- Enzo Ventures is launching a €20 million pre-seed fund focused on entrepreneurs from Southern Europe.
- Fund II has already invested in three companies, including Cori Clinical in London.
- Orbio, Murphy, and Complaion are based in Madrid, Barcelona, and Milan, respectively, not outside their home countries.
Edgar Vicente founded the business-card app DiHola at 19 and grew its user base to 50,000 before handing it over to Social Labs in 2020. Currently, he and Iván Fernández Lucas run Enzo Ventures, a pre-seed firm in Barcelona which has launched its second fund of €20 million.
The fund will make its first investments in the range of €250,000 to €600,000 and will therefore continue the strategy followed by Fund I of supporting Southern European founders at the pre-seed stage, regardless of where their companies are incorporated. The fund has already invested in Cori Clinical in London.
The fund is concentrating on B2B technology, AI, and software. According to Vicente, their investment approach is influenced by changes affecting the kind of founders emerging from the region.
“When we started investing in 2023, our conviction was that something structural was changing in Southern Europe. The new generation of founders coming out of the region was more ambitious, more technical and much more global from day one. We didn’t want to build a fund around where companies were incorporated. We wanted to build one around where exceptional founders came from,” says Vicente, a founding partner at Enzo Ventures.
A focus on founders who grow their companies internationally
The firm focuses on founders from Southern European cities such as Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, or Lisbon who then set up their companies in places like London, Zurich, Paris, New York, or San Francisco and remain linked to their original networks.
“The biggest misconception about Southern European venture is that the opportunity is limited to companies headquartered in Southern Europe. We think the opposite. Some of the best founders from the region will build from San Francisco, London, Zurich or wherever gives their company the highest probability of becoming global. Our job is to find them before everyone else knows their name,” Vicente says.
Enzo is one of a number of pre-seed funds in Europe that are led by young people, according to Forbes Spain. For instance, Wave Ventures has named 23-year-old Margarethe Böhme as managing partner. For the investor view on how European VC is shifting, see our interview with RTP Global’s Thomas Cuvelier.
Enzo was the first investor in Orbio, Murphy, and Complaion as its flagship portfolio companies. Cori Clinical is the first Fund II investment based outside Southern Europe. Enzo’s most well-documented successes are those companies which stayed in their home markets.
The firm’s two US-based portfolio companies, Karumi and Intelligence Factory, are said to be based in San Francisco and New York, although PitchBook lists Intelligence Factory as San Francisco-based.
What Enzo’s €20M fund needs to prove
Enzo states that Fund I has invested in 28 companies across nine regions, some of which have moved beyond the pre-seed stage.
Enzo’s fund, at €20M, is smaller than several other funds. For example, PSV Tech raised €56M in its Nordic pre-seed round, Samaipata raised €110M for its third fund, and Yellow, set up by the Glovo team, started with €30M for its European pre-seed.
This smaller scale is in keeping with Enzo’s method, since two partners are responsible for all investment decisions and the firm uses special-purpose vehicles to invest more in the companies that perform best.
According to PitchBook data, venture capital investment in Southern Europe reached €2.9 billion in the first six months of 2025. Furthermore, TFN has tracked €3.1 billion injected into Spain and the expansion of the Barcelona ecosystem.
Fernández Lucas said, “Fund I was about proving that we could identify these founders extremely early. Fund II is not about changing strategy. It is about increasing our ability to execute the same strategy with greater scale, stronger access and everything we have learned over the last three years.”
Vicente concluded, “There is always pressure in venture to evolve into something bigger and broader. Our ambition is different. We want to become exceptionally good at one thing: finding extraordinary founders from this ecosystem earlier than almost anyone else and being there from day zero.”
The key challenge for Fund II is whether its next major success will come from a founder who left Southern Europe or one who stayed.
