With the help of Swiss investment holding company xMultiplied, Seedstars formally debuts Seedstars Capital, its investment platform for new venture capital (VC) fund managers. The platform collaborates with young, diverse managers with local knowledge and distinctive methods, and it offers them the resources they need to start new funds and grow their investment businesses. By giving investors a diverse allocation option to the asset class in emerging markets, it also serves as a motivator for investments in these early-stage companies.
Seedstars is fully committed to the achievement of the UN’s SDGs and integrates ESG and impact considerations into its manager selection process to drive positive changes. With the platform, Seedstars expects to drive over $500 million 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.
Despite the exponential growth of the VC industry across emerging markets in recent years, most early-stage VC funds raised are small in size (i.e. below $50m AUM) and raised by an increasing number of new and diverse teams with limited track records and resources, which reduces the amount of capital limited partners can deploy to these skilful and highly talented managers.
Seedstars seeks to bridge those market inefficiencies by working alongside new and diverse managers in the development of their strategies, providing the resources of its large community of limited partners, mentors, experts, physical locations and the tech and administrative infrastructure. By bringing these teams and assets together, Seedstars is building a global platform of high-performing and impactful strategies across emerging markets.
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 a positive impact across emerging markets. Providing outstanding new and diverse managers with the possibility to execute on their strategies will fuel economic growth while achieving market investment returns”.
The first fund launched by the platform is Seedstars International Ventures, an industry-agnostic pre-seed & seed-stage emerging & frontier market fund. Recently, the fund announced its first close, which garnered support and commitments from notably limited partners such as IFC, Visa Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Symbiotics.
The platform also works with Seedstars Africa Ventures, a regional-focused fund to back companies in the African continent. The fund has partnered with French private equity and asset manager LBO France to address the investment gap existing in the region.
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.
Seedstars is set to collaborate with a number of additional sector-specific technology funds, active from Pre-Seed to Series A, in emerging and frontier markets.
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