Seedstars has launched Seedstars Capital, an investment platform for emerging venture capital (VC) fund managers, with the support of xMultiplied, a Swiss based investment holding company.
Seedstars Capital is an alternative investment platform specialising in emerging and frontier markets, which incubates, accelerates and invests in first-time and emerging venture capital funds active in the pre-seed to Series A stages across complementary geographies and sectors.
The platform partners with emerging and diverse managers with local expertise and unique strategies and provides the necessary resources to launch new funds and develop their investment firms. At the same time, it becomes the catalyst for investments into these early-stage firms by providing investors a diversified allocation solution to the asset class within emerging markets.
Despite the exponential growth of the VC industry across emerging markets in recent years, most early-stage VC funds raised are small in size and raised by an increasing number of new and diverse teams with limited track record and resources, which reduces the amount of capital limited partners can deploy to these skillful 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.
“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,” said Benjamin Langer, partner of Seedstars Capital.
“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.”
The first fund launched by the platform is Seedstars International Ventures, an industry agnostic pre-seed and seed stage emerging and frontier market fund. Recently, the fund announced its first close, which garnered support and commitments from notable 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. Moreover, Seedstars is currently working towards launching funds focused on ed-tech, supply chain, climate-tech and other impact sectors with outstanding rising managers in emerging markets to be announced soon.
