Founded in 2012 by Pierre-Alain, Michael and Adrien, three entrepreneurs from Switzerland who connected over their passion for entrepreneurship and building companies from scratch, now Seedstars has officially launched Seedstars Capital. It is an investment platform for emerging venture capital (VC) fund managers with the support of xMultiplied, a Swiss-based investment holding company.
Earlier this year, after the first close of $20 million, Switzerland-based Seedstars also announced $30M seed-stage fund for emerging markets.
Already, over 90 emerging market venture ecosystems have received help from Seedstars since 2013, and its inaugural investment fund, Seedstars International Ventures, sponsored 81 businesses in over 30 countries, including Omnibiz in Nigeria.
Drive over $500m of new funding
With Seedstars Capital, the platform will partner with emerging and diverse managers with local expertise, provide them with the necessary resources to launch new funds and develop their investment firms.
With the platform, Seedstars expects to drive over $500m of new funding into emerging and diverse managers, who will create more than 10,000 new jobs and generate over $20bn of additional GDP across emerging markets in the next 10 years.
Benjamin Langer, Partner of Seedstars Capital comments, “We believe the venture capital industry needs to be more open and inclusive and we find highly talented managers across emerging markets. Unfortunately, most lack the scale and resources to attract institutional limited partners and depend on local funding to deploy their strategies and create the impact they long for. For limited partners,, the growing number of new managers makes it difficult to identify the best performing and most impactful strategies. By pooling their assets and bringing them under our community, we can accelerate the growth of rising managers while offering limited partners the visibility and investment vehicles they need to increase their allocation to the asset class.”
Vivek Chandaria, Managing Partner at xMultiplied shares, “We partnered with Seedstars given our common vision of creating wealth with positive impact across emerging markets. Providing outstanding new and diverse managers the possibility to execute on their strategies will fuel economic growth while achieving market investment returns”.
Active from Pre-Seed to Series A, in emerging and frontier markets —
The platform also works with Seedstars Africa Ventures, a regional-focused fund to back companies in the African continent. Moreover, Seedstars is currently working towards launching funds focused on EdTech, supply chain, ClimateTech and other impact sectors with outstanding rising managers in emerging markets to be announced soon.
