We love pre-seed stage investing in Europe and we are going to do everything we can to support it (updated)
The funding gap at the early stage is real, pre-seed and seed are left wide open, as you can read in Flavio Lobato’s article: “The VC unicorn obsession is creating an early stage funding wasteland” both angel and seed round activity has been on target for their lowest year since 2014.
Having VCs moving to later stage doesn’t only pose a funding problem but early-stage tech entrepreneurs are left high and dry when it comes to mentorship and true assistance as explained by John Vrionis in his article: “Venture Capital Is Losing Sight Of Its Most Important Investments: Seed-Stage Entrepreneurs.”
As John, We believe pre-seed and seed-stage investors are making an enormous difference. We, at id4 ventures, strongly believe that early stage is the most gratifying stage financially and on a personal level. We are not alone, we see great micro and seed funds emerging across Europe. We want to do more to support pre-seed investment in Europe.
For those reasons, we have decided to commit more of our resources not only to early-stage investing via id4 directly but also via other funds. We have finalized our first fund investment that will be announced soon and another one is work in progress. Stay tuned.
Why also investing in angel funds? Because we believe to do a great job as pre-seed stage investors, you need to provide not only money but also localized advice, connections, support notably in talent acquisition and business development, etc. Nobody can be good at everything everywhere.
So we decided to restrict our angel investments as lead only to France and invest via angel funds sharing our values in other parts of Europe.
We also believe those funds investments we will help us learn faster by sharing experiences across angel funds and develop our network across borders to better support our portfolio companies and be the point of contact in France for companies of counterpart funds.
We are super enthusiastic to collaborate with other micro funds
Vive the European micro fund’s community
Update 1 (01/03/2019)
Now, we can disclose our first fund of fund investments. We are thrilled to be part of The Nordic Web Ventures Fund II run by the great Neil Murray
More about this : The Nordic Web Ventures raises a second fund and picks up Atomico’s Niklas Zennström as a backer.