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September 16, 2007
Euro VC Fund News: New Italian and Finnish Early Stage Funds Attract Buyout Pros
Two new tech venture funds for Europe reveal some interesting contrarian activity among founding general partners.
It looks like a few buyout investment pros in Europe are leaving LP-money-magnet buyout funds to the less LP-favoured asset class: early stage European VC.
Read on to find out more about a few that prove that not all PE pros are in it for the fat management fees.
In Italy a brand new partnership called Innogest Capital has two founders that hail from the buyout sector: Marco Pinciroli, formerly of BC Partners, and Claudio Giuliano, formerly a senior associate at Carlyle Group [via realdeals.co.eu]. They’ve just closed an €80M fund for Italian tech ventures called Innogest. And in Finland, Contor Venture Partners has attracted one of the founding partners of Eqvitec.
It is positive news that Innogest actually closed a first time fund in Europe. Its portfolio firms include HT Srl (€1.5M raised) whose products and services are aimed at government agencies and law-enforcement to combat computer crime, and “TheBlogTV” with the same amount of capital.
You can get some insights into the tech zeitgeist in Northern Italy where this fund is active on Torino Wireless.
Finnish Contrarian Move
Pinciroli and Giuliano are not the only private equity pros to leave the money-heavy asset class. Jari Mieskonen is now a managing partner at Conor Venture, also a new Euro VC fund targeting the early stage.
He was a founding partner at Eqvitec, which has been moving away from the early stage roots, a result of growing its funds' size and adding mezzanine finance.
Conor is in fundraising mode on its first time fund, and has made a few investments that we’ve covered here: Aitos and digital billboard ads startup Virtual Advertisting Systems.
Expect to see a more active approach to building tech startups from Conor when it comes to things like mergers, acquisitions for growth, and building syndicates of investors from this team. He believes that European VC has been too passive in the past. He said: "We intend to look at merger opportunities sooner rather than later... We are about bringing in the resources a venture needs other than money."
A lot of VCs in Europe assert that they do more than hand over cash. There are indeed a few that have added value, based on what we see as outsiders. And we have our keyboard at the ready to point it out when we see it.
View Conor Venture Partners
View Innogest
Posted on September 16, 2007 08:50 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | Permalink
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