Announcing Fly Ventures’ Fund II
Fly Ventures was launched in 2016 to fill a hole in the European startup ecosystem. Despite a huge growth in aggregate funding we saw little capital specifically tailored on investing in what we feel is Europe’s great opportunity: Enterprise and Deep Tech startups. Founders leading companies in these sectors face a host of unique challenges: long sales cycles, organizational inertia, extensive product development, high capital requirements and generally slow initial growth. Founders deserve an investor that’s well-calibrated to these challenges and for the past three years we’ve exclusively focused on building just that. Today we are delighted to announce the next chapter in Fly’s story with the closing of our €53 million Fund II.
Our second fund enables us to continue to do what we love: finding and backing the best European seed-stage enterprise and deep tech startups that unlock the full potential of digitisation and automation. Every fund will claim that they’re the premier firm of their chosen strategy but we prefer to let our track record speak for us:
- We understand the enterprise: our portfolio companies are automating insurance, monitoring and cybersecurity, optimizing clinical trials, enhancing product management, fighting anti-money laundering and powering capital markets.
- We love deep tech: our portfolio companies are enabling limitless data, tackling infertility, enabling microservices, expanding the cloud edge, developing electric planes and discovering fully autonomous driving.
- We invest across Europe: our portfolio includes companies from Germany (10), France (6), the UK (6), the Netherlands (3), Switzerland (1) and Estonia (1).
- We find top talent: Fund I saw two exits to Facebook and 60% of our “matured” companies have raised Series A rounds (compared to industry average of 19%).
- Our investment has signal: we’re proud to have a co-investor community of top tier funds from the US and Europe including: Balderton, Compound, Connect, Crane, Eclipse, Entrepreneur First, Frontline, Greycroft, Kima, LocalGlobe, Mosaic, Notion, Obvious, Passion, Point Nine, Redalpine, Seedcamp, SpeedInvest, SystemOne, and Tiny.vc.
One of the only changes with our new fund is our additional capital (Fund I was €35 million). With Fund II we’ll be able to make larger initial investments for lead or co-lead positions. Our cheques range from €500K — €1.3 million and we like to take up 50% or more of the round.
We’ll also use Fund II to become a greater source of positive change for diversity within the startup community. As VCs, the greatest impact we can make is through the founders and teams we back. We’re currently working through how we can bring about greater diversity and equality to our portfolio. We will listen, discuss and share our thinking and performance within the community.
Despite the challenging time we’re all going through we’ve never been more bullish about the potential of European tech. We will continue to work towards being the very best partner for Enterprise and Deep Tech startups at the seed stage. If you’re the founder of a startup remaking an industry or building truly novel technology please reach out to any of us.
-The Fly Team
Fly Ventures is supported by InnovFin Equity, with the financial backing of the European Union under Horizon 2020 Financial Instruments and the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) set up under the Investment Plan for Europe. The purpose of EFSI is to help support financing and implementing productive investments in the European Union and to ensure increased access to financing.
Fly Ventures’ investors also include KfW Capital through the ERP Venture Capital Fund Investments facility.
