Finally good news for european startups, the times reports that a new development fund is being put together to invest in early stage technology companies.
European Founders Capital (EFC) will have initially £20 millions to play with, but is looking to reach at least the £50 millions mark. The plan is to make early stage funding more available to european companies, imitating the valley’s seed funding mentality.
The fund will be led by two of the most know english tech entrepreneurs, Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman. Micheal is the co-founder of the social networking site Bebo, founded in 2005 and sold to AOL (Micheal and his wife made a combined profit of $595 million from the deal). Brent is the co-founder of Lastminute.com Ltd, an online discount vacations website that survived the dot-com bubble and was sold to Sabre Holdings for £577 millions.
They clearly know what they are doing. They will be joined by Rogan Angelini-Hurll and Peter Dubens. “We aren’t taking institutional money,” Birch said said. “All the money comes from founders – people who have done it before.” Birch plans on positioning the fund between angel investments (£50.000 to £100.000) and venture capitalists which invest several millions per company.
It is really great and refreshing to see such news, and see the stratup-focused funds grow in Europe, joining two pioneering experiments: European Founders and Team Europe Ventures in the effort of promoting and strengthening european entrepreneurship.
Putting money behind new businesses is the only way to go now to give the little people a start in the big world and by doing this it also helps rebuild the financial crises around the world as we are investing and pumping money back into the world.