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In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.

In this article, we talked to Latin Leap Ventures, a Latin America-based venture capital fund that currently manages investments worldwide and partners with purpose-driven companies that are looking to get into the Latam market. We decided to get in touch with Latin Leap due to their interesting purpose-driven tech focus and their aim to become a key player in the economic development of the regions they invest in.

Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?

Latin Leap: Latin Leap is a Venture Capital Studio that was established to create a unique investment platform to soft-land purpose-driven tech companies in Latin America. We are a sector-agnostic fund, but core verticals include Agtech, Edtech, Fintech, Healthtech, HR tech, and Mobility.

Our average ticket size per investment is around USD 2M.

FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio – and why?

Latin Leap: Some exciting companies in our portfolio include Dimuto, a Singapore-based agri-food trade tech solutions platform, and Talkpush, a Hong Kong-based recruitment platform.
These companies are pioneering the digitalization of supply chains and recruitment processes in Latin America, an emerging market where most traditional business processes remain largely manual and labor-intensive. They are introducing tech solutions to improve lives, businesses, and productivity, and we are very excited as they continue on their growth paths in the region.
Our key persons have a strong individual track record of early local venture investing in Latin America.

FO: Why should a family office invest in Latin Leap as LP?

Latin Leap: Family offices should consider Latin Leap as we are committed to empowering and uplifting Latin American society through the soft-landing of technology in the region.

Through the deployment of international tech scale-ups and knowledge-intensive businesses, we hope to provide greater access, promote entrepreneurship, and foster education while at the same time taking equity positions in holding companies from Asia and gaining exposure to liquid exit markets. Family offices with a keen interest in pioneering and contributing to the development of emerging markets should contact our team of proven entrepreneurs, venture investors, and private equity executives.

FO: Are you also open to investments from European family offices?

Latin Leap: Yes we are. We are keen to work together with European family offices to keep growing our investment portfolio.

FO: Thanks for your time!

Headquarters: Colombia
Website: https://latinleap.vc

In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single-family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.

In this article, we talked to York IE, a venture capital firm founded by successful angel investors aiming to become part of the project by helping first-hand entrepreneurs to build and scale their projects in a sustainable and profitable manner instead of focusing on profit maximization. Their desire to be more than an investment partner and empower entrepreneurs and put their knowledge and experience at disposal of new tech generations makes this company a very exciting opportunity!

Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?

York IE: We believe entrepreneurs are the visionaries, hustlers, and operators and our vision is aligning with the entrepreneurs to reshape the way startups are built, scaled, and monetized since we think the current VC model is not always advantageous to entrepreneurs.
This is why our approach is different, as we believe in responsible fundraising where the founding teams maintain control of their business and their cap table. We are able to be so focused on our entrepreneurs because we run a syndicate model in which we take no management fees.

Our general investment approach is investing in strong industry and/or technology founder(s), preferably serial founder, seeking Go-to-Market (GTM) and Growth help, from a B2B and scalable subscription-based revenue (SaaS) models that have recurring revenue that is also repeatable, worldwide scalable, sustainable, and poised for growth and scale and are operating on tech laggard markets ripe for disruption.

Our average ticket size is US$500k and we plan to double it by the end of 2021.

FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio – and why?

York IE: We launched our investment firm because we had such a successful track record of success as angel investors. As angels, we invested in more than 60 companies and only had 4 failures. We also saw a lot of strategic exits, with many still vibrant and growing companies, including one successful IPO. Our portfolio companies are being rapidly adopted by customers and gaining significant market interest.
Some of the companies we’re bullish on include:

• MetaData, which was ranked 233 on the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies
• Finmark, which was recently named a top 5 startup of the year
• WEVO, which is the only company that can diagnose and compare multiple pages across a visitor’s digital journey giving companies an unprecedented understanding of their customer experience
• Auditoria, which continues to announce new Intelligent Automation capabilities and partnerships to transform the finance back office
• Datazoom, the first Video Data Platform, that standardized data for video teams as streaming video explodes
• uConnect, Creator of the first all-in-one virtual career center for colleges and universities
• Canvs, holds NLP patents around emotion in conversations driven by a proprietary and unique ontology of language around sentiment analysis

FO: Why should a Family Office invest in York IE as LP?

