Launching Gilgamesh Ventures
We recently launched Gilgamesh Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City and focused on fintech in the Americas, encompassing both the United States and Latin America, with $9.5m in aggregate commitments. We target non-lead checks in early-stage ventures (pre-seed through Series A), along with follow-on investments in select portfolio companies in later rounds. What started with small single-deal SPVs in April 2020, has now evolved into $2.7+ million invested in 16 companies. So far 86% of our investments include diverse founders, along with 20% including female founders.
We started Gilgamesh to help fintech founders build huge companies in the US and LATAM. We are fintech specialists and founders. Working with Miguel Armaza to launch Gilgamesh while still a founder himself, Andrew Endicott left Petal in fall-2021 to focus full-time on Gilgamesh. At Petal, he helped hire hundreds of employees, helped raise approximately $250m in equity (including Petal’s recent Series D) and $500m in debt, and navigated the significant uncertainties and difficulties of building a consumer-facing fintech in the United States. He has a background in investment banking from Lazard and years as a corporate lawyer at Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Miguel’s background is different but complementary — long a fintech enthusiast and angel investor, Miguel has become a prominent podcast host via Fintech Leaders (which he founded) and the Wharton Fintech Podcast, which he co-hosted from January 2020 to August 2021 and grew 13x to a monthly audience of 130k. Miguel possesses deep experience in global institutional finance, including Citigroup and Bank of Tokyo. We understand financial services and fintech deeply and have strong relationships with builders in the space.
We believe our media strategy is a unique and meaningful feature of Gilgamesh that can add value to our companies. Miguel has built a platform with over 30k subscribers and has interviewed close to 200 global fintech founders and executives in the last several years, many of whom are now LPs, including Steve Sarracino (Activant), Renaud Laplanche (Upgrade / Lending Club), Laura Spiekerman (Alloy), Dan Henry (Green Dot), Anu Shultes (LendUp), Pedro Conrade (Neon), Prajit Nanu (Nium), Santiago Suarez (Addi), Bo Brustkern (LendIt), Sarah Hammer (Wharton), Inigo Rumayor (Arcus), and Brian Barnes (M1), among others.
Gilgamesh is also backed by a long list of fintech and financial industry leaders from the US, LATAM, and Asia, like Peter Fernandez (99), Marcelo Lima (Monashees), Ignacio Canals (Migrante), multiple family offices, Mexico’s NOA Capital, Encore Bank, and Foundation Capital, along with one-third of LPs being Wharton and UPenn alumna. The firm began investing while Miguel was still a 2nd year MBA at Wharton and Andrew was still Petal’s President. Our select investments include Klar, Xepelin, Pomelo, Divibank, and Frontrunner.
Our DNA as a platform sets us up to provide maximum impact for founders. We can uniquely help with fintech-specific recruiting, capital raising (debt and equity), partnerships and media. We understand the financial industry, and we know companies work best when investors trust founders, and founders benefit most when investors help founders in targeted ways. Our goal is for our contributions to outweigh our check-size, and we believe we consistently deliver that.
Thank you to all the founders and LP’s that chose to partner with us on this journey. We are forever grateful for your advice, support, and trust. And special thanks to Sue Choe for her invaluable contributions getting Gilgamesh off the ground in the last couple of years.
We look forward to working with you!
