Angular Ventures, a young fund that backs early-stage enterprise and deep tech startups across Europe and Israel with a 'first money in' mentality, has closed its second fund at $80 million from (mostly) US-based LPs.
The firm, which has made investments in 50 seed-stage companies since it was founded in 2019, is also announcing that it is expanding its team.
Angular Ventures already had four venture partners, a senior associate and a 'head of platform', but has now reeled in its first full partner to sit alongside founder Gil Dibner.
David Peterson, the London-based former head of growth at $5.77 billion scale-up Airtable, is joining the team as the firm intends to double down on its seed financing strategy, which is to lead (often first) funding rounds in European and Israeli high-tech - nanotechnology, medtech, ML, spacetech, agtech etc. - startups with a ticket size somewhere between $250,000 and $3 million.
To date, Angular Ventures has backed the likes of Firebolt, Dust Identity, Aquant.io, and CruxOCM when they were still pre-revenue and sometimes even pre-product, and it plans to pick up that pace in the future.
Just yesterday, EuroVC in its Q3 fundraising note reported that close to €14 billion has been raised by funds of all shapes and sizes in the first three full quarters of 2021, so relatively speaking $80 million is just a proverbial drop in the bucket.
But the new fund is double the size of its first one, and Angular Ventures says it was raised in just a couple of weeks (which is very fast even in times like these, when the European market is flooded with venture capital).
With a new full partner on board, the firm wants to compete for the best seed opportunities in Europe, where VC funding is going gangbusters.
Says Dibner: “Our new fund size will allow us to write larger high-conviction first checks, even earlier in a company’s lifecycle. We are most comfortable being the very first investor in a startup, especially in cases where no other investor is willing to move. That is where we can add the most value as coaches, sparring partners, advisors, cheerleaders, and force multipliers. This is what having a venture firm as a true partner means to us. It’s not just about investing, it’s about being fully invested as a VC in the companies we back."
He's also into podcasts these days! We'll try to get him on ours in the next few weeks. ;)
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