New European Investment Fund backed €150m fintech fund launches with three UK investments

The MiddleGame Ventures fund is targeting early stage financial services disruptors in Europe and North America.

A new €150m fintech venture fund has launched with three initial investments in UK-based firms.

MiddleGame Ventures’ new fund us targeting post-seed, series A and series B lead fintech investments in Europe and North America. The MGV Venture Fund I will invest in and partner with B2B and B2B2C startups “driving the transformation of financial services from analog to digital and from centralized to decentralized, with an emphasis on middleware and back office solutions.”  

The Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) and the European Investment Fund (EIF) are anchor investors in the new MGV fund alongside institutional investors and family offices.  The fund remains open to additional institutional and private investors ahead of a final close later in 2020.

The fund has already made three investments: in a capital markets digital platform, banking as a service firm and a big data analytics startup in the UK (Nivaura, Railsbank and Gardenia Technologies).

MGV investment thesis centre on disruption to financial services value chains across banking, payments, capital markets, asset management and insurance business models as new intermediaries “drive a fundamental re-architecting of incumbents”. 

Its remit extends to enabling technologies such as RegTech, Digital Identities, financial data” and crypto-enabled infrastructure.

Pascal Bouvier is co-founder of MGV along with Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt. 

He said: “We are pleased to have new capital from substantial investors to support great, transformational businesses across Europe and the US with our highly focused fund. 

“Our investors agree that specialist funds with experience working with entrepreneurs, incumbent financial institutions and regulators are best placed to thrive in an environment characterised by financial and technological cross-currents and significant regulatory constraints. We are excited to put our platform to work on behalf of investors and the next wave of innovators solving hard problems and re-architecting the industry.”

MGV partners have invested over $300m in early stage financial services firms over the past decade including Ripple, Tandem Bank, SimpleSurance, Coverhound and CompareAsia. 

MGV was established in 2018 by Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt.  Bouvier and Meyer previously co-founded Route 66 Ventures and consulted with Santander InnoVentures. Pinschmidt was a senior official at the US Treasury Department following a decade as a sell-side research analyst covering financial services for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. 

MGV is headquartered in Luxembourg with offices in Dublin and Washington DC.