Alexander Marrapese

Some seed-stage VC firms give up their pro rata rights due to lacking capital to meet the high capital requirements of a late-stage round and competition from larger VC firms. Alpha Partners, SignalRank, and SaaS Ventures are now stepping in to help seed-stage VC investors exercise their pro rata rights to maintain their ownership percentage. VC firms like Alpha Partners, SignalRank, and SaaS Ventures specialize in providing capital for pro rata investments for Series B and beyond funding rounds. #VentureCapital #Startups

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In today's rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape, the importance of defense technology has never been more critical. I'm sharing this article from Sifted, which explores the significant advancements and investments in dual-use tech that can bolster both civilian and military applications. Understanding these trends is essential for staying informed about the future of defense and technology. Thanks, Daria Dmytrenko, for pushing this topic! 👏

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Italy levelling up their startup game. One government, one country at a time the understanding develops and action is taken. To build strong, multi-generational #ecosystems for #innovation, #entrepreneurship, #investment, #jobcreation and the #sustainability transformation, these key stakeholders need to collaborate towards a unified vision. If you ask me, ideally for a better future for people and planet 🌱🌊🌞 Startups: 🤠 innovative, brave, agile, at the forefront of new developments. Running on Ramen and Coffee. Corporates: 🏢 In need of solutions to remain relevant and thrive. Have clients, resources, reach, talent, infrastructure, capital. Investors: 🤑 Good investors have the expertise, network and capital to make success happen. Fuel the ventures. Is performance metric and benchmarking tool. Important to measure non-monetary impact of the business activity as well! Academia & research: 🤓 Develop brave, smart, curious and energetic talent to work with the latest of what humanity develops in scientific research. Politics: Super-networked people operating on systems level. Slowish due to democratic processes. Important to be brave and put policies and infrastructure in place with transformative and long-term benefits for society and our natural environment we live in, and depend on! Like STATION F in Paris Media: With the power, reach and responsibility to show-case positive solutions, positive rolemodels, the people and vision behind big and small ideas which improve how we live and work every day. We're building our future today. Every day. One day at a time. 🌱🌞 It's important to show what we're doing, to provide hope, perspective and motivate everyone to contribute to the solution. Let's build #EoTs - Ecosystems of Transformation. Let's build them together. Share in the comments what you need to thrive in your mission, or how you create positive impact people need to know about! Cambridge Judge Business School Stanford LEAD ETH Zurich, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering digitalswitzerland World Economic Forum Hugo Rauch Michael Jackson Tech Barcelona Oliver Bussmann Nicolas Bürer

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When 30+ investors chase you with $500k - 1M cheque but you don’t want to commit (yet) During the past few months, Davide Roznowicz and I received a lot of DMs from venture capitalists: generally, they were inviting us to join a call and let them know what we are working on. From my understanding, it works like in job interviews: you make a prescreening call just to get to know each other and see if the interests are aligned. If yes, you will progress with other interviews (maybe 2 - 3) with other representatives of the venture firm.  These are some aspects that are evaluated in a startup to be potentially funded: ➡ Team: what is the quality of your team? Why is your team the best team to solve this problem? ➡ Market Size: how large is this market?  ➡ Competition: how competitive is this market? ➡ Differentiation: how will you beat the competition? ➡ Metrics: what’s your current growth indicator? Eventually, if both parties are happy, you, as a company, will receive the funding. ✅ It’s an exchange of money for shares of the startup: from the very few introductory calls I attended in the past, a possible contract in Switzerland for an early-stage startup created by young but solid people, it could be $500k+ in exchange for 20% of the startup. ✅ Most of the venture firms that contacted us invest in Business to Business (B2B) startups: working on a B2B AI-first software startup, in the current AI trend, makes the investment more appealing. Nevertheless, we believe that raising money is a no-way-back decision and we want to avoid doing it when we are still without any customers. Venture firms take bets and hope that one or a few startups across their portfolio will become enormous and will pay back all the lost bets: instead, we bet 100% on what we do, so we should take care of every step we take. In our view, it’s much better to gain some traction and, at that point, if we need money to expand our activity, we will raise money. ❎ Raising right now would mean plenty of time lost talking to potential investors, receiving a lot of “No”, talking again to others, and not progressing with the core of inlook.ai, which is what really matters to us right now.  ✅ We also want to be fully aware of every research, development, marketing and business side of what we are building: therefore we don’t plan to hire anyone for some time. Becoming a company surviving on steroids (burning money month after month and not making any profit) is not something we are interested in.

