Global venture capital firm Eight Roads Ventures has announced it will invest $375m (£267m) into ‘promising’ technology scaleups.
The fund will be used to support between 15 and 20 growth-stage companies across Europe and Israel. London-based Eight Roads Ventures hope to use this latest fund to help selected companies expand from 50 to 500+ employees.
Fast-growing scaleups will be chosen from the enterprise, consumer, FinTech and healthcare IT sectors. The average investment for each will be between $10m (£7.1m) and $30m (£21.3m).
The Eight Roads team will help founders with building out their sales and marketing teams as will be on-hand to assist with geographic expansion.
Davor Hebel, managing partner and head of Eight Roads Ventures Europe, spoke about the news: “We find ambitious entrepreneurs across the continent but there is a real lack of credible scaleup advice and business-building experience to help them beat the odds.
“We will continue to support our entrepreneurs with our global platform and value-add team of operators as they take their companies from 50 to 500 employees and beyond.
“We are confident that with the right help the European ecosystem can systematically create $10bn+ global tech businesses.”
On the investment climate in the UK, Davor Hebel added: “Brexit has had no impact on us thus far. Companies based here like Made.com continue to do well and in fact our last four investments: Decibel Insight, Rimilia, Duco and OTA Insight came out of the UK.
“We hope that the UK maintains an immigration-friendly stance to keep attracting the world’s best talent for its scale-ups, a critical ingredient for building globally successful companies.”
Eight Roads Ventures has backed over 20 companies including AppsFlyer, Compte Nickel, InnoGames, Made.com, Neo4j, Treatwell and Wallapop since launching its first £100m fund in 2010.
This latest investment is its biggest to date, (Europe Fund II launched in 2015 at £150m), and brings their total investment into growing companies over the past 10 years to almost $6bn.