York IE: We believe our deal flow is better than other firms because of the pre-existing relationships with entrepreneurs, corporate development and venture capital teams, our strong technology and engineering background and networks together with our investment portfolio history, exits, value-add, and track record. Also, we are clearly differentiated due to our specific approach – entrepreneur-first; market intelligence, and data-led, as due to the region (Northeast) and the startup stage we invest in.

Finally, something that proves our different approach is that we work daily with our investments so we’re helping them scale, instead of just waiting for quarterly updates.

The firm is made up of a diverse group of high net worth individuals, family offices, and institutions who want access to a unique asset class and our strong deal flow, which has been cultivated over the past 15 years working in tech. Our investment partners invest alongside our own capital. Since it is an evergreen syndicate model and not a fund, we are always looking for new investors to join.

FO: Are you also open to investments from European family offices?

York IE: Yes. We have a long history of doing business internationally and expect the same for York IE

FO: Thanks for your time!

Headquarters: Manchester, New Hampshire, USA
Website: York IE

In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.

In this article, we talked to Twenty Seven Ventures (27V), a venture capital firm focused on empowering the next generations by fostering e-learning and productivity companies worldwide, contributing current and next generations to achieve more and overcome their goals with technology.

Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?

27V: We are curating a group of thoughtful founders building the foundations of human learning and productivity. We invest in companies worldwide that are focused on the EdTech and Future of Work (FoW) and are at the pre-Seed and Seed stages.

Our average ticket investment is $25k – $250k.

FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio – and why?

27V: We’re big believers in the newest wave of EdTech companies, which is much more focused on community and peer-supported learning. This is especially prescient today as the new generation of learners is digitally native and very comfortable – nee prefer – building relationships in virtual spaces.

Some of our portfolio companies are Fiveable, Edlyft, and 101Edu.

FO: Why should a Family Office invest in 27V as LP?

27V: The team is completely focused on our investment sectors – Education and Future of Work – and we are increasingly being recognized as thought leaders in the verticals globally. We have co-invested with top-tier global investors including KPCB, Emerson Collective, Point72 Ventures, Village Global, Next Play Ventures, Urban.US, Google, BMW, YC, and more. For family offices looking at pure financial returns and access to co-investment opportunities in high growth global startups, 27V is a great vehicle for investment.

Additionally, if the Family Offices operate in our chosen sectors – education and work – we are able to provide insights and help the principals operate at the bleeding edge by staying connected to the amazing founders we invest in.

FO: Are you also open to investments from European family offices?

27V: Yes, absolutely! We just made our first investment in Europe – an EdTech company out of London – and we’re just getting started.

FO: Thanks for your time!

Website: Twenty Seven Ventures

In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single-family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.

In this article, we talked to CoFound Partners, a venture capital firm focused on the enterprise software, databases, and technological infrastructure that aims to help companies on the GTM and sales Growth process by investing in seed and early stages to become a trustful and relevant early partner of the companies they invest in on their path to profitability and success.

Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?

CoFound:  We invest primarily in seed-stage rounds of enterprise software and B2B startups in which GTM and sales is a top priority for the founders. The majority of our investments are based in the U.S. but we may make opportunistic investments in companies domiciled in Canada, Western Europe, and Israel.

The ticket size for Fund II will be $250-500k for initial checks and reserve 50% of the Fund for follow on investments in subsequent rounds.

FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio – and why?

CoFound: Fund I is still a very nascent portfolio but has already experienced a number of meaningful inflection points and markups. For instance, HR-technology platform ChartHop raised a subsequent Series A round led by top Silicon Valley VC firm, Andreesen Horowitz at a 3x step up from CoFound’s valuation.

All of our investments to date have been alongside premier institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Thrive Capital, and leading seed-stage funds.

FO: Why should a Family Office invest in CoFound Partners as LP?