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💫Exploring alternative financing options for impact-driven startups 💫 At maze impact, we believe in empowering early-stage impact founders. While we offer equity investments and acceleration programmes, we know that venture capital isn't always the right fit for every business. So, we reached out to three industry leaders who specialise in alternative financing options to help founders scale without compromising control. 💡 Meet the experts: Paul Boutelier from WE DO GOOD - Crowdfunding through crowd revenue-based financing (RBF). Learn how businesses can raise capital from a community of individual investors and keep their ownership intact. Thomas Gmeiner from Brainforest - Using traditional revenue-based financing to support forest regeneration and sustainability-focused ventures with patient capital. Matias Aramburu from Goparity | Impact finance - Crowdlending for sustainability, connecting businesses with individual investors to fund impactful projects that support social and environmental change. In our new blog post, we dive into how these innovative financing models can help startups at different stages, with flexibility and founder-friendly terms. Read the full interviews and learn how these unique options can complement or even replace traditional venture capital. 🔗 Read the full blog post now: https://bit.ly/4902K8D #impactinvesting #mazeimpact

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I couldn’t be prouder to be a Venture Partner at Isomer Capital (aka the best European FoF - at least for me) as we just announced the launch of our pioneering £100m secondaries fund. This fund is dedicated to acquiring stakes from LPs in various VC funds, tapping into a massive and largely unexplored market. 🌟 Key Highlights: - Focused Investment: Primarily targeting stakes in VC funds, with selective investments in private companies. - Robust Funding: Already over 20% funded, thanks to strong support from Nordic family offices and a German foundation. - Market Potential: With a growing number of private tech companies and a VC liquidity crunch, Europe's VC secondaries market is poised for rapid growth. - Track Record: This isn’t Isomer’s first foray into the secondaries market. As a firm we’ve done several secondaries deals with portfolio companies and VC firms, including early-stage VC Seedcamp (in 2021) and mobility giant Bolt (in 2023). - Expert Team: Welcoming the amazing Omolade (Rachel) A., formerly of Coller Capital, as a principal to lead this initiative. 💡 Investment Strategy: - 65-75% of the fund will buy "LP interest" stakes in VC funds. - 15-25% will be directed towards stakes in companies. - Up to 15% reserved for flexible investment opportunities. 📈 Looking Ahead: We're targeting returns of 2-3x, with significant distributions expected in the next 4-7 years. As one of the few players in this space, we're not just participating in the market—we're driving it forward. Read all about it here: https://lnkd.in/dc7sbC3G #VentureCapital #SecondariesFund #EuropeanVC

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Why Do Analysts/Associates Matter at VC Companies? This is a question many founders have, and I am delighted to answer. Junior-level employees at VC firms play a crucial role in the investment process. They are often the ones taking the first meetings, conducting due diligence, and making the initial assessments of potential investments. The initial meetings are critical. Due diligence evolves into more serious inquiries, and those first interactions serve as a litmus test for all future relationships. If you're a founder hesitant about engaging with a junior-level employee, consider it the first step in a long-term relationship-building process. These early conversations can be more impactful than you might think...

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Calling ALL Emerging VC Managers in my network 📢 This is worth applying for 👇 Jonathan, Gregor and their teams have put together a strong plan to help you accelerate your fund launch. If you're investing in European tech then that's good news for you. I've been speaking with both 1-2-1 and attended their latest webinar on it. I'm definitely convinced I'll throw my hat in the ring. 👊 If you're serious about building your firm to invest in European tech, you may consider doing it too. And if you think I'm silly for sharing and increasing the competition... Ok maybe don't apply. We have enough assholes in Europe thinking VC is a 0 sum game. Trust me: paying it forward and see what happens is a much better game to play. So yeah, go for it, and help us all make Europe a much better and stronger ecosystem if you think this is one for you 💪 A couple of answers I got that may be useful to you: - Do you need the fund to be domiciled in Europe or even legally launched yet? No, but you must be investing in Europe. And your goal should be to be to have the fund in object live in 2025 (even tail end) - Do you need a deck? It helps but if you are in between funds like me, you can come up with a pre-deck "something" and add to your old deck. - Is it in person? The core bits yes, but the schedule is easily manageable and will be synced with the LP/GP top events schedule next year, so you'd be silly to even want to be remote if you want to really raise a fund. More detail on the post below 👇 👇

