MiddleGame Ventures (MGV), a fintech-focused investment firm well known to Railsbank, has raised a new fund which targets post-seed, series A and series B lead investments in Europe and North America.
The MGV’s Venture Fund I has achieved its first close, with a final close target size of €150m and will invest in, and partner with B2B and B2B2C startups.
One of the new fund’s first investments was Railsbank.
Transformation
It will back companies driving the transformation of financial services from analog to digital and from centralised to decentralised. There will be an emphasis on middleware and back office solutions.
The idea is to enable technologies such as RegTech, Digital Identities, “FinData” and crypto-enabled infrastructure across banking, asset management, insurance, payments, and capital markets.
Anchor investors in the new fund are the Luxembourg Future Fund and the European Investment Fund. S&P Global is included among other institutional, strategic and family office investors.
The fund remains open to additional institutional and private investors ahead of a final close later in 2020.
Pascal Bouvier
Pascal Bouvier is co-founder of MGV, together with Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt.
Pascal said: “We are pleased to have new capital from substantial investors to support great, transformational businesses across Europe and the US with our highly focused fund. Our investors agree that specialist funds with experience working with entrepreneurs, incumbent financial institutions and regulators are best placed to thrive in an environment characterised by financial and technological cross-currents and significant regulatory constraints. We are excited to put our platform to work on behalf of investors and the next wave of innovators solving hard problems and re-architecting the industry.”
Patrick Nickels, chairperson of the Luxembourg Future Fund Board of Directors, added: “We are pleased to be an investor of MiddleGame Ventures fund aiming to support early stage FinTech companies. The Luxembourg Future Fund believes this commitment will help to strengthen the FinTech industry in Europe and generate positive spillovers in Luxembourg. This is a strategic sector for Luxembourg for economic diversification and we are delighted to contribute to its continuing development.”
“We are delighted to be supporting MiddleGame Ventures as an anchor investor in its new fund," said the EIF’s chief executive Pier Luigi Gilibert. “The EIF has a strong commitment to innovation in Europe, and we hope that this fund, with its focus on FinTech entrepreneurs, will assist us in that goal.”
Early stage
MGV partners have invested over $300m in early stage financial services firms over the past decade.
These deals include Ripple, Tandem Bank, SimpleSurance, Coverhound and CompareAsia.
MGV’s new fund has already made three representative investments in a capital markets digital platform and banking as a service and big data analytics startups in the UK (Railsbank, Nivaura and Gardenia Technologies).