CoFound: The market field we invest in, mainly enterprise software, database, and technological infrastructure, has been one of the most attractive areas to invest in both the public and private markets over the past 5-10 years with many venture-backed companies going public and trading at attractive multiples in the public markets and producing outstanding returns for their early-stage investors.

We are in the early innings of digitizing the enterprise and we will provide our LPs the access to some of the most promising seed-stage B2B and marketplace startups because of our unique GTM value-add and collaborative check size. Despite investing at this stage is risky, we have a well-diversified portfolio, both in different tech fields but also in different problem-solving approaches that enable us to mitigate the idiosyncratic risk.

FO: Are you also open to investments from European family offices?

CoFound: We successfully oversubscribed our first fund but we’re starting to discuss Fund 2 and would be delighted to extend a preview to  EU family offices!

FO: Thanks for your time!

Headquarters: New York, USA
Website: CoFound Partners

In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.

In this article, we talked to UVC Partners, a Munich- and Berlin-based venture capital fund. We decided to get in touch with UVC due to their interesting B2B focus, many successful investments in the past and their proximity to the Technical University of Munich.

Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?

UVC Partners: UVC Partners is a leading Munich and Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm with over €225 million under management. We partner with European technology-based B2B start-ups and focus on industrial technologies, enterprise software, as well as mobility solutions. Investment ticket sizes range from €0.5 to €4 million initially and up to €15 million in total per company.

FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio – and why?

UVC Partners: In our broad portfolio, we have many future technology and market leaders like FlixMobility, Konux and TWAICE Technologies.

FLIXMOBILITY:
FLIXMOBILITY is a Munich based mobility startup, founded by BCG alumni and supported by the entrepreneurship centers of LMU and TUM. UVC got early in touch with the startup in 2012 before market entry. Together with HV Capital, UVC was the first institutional investor in the company by providing seed financing in 2013. Thereafter, UVC was an active board member and supported the founders finding and defending valuable market positioning, while the valuation increased from €8.6 million to over €1 billion today.

KONUX:
Konux is a leading German AI scale-up, improving the network availability for railway operators. The founders graduated from TUM and were supported on different levels by UnternehmerTUM. The team participated in our TechFounder accelerator program and received the Manage&More Scholarship. Together with the US top-tier investor NEA, UVC participated in Konux’s Series A financing round in 2016 and helped the start-up to build a high profile organization as well as attract follow-on investments, resulting in a total funding amount of over $51 million.

TWAICE:
TWAICE is a promising provider of predictive analytics software for lithium-ion batteries. The founders were PhD students at TUM and signed up in UnternehmerTUM’s entrepreneurial education. UVC was an important sparring partner for the young team at a very early stage and built up a close relationship with the founders. The initial investment was made in August 2018 by UVC with Speedinvest as a co-investor. As chairman of the board UVC played an active role especially in introducing strategic partners and customers. Through hands-on introductions to established companies, we significantly accelerated the market entry and helped TWAICE to attract top talents as well as follow-on capital from top-tier investors.

FO: Why should a family office invest in UVC as LP?

UVC Partners: We enjoy the preferred partnership with UnternehmerTUM, Europe’s leading center for startups and innovation. Through this ecosystem, we provide startups with a unique platform to accelerate their growth. UVC can leverage a network of over 1,000 corporate partners and 5,000 students per year at UnternehmerTUM, and thus can uniquely provide first customers and top team members and employees to start-ups. This is very attractive to founders and gives UVC a strong advantage to win competitive deals. By leveraging our engineering and entrepreneurial backgrounds, with 70+ years of combined venture and startup experience, we grow great ideas into great businesses – and deliver high returns. UVC has a deep understanding of how to grow and scale B2B start-ups. Our UVC I performance already is ranked in the top quartile of European VC funds.

FO: Thanks for your time!

Headquarter: Munich, Germany
Website: https://www.uvcpartners.com

In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.

In this article, we talked to Storm Ventures, a Menlo Park-based venture capital fund. We decided to get in touch with Storm Ventures due to their successful early-stage investments in Marketo or site search tool Algolia. We talked to Storm’s Managing Director Ryan Floyd.

Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?