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My VC-tech newsletter for the first half of September can be summarized in 5 words - Summer Slump and AI Hype - https://lnkd.in/eHuihDec European VC Market 📉 August was the worst month for European startup funding since April 2017, with only €1.8bn raised across 247 funding rounds. 📈 Despite this, median late venture rounds are growing in size, with the median Series B round size up 40% year on year. Global VC Trends 📉 The number of VC transactions continued to decline in Q2'24, to 4,207 from 4,452 in Q1. 📈 However, aggregate value ticked up to $69.4bn from $61.2bn, boosted by tech deals. 🚨 Exits continued at a very moderate pace, with only 13 VC-backed IPOs in Q2 compared to 44 in Q1 2024. AI Update 🤖 AI features prominently among the 6,868 VC funds currently in market worldwide, aiming to raise a combined $462.6bn. 💰 The US has increased its domination of VC in recent years, with prominent funds like Andreessen Horowitz and Balderton Capital investing heavily in AI (A16Z did close their Miami shop which Khosla shrugged off). Mega-Deals and IPOs 🚀 Safe Superintelligence raised a $1+ billion round at a reported $5 billion valuation, while OpenAI and Coreweave are out to raise unprecedented rounds. 💰 Sequoia Capital bought $861 million worth of Stripe shares. IPO 🔔 Companies like OpenAI, CoreWeave, and Rebellions are reportedly planning IPOs. Come along for much else on how VC valuations shaped up in early Sep, the California AI act, AI eating jobs at your favourite BNPL shop, Paul Graham's awesome new article on 'founder mode'. #VC #Startup #Tech #AI #IPO #VentureCapital #Funding #Innovation

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When I receive a pitch deck, one of the first things I evaluate is The Team. Does the team have the technical expertise to solve the problem they’re addressing? At Ingressive Capital, one of our key selection criteria is that at least one of the founders must be technical. This ensures that they not only understand the problem but also have the capability to build and scale a solution.

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🚀Atomico’s Latest Report: Europe’s Tech Ecosystem Hits Trillion-Dollar Milestone 🇪🇺💼 Did you know that European tech companies have generated nearly $1 TRILLION in exit value over the past decade? 🤯 Which region outperformed in VC returns? 🗺️Over 10 years, European VCs saw 23.07% annual returns, compared to the US at 21.15%. In the last 5 years, Europe surged to 31.44%, outpacing the US at 25.20%. Key highlights: 🛒$597B in M&A value 🏛️ $329B in IPO value From Spotify's game-changing direct listing to Adyen's record-breaking IPO, European tech is proving its global competitiveness. More exciting developments: • European startups raised $15.6B in Q2 2024, up 14% from Q1 and 12% year-on-year. • European startup funding experienced a slowdown in Q3 2024, with startups raising a total of $11.3 billion, which is down 35% compared to the same period last year. However, the total investment in European tech for 2024 so far stands at $40.9 billion and is on track to equal 2023's total investment of $58.2 billion • Energy has become the most funded sector in Europe in 2024, overtaking Fintech and Health • AI now accounts for a record 18% of VC funding in Europe, up from 7% in 2014 Follow for more investment insights. #EuropeanTech #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #startup #VentureCapital

