London, UK-based Kindred Capital closed its second Equitable Venture seed fund, at £81m.
Notable LPs include University of Chicago, Industry Ventures, Generation Ventures, Sands Capital, British Patient Capital, Isomer, and Legal & General. As well as institutions, Fund II has attracted great founders like Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise), Carsten Thoma (Hybris), and Rishi Khosla (Oak North), amongst others.
Through its Equitable Venture program, Kindred Capital shares its carry with the founders in which the fund invests. The idea is that this encourages a collective model, in which founders actively help each other achieve their goals.
The model will be continued for Kindred’s second fund. In Fund I, Kindred projects that around £5m will be returned to founders, which would otherwise have gone to General Partners of Kindred.
Since its launch in 2015, the firm has now invested in 39 technology companies across Europe and Israel, with ten of those investments coming from the second fund in companies such as BotsAndUs, Gravity Sketch and Beit.
Fund I made 29 investments across Europe, including Five, Paddle, Pollen, Farewill, Disperse, LabGenius, Flagstone, and Animal Dynamics.
Kindred has been investing from the second fund over the last 12 months.
Partners include:
● Yale and Harvard-educated Leila Zegna spent 15 years as an operator and angel investor. She was part of the founding team of Silicon Valley based GenapSys, raising $50m for the genomics firm and building out a team of 70 staff.
● Mark Evans has a 20 year history of early stage investing, including companies such as Natural Motion, MySQL, Headspace, The Hut Group, Yoox and Gousto.
● Serial chairman and angel investor Russell Buckley was part of the founding team of AdMob, which sold to Google for $750m in 2010.
● Chrys Chrysanthou was previously a very early employee with Amazon Web Services in EMEA, and was the COO of a B2B IoT startup. He was also a VC at Accel and Notion.
Kindred also operated a a support team with deep expertise across operations, talent, technology, product, and marketing, focusing on what founders say they need from investors.
FinSMEs
21/09/2020