Nov 5, 2019
Announcing Change Ventures Fund II and our latest investment, Qoorio — the new venture led by Vinted co-founder Justas Janauskas
Backing ambitious Baltic founders. Not a tagline we invented lightly. All three Change Ventures investment partners have been founders and operators in startups from the USA to Europe. We have seen the grit, ambition and “walk through walls” determination required to build world-class and global-scale businesses. We also witnessed this grit in our portfolio companies from our first fund, which includes startups such as Nordigen, MeetFrank, Interactio, Timbeter and Giraffe360. We have every reason to believe that many more great companies will emerge in the coming decade.
Since our first investment in November 2016, our firm has attempted to bring change to the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian seed and pre-seed investment environment:
- We only back Baltic founders with big, bold, global ambitions;
- We invest using a no-nonsense founder-friendly process;
- We help with getting to product-market fit, raising additional funds and growing the business.
- We deliver an unparalleled network of follow-on investors and partners.
Today we are excited to announce that investors have valued our differentiation and committed over €30M of capital in Fund II, €21M of which was included in the first close. The anchor investor is the European Investment Fund (capital from Baltic Innovation Fund I and Innovfin), joined by publicly listed Draper Esprit, one of Europe’s largest venture capital funds, as well as a Baltic pension fund manager, among others.
“Our investments in Estonian startups Transferwise and RealEyes indicated something special about the Baltic States. This small region with a population of just 6m people has produced a disproportionately large number of global success stories, including 4 unicorns from Estonia alone. We selected Change Ventures as the leading seed fund in the region to invest in the next crop of new teams coming to the market so that we can offer them growth financing when the time comes,” commented Jonathan Sibilia, Head of Secondaries and Fund of Funds at Draper Esprit.
The new fund sees the addition of a new venture partner to strengthen its presence in the region. Janis Krums, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor and a Latvian based in the USA, will help the firm scout investment opportunities among the Baltic diaspora and support our portfolio with advice. Our venture partner in Lithuania, Vytautas Kubilius, Head of Baltics at Google, will also continue to support the search for aspiring startup teams.
In an age where the best founders get to choose their investors, we are excited to announce that Change Ventures was selected to be the first investor in Justas Janauskas’s new venture Qoorio (formerly known as HumansApp) — a community for humans to share life learnings & knowledge. Justas launched Qoorio after nearly a decade of co-founding and leading Vinted, one of the largest pre-loved fashion marketplaces in the world that raised over $120M in venture funding. We led Qoorio’s pre-seed round this summer, supporting their successful pilot launch in Vilnius. As a next step, the Qoorio team is preparing to launch in a major European capital soon. More detail on why we backed Qoorio is available here.
About Change Ventures:
Change Ventures is the first pre-seed & seed venture capital fund with boots on the ground in all three Baltic states. We back ambitious founders based in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania as well as Baltic diaspora entrepreneurs building their businesses elsewhere in the world. Our initial investments range from €100k to €750k, with follow-on capital available for later rounds. Our founder-friendly no-nonsense investment process is designed to help founders with big, bold ambitions get fast investment decisions. Once we are on board, we help with getting to product-market fit, raising additional funds and growing the business, leveraging an unparalleled network of follow-on investors and partners.
Find us at www.changeventures.com or email us at info@changeventures.com.