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Pro rata or not pro rata? That is the question One of my favourite pieces on this, and VC portfolios in general is Moonfire’s research on portfolio construction. 📊 They simulated a series of VC portfolios to try and find the optimal one. I really like this series of articles since it explains, at least in part, why VCs behave the way they behave. 🤓 I’m adding in the comments all links to the research and the simulator. It’s free, kindly provided by Moonfire. Whether you are a #founder or an #investor, you should have a look. Some TLDR but again, go read the whole thing: ⚡️ VC follows the so called “Power Law” meaning that most returns in a portfolio come from a small number of investments. It’s not about being always right, but rather how right you are, when you pick a good company. 👑 Being good at picking winners is the main difference between a good VC and a bad one. If you’re bad at picking winners you can invest in more companies and index the market, increasing the chances of returning 1x and avoid losses. If you want to achieve 2, 3, 5x, you either need to improve your decision quality or invest in fewer companies and hope for the best 💸 Follow-ons tend to be mathematically less profitable than investments in new companies. Yet VCs still do plenty of them for non financial reasons like extending runway, giving confidence to future investors and so on. How conscious are you as an investor of your portfolio construction? I’m curious to know how many VCs/Angels actually discuss this internally and how many founders are aware of their positioning within the portfolio of their existing investors. #VentureCapital #PortfolioConstruction #ProRata #StartupInvestment #PowerLaw

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High valuation isn't always the best scenario as people usually think 😑 I'm currently looking deep into AI startups and the whole sector. Let's get the case of Perplexity, one of the biggest AI-chatbot firms that was founded in 2022 with ~10M monthly active users (as of Jan 2024). In January, the company raised nearly $74 million at a valuation of $540 million. In April, sources said that Perplexity is raising at least $250 million more at a valuation of between $2.5 billion and $3 billion.  We are talking about at least a +463% valuation growth in 3 months. When a startup that has a valuation of US$200k goes up to US$600k in 3 months we go like 'Ok, big growth but not crazy'. But when you have a +US$500M valuation and you have this growth, I start to be more concerned. But why it can be bad to have a disproportional valuation? Here is an explanation from Fast Company: "The first, and probably most important, is the impact on the company’s ability to attract quality talent... most people in the startup world join startups for the equity upside in a liquidity event or IPO. When a highly-priced round is completed, guess what–the strike price of the options also goes up. In effect, the hurdle for the options to be “in the money” has gone up and the value of the options has decreased." "Another difficulty in raising a highly-priced round is the set of expectations from the new investors...When you next need to raise capital, you may be faced with a down round, or in extreme circumstances, a complete recap or non-funding." Thus, investors and founders need to have all this in mind to not commit themselves to future problems ☠

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A No Fluff Business Podcast My first in person podcast in Singapore W/ Sina Meraji of Learning Loop - Sina shares advice and insights on many different topics DM me to get early access to 1-2 clips from this episode w/ Sina CC: buildspace Ask: For context: I am participating in BuildSpace and looking for feedback on what I have created with Business Podcast by Roohi thus far: Here are the questions below- feel free to answer whichever ones you are comfortable with 1.what’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced when trying to learn about startups and venture capital? 2. how do you currently find reliable information about the startup world? 3. what do you wish existed to help you better understand the startup and vc space? Feel free to DM me or reply to this post with your answers

