InReach Ventures, a London, UK-based AI-powered venture capital firm, held the first closing of a new €53m fund targeted at European early stage technology companies.
This first close surpassed the original fund target of €50m.
Founded by Roberto Bonanzinga, former General Partner at Balderton Capital/Benchmark Europe, Ben Smith, former UK Engineering Director at Yammer (Microsoft) and CTO at various technology startups, and John Mesrie, former General Counsel at Balderton Capital/Benchmark Europe, InReach Ventures leverages Artificial Intelligence powered software to discover, evaluate and support investments in the most promising early stage startups in Europe.
Like the tech disruptors it is looking to finance, the firm has a strong technology background having invested over €3m in the development of its own proprietary technology over the last three years, Over the half of the team members are software engineers.
Its proprietary software-based approach generates and evaluates deal-flow more efficiently than traditional venture firms. Through the software stack, the team is positioned to discover and analyse thousands of new opportunities each month.
The final target of this approach is not to automate the actual decision making process for investing but to use technology to make this process far more scalable, efficient and informed.
Launched in 2015, the firm has already invested in eight startups from across Europe, including:
– Oberlo (Lithuania) subsequently acquired by Shopify,
– Soldo (Italy/UK),
– Tutorful (UK),
– Shapr3D (Hungary),
– Traitly (Sweden) and
– Loots (Germany).
FinSMEs
12/02/2019