New €110m
seed fund
At Breega we proudly announced yesterday the closing of a new € 110 million seed fund. This is a fund dedicated to backing and growing what we like to think of as Europe’s best and brightest tech founders. If you’re a tech founder wondering what that means and whether this fund is for you, then here’s the lowdown.
A fund for early-stage startups from a variety of sectors
Breega’s new seed fund is for early-stage tech startups producing innovative solutions for a variety of sectors. We back companies from SaaS to deep tech through to HR tech, ad tech, mobility, health tech, logistic, cybersecurity, and more… We even finance hardware. Why? Because our investment thesis isn’t industry but VIP based: (revolutionary) Vision + (extraordinary) Individuals + (groundbreaking) Product ;). So In our portfolio, you’ll find startups producing autonomous vehicles, heads-up display devices, nifty warehouse robots, and even parts for quantum computers!
By “Early-stage” we mean that, with this fund, we’ll mostly invest for the first time at Seed level (rounds of €5 Million or less). This said we’ll also finance pre-Seed rounds if we think the project has huge market potential and requires some dry powder to get it off the ground. For more information on who we invest in and how, check out our Let’s Invest website page.
A fund for European founders
Although we do have startups in the US or Israel, our main focus is Europe. The reason being is that we believe venture-capital to be a people business, we, therefore, like to be close to our founders so we can meet with them often. With travel restrictions in place due to the global pandemic, meeting international founders is obviously a little complicated right now.
This said, if you are based outside of Europe, you can still send us your deck, we’ll hang on to it, ready to delve in and explore once it’s possible to get outside and travel (again)!
A fund that is already up and running
We were actually able to start investing with Breega III just over a year ago, after the first closing. To date, we’ve already backed 12 great young startups : Stations-e (Greentech), Trustpair (fintech) IoTerop (IoT), BeOp (Adtech), Otodo (IoT), Humanity (AI/Healthtech) Alice&Bob (Quantum Physics), Neobrain (AI/ HR tech), Didomi (Adtech/ Regtech), Ubble (AI/KYC), Ponicode (AI/Deeptech) reciTAL (AI/Deeptech). Other Breega III investments are in the pipeline. But don’t worry, there is still plenty to go around. Our aim is to finance (and refinance) just over 30 startups with this fund, meaning we still have some way to go. Tech founders: send us your decks!
A fund that really provides (much) more than just money
As founders, you’ll have probably noticed that lots of VCs nowadays provide “More than just money” generally meaning that they also provide advice, contacts and tips. VC is changing and that’s a good thing! For Breega however, since the beginning “more than just money” has actually meant a WHOLE lot more! Here’s how.
Breega is a fund, built, financed and powered by founders so we like to get involved. When you’re backed by Breega, you’re “onboarded”, meaning that you become part of our team and we become part of yours 😉
A fund that works for and with you
Apart from taking a board seat to help founders with the strategic decisions and running of their business, we also have a full-time in-house operations team. An 8 person team that is on-call to advise and actively lend a hand whenever needed. It’s divided by squad:
- HR & Talent squad: they actively recruit for our startups with great results: 100 recruitments in 2020! They also provide tools and advice on how to structure your teams as they grow.
- Biz Dev: our Biz dev and Head of operations leverages our network of corporate contacts and LPs to help our startups sign contracts.
- Marketing,Com&PR squad: the coms squad helps you build your marketing, branding and PR strategies, providing advice, written materials and contacts.
- Legal & Finance squad: our legal eagle CFO with the help of her team is on hand to answer your contractual and financial questions therefore saving you time and money!
A fund that is actively helping to build tomorrow’s world…
Although not an investment criteria, we’ve noticed that many of our latest investments are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help power their solutions. Co Founding Partner, Maximilien Bacot tells us:
” It’s true that we’re seeing an increasing number of AI tools and platforms across all tech sectors. AI, whose progress is being fueled by the global pandemic, is increasingly present in the technologies that are currently shaping the way we live, interact, consume and work. Our latest investments reflect this trend”.
We’re expecting this trend to increase further in 2021 providing us with greater data, more efficient algorithms and more relevant technologies…
…And Breega’s future
This latest, multi-sector seed fund is the third fund we’ve raised so far since 2015 and it comes just a little over two years after our first venture fund dedicated to financing startups at Series A/Series B stage (rounds over €5 m). We have notably invested in some trailblazing fintechs which you can check out on our companies page.
It brings the total amount of our assets under management to € 260 million and our number of portfolio companies to 55. We have to say that it’s a track record we’re proud of. Just like the startups we work with, Breega is also growing fast. And we’re not stopping there. There’ll be more to come, much more. So watch this space….we’ll keep you posted 😉
All the best,
Team Breega 💚