Announcing the Closing of Endeavor Catalyst III
By Allen Taylor, Managing Director, Endeavor Catalyst
We are very excited to announce the closing of Endeavor Catalyst Fund III, a $134M venture capital fund through which we’ll continue to invest in Endeavor Entrepreneurs in emerging and underserved markets globally.
Since launching Endeavor Catalyst in 2012, we have actively pursued Endeavor’s core belief that High Impact Entrepreneurs change the world and have invested into more than 150+ Endeavor Entrepreneur-led companies across 30 different markets to date.
Leveraging our pioneering co-investment model, we have partnered with many of the world’s leading venture capital and growth equity firms to invest in businesses like Globant (NYSE:GLOB) and Rappi (valued at $3.5B+) in Latin America, Peak Games (acq’d Zynga $1.8B, 2020) and Checkout.com (valued at $5.5B+) in EMEA, and Bukalapak (valued at $2.5B+) in Southeast Asia.
We created Endeavor Catalyst eight years ago with the ambition to be the world’s most founder-friendly investment fund. With deep experience mentoring and coaching entrepreneurs on the “ins and outs” of navigating the venture capital fundraising process, we built Endeavor Catalyst on top of Endeavor’s globally-distributed, trust-based network to partner with Endeavor Entrepreneurs on their equity fundraising rounds. Following our early success investing philanthropic capital in 2012 and 2013, we raised Endeavor Catalyst Fund I (2014), Fund II (2017), and now Fund III (2020).
This $134M Fund III represents our largest fund to date, surpassing the $120M target goal we had originally set. It also brings Endeavor Catalyst’s total assets under management (“AUM”) up to $250M.
We are incredibly fortunate with Endeavor Catalyst to be backed by some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs as our Limited Partners (“LPs”). We are grateful for the support of iconic founders like Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Michael Dell (Dell Technologies), and Pierre Omidyar (eBay), as well as world-class investors such as General Atlantic’s Bill Ford and Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman. The support of our LPs enables us to focus on investing in the next generation of founders in emerging and underserved markets around the world.
Endeavor Catalyst has also become a powerful platform for Endeavor Entrepreneurs to reinvest their success in their peers, building one of the world’s leading communities of, by and for entrepreneurs. With this new fund, we are thrilled to have more than 60+ of our own Endeavor Entrepreneurs as investors. In Latin America, where Endeavor has been active since 1997, our Fund III LPs include the founders of some of the region’s most successful scale-ups: MercadoLibre, Nubank, 99, Creditas, and Clip.
Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), dozens of Endeavor Entrepreneurs have joined us as LPs, including the founders of Careem, Yemeksepeti.com, Property Finder, Checkout.com, Softomotive, Moneyfarm, and Flutterwave, among others.
As Mudassir Sheika, CEO of Careem (acquired by Uber for $3.1B) sees it, investing in Endeavor Catalyst is a “great way to ‘pay-it-forward’ and invest in high-quality entrepreneurs in frontier markets!”
With Fund III, we are proud to have at least one LP from every single country where Endeavor operates. We are grateful to all of our investors, to our trusted co-investment partners, and, of course, to our amazing founders. We hold a deep conviction that entrepreneurial talent is globally distributed, and that this talent can build multi-billion dollar “scale-up” companies everywhere. We’re excited to continue partnering with these builders and visionaries around the world.
About Endeavor
Established in 1997, Endeavor is leading the global high-impact entrepreneurship movement to drive economic growth and job creation by selecting, mentoring, and accelerating the best high-impact entrepreneurs around the world. To date, Endeavor has screened more than 60,000 individuals and selected more than 2,000 founders leading over 1,200 scale-up companies. Headquartered in New York City, Endeavor currently operates in 35+ growth markets throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Learn more at endeavor.org.
About Endeavor Catalyst
Endeavor Catalyst is an innovative, rules-based co-investment fund through which Endeavor invests into its portfolio companies. Launched in 2012, Endeavor Catalyst has raised $250M across three funds and made 150+ investments to date in 30+ different markets.
