Nauta Capital, a pan-European Venture Capital firm investing in capital-efficient B2B software companies, closed its fifth fund, at €190M.
With a €120M first closed announced in 2020, the fund’s final close brings the firm’s assets under management to €550+M. Limited Partners include institutions across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The vast majority of Limited Partners joining the fund are private institutions with strategic interest in fund’s B2B focus as well as Family Offices with links to corporations aligned with the fund’s investment thesis. Among these are Netherlands based European Family Office Merifin Capital and the private markets division of the Spain based giant BBVA Asset Management. The fund has also had backing from leading investors such as British Patient Capital, ICO, the European Investment Fund, ICF, and Germany-based KfW Capital.
As a sector-agnostic B2B investor, Nauta’s main areas of interest include SaaS solutions with strong network effects, vertically focused enterprise tech transforming large industries as well as those leveraging deep-tech applications to solve challenges faced by large enterprises. Investing from late seed and Series A, typically Nauta invests between €1M – 5M initially, with the ability to follow on at later stages.
Based in London, Barcelona, and Berlin, Nauta has invested in 11 companies across Europe from the new fund since its launch. The companies invested from the new fund range from SaaS purchase and management (Cledara), open source platform (Nhost), and app analytics and management platform (Appfollow)) to solutions democratising employee wellbeing (ifeel), embedded insurance for SMEs (insureQ), and b2b last-mile delivery company (Gophr), among others.
Nauta Capital has had a successful year leading up to the fund’s final close with two portfolio exits in the last 8 months. The VC firm exited from Brandwatch, a global leader in digital consumer intelligence, which was acquired by Cision for $450M earlier in 2021, and from Holded which was acquired by Visma group.
As part of the new fund, the VC firm will invest £100-£250K in 16 pre-seed deeptech companies through its recently launched Nauta Labs initiative. These 16 smaller investments will be in addition to the approx. 35 companies Nauta plans to invest in from its new fund.
FinSMEs
04/11/2021