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A really interesting and comprehensive data analysis of the Venture Capital market by Marktlink Capital. For a 6 months project they analysed funds, and clustered them into 4 groups: ➞ The Venture Classicists - Union Square Ventures (Nick Grossman), Visionaries Club (Sebastian Pollok), DCVC (Matt Ocko) - Usually focused on early stage, and opportunistic in terms of stage from early to B stage. Classicists funds raise on average $ 220m and their avg. net TVPI of 2.1x and a net IRR of 13.7%. ➞ The New Asset Managers - Tiger Global Management (Ali Hartman), Battery Ventures (Shiran Shalev) - Usually large funds with avg. of $293m in fund size, They have net IRR (16.3%) and making 2.0x in net TVPI. they rank highest on DPI (1.6x). ➞ The Super Funds - General Catalyst (Carin Watson), DFJ Growth (David Han-Dizon), IVP (Tamar Yehoshua) - Very experienced fund managers who on avg. raise 4+ funds, with mean fund size 350m+. Their avg. net IRR (10.8%), TVPI (1.7x) and DPI (1.1x). ➞ The Artisanal Masters - Pear VC (Pejman Nozad), Fika Ventures (Eva Ho), Partech (Boris Golden) - smaller funds focused on early stage with median fund size $126m, with 45% success raised to close their funds. Their net TVPI (2.4x), avg. net IRR (12.7%) and net DPI metrics (1.3x). In the analysis they used a database of 2,092 North American and European VCs from 29 countries. There were 1,692 funds (81% of the funds), 131 UK funds with 400 EU funds. 31% of the funds Early-stage, with 51% Multi stage and only 8% focused on growth. According to the creators of this model Jules Lucas, Vladislav Manolov, Adriaan van de Mortel and Jaap Vriesendorp this is a simplified model and will evolve as more data is collected, and the model is evoled. One of the key fields I would love to see and maybe could be collaborated with our work at The Table (Julie Blane, Carmel Rafaeli 💯, Mea L., Sthembile Nkabinde), is to understand if there is correlation in those 4 cluster to where female investors take GP and Partner roles and how their portfolio invests in female founders. Another angle, that I am interested is their ESG and sustainability practices and footprints, who is reporting on their carbon emissions, and what is their contribution to avoidance and/or reduction of CO2 with their funds. #venturecapital #dataanalysis #funds

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Democratising access to VC! Included VC's fully funded, virtual programme is now open for applications. If you're interested in the sector/ know someone who is then check it out: https://lnkd.in/eFcCA82s You don't need prior financial experience/ investing experience and can apply from anywhere as it's a global programme. #vc #investor #globalprogrammes

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2024 has been 📈📉🤝💰👶🍼🍌🛥✈ 🌴 🥱🔥 It's been tough again But our founders smashed it, raising $176m across 6 rounds We made 5 new investments across Europe, the same pace as last year - hello NetFabric.ai & Recurse ML (🤫 x 3) Andrew Sheffield was promoted to Principal, Clare Zhang to Associate and Head of FFOH, and we welcomed Matt Gill, CFA as CFO I became a Dad for the first time in May (🐣👼🦞❤) Our Founders' Dinners were the best yet, deepening relationships and collaboration across so many companies FFOH Editions 11 & 12 saw 600+ founders meet 300+ investors for 2,300+ one-on-one meetings And we were in person at Slush for the 3rd time and WVC:E and LTST for the 1st time We started asking founders what they really think about us and the results were good - 4.7/5 We grew our angel community, brought angels into every new investment we made and held some awesome events at Warner Yard It's been an incredible year For the full top 10 highlights, check out the link in the comments below 👇 A huge thank you to our founders, my team and everybody who supported us, especially Federico Pirzio-Biroli 🙏 Looking forward to doing it all over again in 2025...after a good rest... 😴 #venturecapital #startups #technology #innovation #future #economy #markets #fundraising #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #founders

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“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” - Theophrastus, Greek philosopher. Excellent breakdown on DePIN short term prospects, opportunities and challenges by Lyllah Ledesma with viewpoints from VanEck's Pranav Kanade, Cumberland Labs' Christopher N., Fundstrat Global Advisors' Sean Farrell, GSR's Brian Rudick and Anand Iyer, David Garcia. TL:DR- DePin projects don't need tokens if planet scale demand for their solution already exists. Everyone needs their identity and private keys available wherever they go and no one wants to lose them. Everyone wants the gift of time. No one wants to lose time. MetaKeep's DePin Root of Trust <> Polygon ID and credentials are on fire because their offering higher quality products and performance than all the centralized incumbents, their eliminating 90% of their customer's costs, and their giving their customers' end users the gift of time, which is infinitely more valuable than a crypto token. https://lnkd.in/gv6F2eED Otto Mora Suraj R. Mulla Ravikant Agrawal Michael Blank Naga R Samineni Rohan Sharma Vinod Cherian Joseph Claudia Nemat Mia Melinda Jinyoung Englund Jeff Moss Christopher Outram Anunay K Eagle Yi Bob Pittman Marc Mercuri Paul Chan Mikito Ebishima Angela Son Nicolas Pouard, Steen Andersson Bruce Ahn Abdul Rehman Vikas Pandey Mickey Maher Max Luck Adam Lee

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