BACKED raises €150M to Champion Seed Entrepreneurs in Europe with its Human-Centric Model!
by Startacus Admin
London-based European fund BACKED VC has announced a new €150M fund, split between a €75M second core fund and a brand new €75M encore fund.
BACKED the human-centric seed VC fund has just revealed details of two new €75M funds to invest in Europe’s boldest entrepreneurs. ‘BACKED Core 2’ continues to invest in seed-stage startups and ‘BACKED Encore 1’ is dedicated to follow-on investments in later-stage rounds of existing portfolio companies.
Alex Brunicki, Partner at BACKED, commented, “First and foremost - we wouldn’t be anywhere without the dedication and ambition of the founders we’ve backed. They bring the magic, day-in and day-out, we’re merely a supporting act.”
He added “We’ve pushed ourselves to be an entrepreneurial fund. We’ve not always got it right, but we iterate, listen and test at pace. I’d say we’ve made it to our Series A. I couldn’t be more excited about where we stand today and what lies ahead: we’re developing deeper edge in frontier markets like Biotech and Crypto; we’re bringing nascent communities together - such as Coin-Op - in a meaningful way; and we’ve built an exceptional team to support founders at scale.”
Co-founded and launched in 2016 by Partners Andre de Haes and Alex Brunicki, the BACKED portfolio now consists of 67 companies with an aggregate value of €10.7Bn including three unicorns: SkyMavis, the company that experienced the fastest revenue growth in history through their play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, the cloud-native core banking platform Thought Machine; and the Ethereum Layer 2 solution Immutable X. Four portfolio companies have exited, such as mobile gaming studio, Hutch Games, which sold to MTG for $375M in November 2020.
The company's investors include five major institutions both publicly-listed firms such as Groupe Bruxelles Lambert and private firms such as Wilshire Associates, alongside 20 leading venture-focused family offices and over 20 entrepreneurs, including several from Backed’s own portfolio. 80 per cent of BACKED’s recent funding came from existing investors.
Acting on its human-centric ethos, BACKED runs a proprietary 18-month founder support programme offered to all early stage founding teams. It contains 24 features across startup fundamentals with a special emphasis on people-related factors, including situational leadership training, culture and values workshops, hiring support via an in-house recruiter, access to mental health services and an in-house executive coach for founders and leadership teams.
The company also places an emphasis on community; hosting over 30 events annually from founder dinners to a 1,000 person party at the Finnish tech conference Slush, and co-hosting conferences such as Coin-Op, a global blockchain-gaming summit held at the London Science Museum.
BACKED was also one of the earliest firms to launch a Venture Scout programme in Europe. To date four investments have been made via their network of 60 Venture Scouts, including cellular agriculture startup Hoxton Farms and Black beauty brand Afrocenchix.
We've no doubt we'll be reporting back soon on the impact of both this investment fund and further BACKED successes!
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Published on: 22nd February 2022
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