Former Accel investor Candice du Fretay launches Outlier Grove, a $20m angel and seed fund backing Europe’s next global B2B leaders. The fund aims to accelerate B2B startups through early engagement with the US market.
du Fretay is bullish about Europe’s ability to create global category leaders. The region has become a centre for world-class tech and AI talent, which she attributes to its leading universities and the groundbreaking AI and engineering work coming out of research labs like DeepMind in London and Meta’s FAIR lab in Paris.
In most B2B categories, winning the US market is required to achieve significant scale. Although the conventional wisdom is that European startups should wait until Series A to sell their products in the US, du Fretay believes this approach means founders can miss early opportunities to share best practices, learn about competitors and sell into the US market, reducing their chances of achieving category leadership.
As an early-stage investor at Accel, she saw that many of Europe’s most successful B2B platforms sold their products globally ahead of their Series A.
du Fretay acts as an extension of the founding team, offering support, insight and access to the fund’s network of US-based LPs – entrepreneurs, directors and C-level executives that have shaped the success of over 25 category-leading companies including Anthropic, Confluent, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Google, Miro, MongoDB, OpenAI and Stripe.
The fund will take a collaborative approach, writing cheques of $200,000 to $500,000 alongside business angels and other seed firms. Over the next three years, it will invest in around 25 companies from the very earliest stages.
According to Candice du Fretay, founder and solo GP:
“Europe is home to world-class tech talent and has consistently produced groundbreaking research and innovation. At the same time, the US is a large and lucrative market where buyers have big budgets and a strong appetite for adopting emerging technologies.
With Outlier Grove, my goal is to connect the two, so Europe’s outliers can think globally from day one. Through my own US network and the backing of entrepreneurs and C-level executives from iconic US scale-ups and enterprises, Outlier Grove will support these exceptional individuals and accelerate their journey to global leadership.”
Prior to launching Outlier Grove, du Fretay was an early-stage investor on Accel’s European team, working with promising scale-ups at the seed and Series A stage, including Conduktor, Lightdash, Sorare and Swan.
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