Storm Ventures: We invest in B2B SaaS companies worldwide that have found product-market fit typically around 500K in ARR and then we help them scale to 100M+. We are experts at helping companies scale their go to market strategy as all B2B companies use similar GTM tools and techniques. We are investing out of Fund IV and have over 20 years of helping companies scale with this strategy. 

FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio?

Storm Ventures: We were the early investors in Marketo which was one of the first marketing automation SaaS companies which we ultimately helped to take public and eventually sold to Adobe. We are the early investors in Mobile Iron which is a public company (MOBL) focused on mobile security. The company recently announced that it would be sold to a private equity firm. We have several other exciting companies in the portfolio that represent substantial gains such as Talkdesk (call center saas), Algolia (search API saas) and Workato (workflow automation) and many more. We were the first or early investor in all of these companies with the same strategy. 

FO: Why is investing in startups through Storm Ventures a good choice for family offices?

Storm Ventures: We have many family offices involved with Storm. We have consistently delivered positive returns across all of our funds even in difficult times with a strategy that we continue to improve over time. We have a small diverse investment team that is focused on returns not fees. We intentionally keep our funds <300m to optimize for returns for our LPs. We are also very large personal investors in our funds as we cannot think of many better places for us to personally invest.

FO: One last question, since many family offices from our readership are from Europe: are you also open to investments from European FOs?

Storm Ventures: We are open to family offices from Europe and currently have many European investors.

FO: Thanks for your time!

Headquarter: Menlo Park, United States
Website: https://www.stormventures.com

In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.

In this article, we talked to Yabeo, a Grünwald-based venture capital fund. We decided to get in touch with Yabeo due to their exciting flexible evergreen investment approach which offers opportunities for fund investors as well as the investment target.

Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?

Yabeo: Investment focus industries: Fin & InsurTech, HealthTech, CleanTech, Food & AgriTech, EdTech;

Investment Geography: Eurozone with focus on DACH, UK and selectively North America;

Stage: Initial entry (Pre) Series A, Series A, with follow on investments up to the exit (IPO, Trade Sale);

Ticket size: Starting from 0.3 Mio. up to 5.0. For most promising companies it can go above 5 Mio (partially via SPVs),

Investment strategy: We have an open-end (evergreen) fund structure, which grants both to us and to our investors maximum flexibility, and represents the basis of our long term investment strategy:

• We invest when we find the right opportunity and not with committed capital
• We exit when we believe it is the right timing, as opposed to when end of fund lifetime is due or track record for next fundraising is needed
• We focus on trustful and longstanding investors with stable investment approach, also in times of crisis
• We actively support our portfolio companies with our Experience, Know-How and Network, as well as our investors’
• We actively manage synergies between our portfolio companies
• We actively manage Cap Table 
• We invest over the startup’s life cycle into our leading assets, irrespective of „fund duration” or stage, as we want to use our leading-edge due to longstanding relationships to founders, shareholders and other stakeholders for the selective portfolio companies. In this way, we are able to overweight good performing assets over time and participate in attractive secondary and convertible opportunities.

FO: What was your most successful investment so far?

Yabeo: Our current portfolio company CeraCare is a good example of a very successful investment. We first invested back in 2018, as part of Series A financing round. Cera Care is a healthtech company that provides tech-enabled care in the UK. The care market is highly fragmented and lags significantly behind in digitization. We invested regularly since 2018 and increased our share via financing rounds and financially attractive secondaries. Yabeo team is in very close contact with Cera’s management and other leading investors, actively advising and supporting company’s development. Cera’s valuation nearly doubled each year, and we look forward to further support and invest in Cera in the coming years. The next challenge and big opportunity is the upcoming internationalization, where yabeo is actively involved.

FO: Why should a family office invest in Yabeo as LP?

Yabeo: As a result of our active investment strategy, family offices and small institutional investors suit best for us. We understand the needs and rationals of family offices and very much welcome their support for our portfolio companies with their network and knowledge. We grant full access to our pipeline and existing portfolio companies, and also give our investors the additional benefit of overweighting a single portfolio company via our SPV structures.

FO: Thanks for your time!

Headquarter: Grünwald, Germany
Website: yabeo.de