Seedstars International Ventures has announced the launch of a platform called Seedstars Capital in partnership with Swiss-based investment holding company xMultiplied to help new fund managers around the world launch funds and develop their investment firms.
Seedstars expects to drive over $500m of new funding into emerging and diverse managers, who will create more than 10,000 new jobs and generate over $20bn of additional GDP across emerging markets in the next 10 years.
The platform partners with emerging and diverse managers with local expertise and unique strategies and provides the necessary resources to launch new funds and develop their investment firms. At the same time, it becomes the catalyst for investments in these early-stage firms by providing investors with a diversified allocation solution to the asset class within emerging markets.
The Seedstars Group has provided different entrepreneurial programs to support various stakeholders, especially tech entrepreneurs, since its inception almost a decade ago.
Last year, it launched Fund II with Patricia Sosrodjojo, which the IFC, the Rockefeller Foundation, Visa Foundation and Symbiotics, and other investors are now backing. Earlier this year, Seedstars set a goal of investing in 100 more startups with the launch of its second emerging market seed-stage fund, Seedstars International Ventures II (SIV).
In the same vein, xMultiplied was founded to back entrepreneurs, family enterprises and ultra-high-net-worth individuals seeking to scale up their businesses. It accelerates the growth of entrepreneurs by bringing together capital, relationships and functional skills.
In a statement seen by TechNext, Benjamin Langer, Partner of Seedstars Capital, said, “We believe the venture capital industry needs to be more open and inclusive, and we find highly talented managers across emerging markets.”
“Unfortunately, most lack the scale and resources to attract institutional limited partners and depend on local funding to deploy their strategies and create the impact they long for. For limited partners,, the growing number of new managers makes it difficult to identify the best performing and most impactful strategies.”
“By pooling their assets and bringing them under our community, we can accelerate the growth of rising managers while offering limited partners the visibility and investment vehicles they need to increase their allocation to the asset class.”
Vivek Chandaria, Managing Partner at xMultiplied shares, “We partnered with Seedstars given our common vision of creating wealth with positive impact across emerging markets. Providing outstanding new and diverse managers the possibility to execute on their strategies will fuel economic growth while achieving market investment returns”.
Read also: Nigerian startup, SafenowNG comes 2nd in Seedstars competition, wins $8,000
In an email to TechCrunch, Group co-founder and managing partner Michael Weber and Seedstars Capital partner Benjamin Langer reiterated that the company’s mission is to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship.”
“We’ve seen so many talented entrepreneurs grow their companies very fast, to the standard of the U.S. or Europe, but unfortunately too many struggle to raise capital to grow even faster. To continue our mission to support them,”
Seedstars is now supporting the next generation of VC fund managers in emerging markets that will then back those promising entrepreneurs.”
The goal of Seedstars Capital
The primary objective of the platform is to help startups in Asia, Africa, and South America with countries like Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. It is looking for funds that target pre-seed to Series A companies since that is where they see the most significant funding gaps and potential.
The platform will help emerging VC managers solve challenges like access to international funding, infrastructure, and the right community of people. These are critical components of building a brand that will allow managers to attract the best talent.”
Seedstars can help solve these issues because it has over ten years of experience in emerging markets and has accelerated or incubated more than 2,000 ventures using a network of more than 1,000 experts and mentors.
Seedstars Capital is committed to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and plans to use ESG and impact considerations as it selects a diverse group of fund managers.
“Ideally, we want Seedstars Capital to support gender-diverse teams as we know we need a more inclusive industry,” said Weber and Langer. “We are convinced this will have a tremendous impact at the portfolio level, and we will be able to empower more women entrepreneurs.”
The platform also works with Seedstars Africa Ventures, a regional-focused fund to back companies in the African continent. The fund has partnered with French private equity and asset manager LBO France to address the investment gap existing in the region.
Moreover, Seedstars is currently working towards launching funds focused on EdTech, supply chain, ClimateTech and other impact sectors with outstanding rising managers in emerging markets to be announced soon.
Seedstars is set to collaborate with some additional sector-specific technology funds, active from Pre-Seed to Series A, in emerging and frontier markets.
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