B2B investor Dawn Capital promotes Evgenia Plotnikova to general partner

After helping raise over $1bn for the firm and leading a host of investment rounds in the likes of Soldo, Dawn Capital today promoted Evgenia Plotnikova to general partner (GP).

According to Dawn, that makes her the youngest woman in Europe to be internally promoted to GP.

Plotnikova joins Dawn’s founders, Norman Fiore and Haakon Overli, along with Josh Bell as fellow GPs—who jointly are involved and responsible for Dawn’s long-term strategy and stewardship of the partnership.

“It’s very unique that at Dawn, we are really growing and nurturing talent from the early stages of a career all the way up,” Plotnikova told AltFi.

“It’s quite rare because in a lot of firms you can never get to the holy grail of partnership.”

Dawn, in particular, pointed to Plotnikova’s involvement leading funding rounds in some of Europe’s fastest-growing B2B businesses like expense automation platform Soldo, which Dawn backed in 2019 and just raised a $180m Series C.

Her promotion also continues to demonstrate Dawn’s leadership in maintaining a 50/50 gender balance across its investment committee, investment team and the wider company.

While most of Plotnikova’s focus is on Software-as-a-Service and the field of customer success, she told AltFi that Dawn’s recent successes, including Visa’s $1.8bn acquisition of portfolio company Tink continued to invigorate the firm’s interest in the sector.

“We will continue looking across B2B fintech in Europe, I think we've been paying a lot of attention to payments recently as the firm's thesis is that there'll be a lot of opportunities there,” she said.

“We firmly believe that, for example, there'll be very large outcomes in buy now, pay later financing in the B2B space. So that’s one reason why we’re continuing to watch broader B2B payments very closely.”

Given the successes that not only Dawn, but also Augmentum Fintech,Draper Esprit and other VCs are experiencing across the whole fintech sector, it’s unlikely the pace of investment will slow anytime soon.