, and TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. Hinrikus has become a prolific fintech investor over the last few years, most recently making a public investmentinto chatbot app Cleo.
“Seedcamp took a chance on us back in 2015 when we were a team of just ten people in Romania and now, three years later, we have more than 590 employees across 14 countries and valued at over $1bn,” commented Dines. “I trust the Seedcamp team implicitly when it comes to uncovering and investing in new categories and Europe’s future leaders and am delighted to support the next generation of entrepreneurial talent to come out of Seedcamp.”
The fund is also supported by angel investors like Michael Pennington of Gumtree fame, and Barry Smith from Skyscanner. Institutions backing Seedcamp’s fourth fund include Orange Digital Investments, Cachette Capital Management and MUFG Bank.
Jeff Kelisky, CEO at Seedrs, commented: “This is a fantastic and genuinely innovative collaboration between the venture capital and equity crowdfunding spaces. We’re proud to have built an infrastructure that allows us to open up highly attractive funds, such as Seedcamp’s Fund IV, to more investors than ever possible before. We very much look forward to working with Seedcamp and their companies in the years to come.”
