Deep tech and enterprise focussed seed fund Angular Ventures has announced the closing of its debut fund at $41m for early-stage enterprise companies with global expansion plans based in Europe and Israel.
The firm, which has been operating in stealth mode for nearly two years, has already built a portfolio of 12 companies with plans to make 5-7 new investments per year.
The fund’s current portfolio spans Israel, the UK, Finland, Romania, and other countries.
Over 50 per cent of the fund’s capital comes from the US, and 74 per cent of the fund’s capital base is institutional, including two US-based endowments, several leading fund-of-funds, and sophisticated family offices from around the world.
The fund’s approach is to drive start-up growth and scale for early-stage companies from across Europe and Israel by rapid expansion into the United States.
Its General Partner and founder Gil Dibner said: “We invest early – from ‘first check’ to Series A, and our LPs have given Angular the green light to invest anywhere in Europe and Israel.
“This broad geographic mandate coupled with our specific industry focus and long track record in enterprise tech investing provides Angular Ventures with a distinct sourcing advantage: for example, we recently backed Valohai, a Finnish company building a version control platform for AI/ML.
Through his career, Dibner has backed 40 companies, and of these 28 have raised capital from US-based VC firms or been acquired by US-based acquirers. Eight have exited, and two, JFrog and SiSense, have reached unicorn status.
The VC’s roster of advisors include JFrog founder Fred Simon, Jerry Dischler who leads the product team for Google’s core ads business and Phil Wickham, founder of Sozo Ventures.
“One of our recent investments is Candu, a UK-born company in the customer success domain, founded by an American and an Italian,” continued Dibner.
“Taking advantage of Angular’s global network, we recently connected them with a senior advisor in our Israeli network who served as CTO and VP Product for a related company.
“His experience was best placed to support Candu. They are now successfully working closely together to tackle product challenges. This sort of cross-border high-touch value-add is a unique capability that Angular brings to the table for enterprise tech companies.”
Of Angular’s first 12 investments, seven have US VCs as co-investors, seven were led or co-led by Angular, and four have already raised follow-on capital at a significant mark-up in valuation.