VentureFriends

It was a privilege to have so many friends join us in Athens for the VF Summit this year. We had a series of enthralling panels, a rooftop dinner by the Acropolis and even a quick trip to an island with some of the international attendees 🛥️🇬🇷 We thought we would share some of the key takeaways from the discussions and we hope to see some of you join us next time! ⬇️ Panel 1: Venture Capital from Series A to Growth Raluca Ragab, Gil Canaani, Akis Bratsos, George Dimopoulos • Expectations are now higher, from Series A onwards it’s no longer enough to hit a revenue milestone. There needs to be belief that the startup can become huge and profitable, write-offs are painful. • At the growth stage, a larger importance is placed on the capability of the executive team and the processes they have put in place. Founders have to understand the key drivers for their business. • Building relationship is key, it’s rare to invest at this stage within a few months of meeting the founders. 12-24 months is typical. Panel 2: Best Practices & Learnings in Hiring, Growth & Culture Alex Chatzieleftheriou, Jad Antoun, Nikos Moraitakis, George Hadjigeorgiou, Apostolos Apostolakis • Founders should look for people who are willing to join for the mission of the company and the opportunity to grow with it, rather than just for the salary and perks. • As a company scales there is the inevitable need to delegate but that doesn’t mean letting go of the details. • Growth from market tailwinds can be misleading, need to assess performance excluding market conditions. Panel 3: Fintech & Embedded Finance Peter O'Higgins, Egor Kirin, Caetano Lacerda. Alistair Owen • Building a performance culture that has a strong grounding in risk and compliance is essential when experiencing hypergrowth. • There’s no right answer to building a finance team; hiring a strong CFO can be a real asset when scaling the business. • Raising debt is essential to scale a lending operation, but founders need to switch their thinking from pure upside to also understanding the downside risk to speak the language of debt investors. Panel 4: Lessons from Fundraising, Scaling & Exiting John Tsioris, Marios Stavropoulos, Thanos Papangelis, Apostolos Apostolakis • Exiting a business isn’t straightforward, the founding team may need to stay for a few years and lose their autonomy to the acquirer. • Efficient growth is key to success, all the panelists reached profitability/low burn after a few years which gave them power when fundraising and exiting. • Being a founder is stressful and they often doubted themselves, but this motivated them to improve themselves!

🚀 Exciting news from the VentureFriends family! We're thrilled to announce our investment in Edgee, the game-changing open-source edge computing platform. Edgee just secured $2.9M in pre-seed funding to revolutionize data collection and application performance. 💪 Coleading the round with Serena . 💡Why Edgee is a game-changer: • Solving "The Big Lie" in data collection: Edgee captures 100% of user interactions, addressing the 25-30% data loss plaguing traditional methods due to ad blockers and privacy regulations. • Real-time, privacy-compliant insights: By processing data at the edge, Edgee delivers instant analytics while ensuring GDPR compliance and enhanced user privacy. • Democratizing edge computing: Developers can now build high-performance, low-latency applications without the complexity and cost typically associated with edge solutions. • Open-source innovation hub: Edgee is creating the first comprehensive, open ecosystem for edge computing, paving the way for groundbreaking applications across industries. Were honored to partner with founders Sacha Morard and Gilles RAYMOND who bring unparalleled expertise to the table. And we couldnt ask for a better VC partner, led by Guillaume Decugis -- to make this happen 🔊Calling all CMOs, CTOs, CDOs, and CIOs in e-commerce, marketplaces, media, and beyond: This solution is for you! Visit edgee.cloud to estimate your current data loss and discover how Edgee can unlock new opportunities for your business. Congratulations to the #Edgee team! The future of edge computing is looking brighter than ever. 🌟 And, they're #hiring now: check openings in comment! #EdgeComputing #OpenSource #VentureCapital #TechInnovation #data #datacolleciton #ecommerce #marketplace #media #cmo #cto #cdo

Last week, our Michal Bas had a great pleasure to participate in a panel: “Building Products That Stand Out for the Users and Investors” during HowToWeb Conference in Bucharest. 🇷🇴 It was great to exchange views with Tom McGinn Tarık Dutkuner and Elena Ghiniță, and share the perspective of product startegy evolution of our great portfolio company, Blueground! Photo credits: Marius Dosinescu #HowToWeb #ProductDevelopment #Product #Startups #Romania #VentureCapital

Exciting news for Barte! Barte, the Brazilian payments startup, has just closed its Series A round, led by AlleyCorp. This new funding round is a testament to their relentless execution and rapid growth. Since their seed round, Barte has grown more than 70x and is on track to exceed $250M in GTV, with revenues nearing $20M by November! Huge congratulations to Caetano, Raphael Dyxklay, and the entire team on this impressive milestone. Barte is making a real impact in LatAm by addressing cash flow challenges for mid-market B2B companies through its innovative AR/AP automation and embedded lending solutions. We're excited to see what’s next for this dynamic team!

Congrats to Aidan & the team at Carmoola who have raised an additional £100M in debt financing from Natwest, one of the UK's leading retail banks! This partnership underscores the growing confidence in Carmoola’s customer-centric approach and innovative, tech-driven underwriting as the best on the market. We're excited to see what the team can deliver next!

Congrats to the team at Simpler. who have raised a €9M Series A to scale their checkout-as-a-service solution across Europe! Rania, Alexandros & Spyros have onboarded 250 merchants and more than half-a-million consumers and are projecting to 10x their revenues by the end of the year. MMC Ventures & Lamda Development invested in the round, alongside VentureFriends. We're excited to see what this team can deliver next!

If you are attending How To Web conference, our Michal Bas will be there too and would be excited to meet you there!

Congrats to Victor and the team Plum who have raised a £13.4M Series B to continue scaling their savings and investment offering across Europe! Plum has seen strong growth over the past year as savers become more discerning in where to invest their hard-earned savings. Plum will use this funding to reach profitability and consolidate their position as a leader in Europe. Eurobank, iGrow Venture Partners, Ventura Capital & VF participated in the funding round alongside £2.7M sourced from the crowd.

Last week, our Michal Bas had a great pleasure to participate in Plug and Play Tech Center's first EXPO event in Vilnius. He exchanged on stage ideas with fellow international investors on future of the Baltics ecosystem and the challanges the region faces today. Kudos to all startups selected in the first batch, and huge thanks to Leonardo and Raimondo for a great event and a stimulating discussion!

We’re excited to be backing Cube AI in their mission to automate supply chain ops using AI employees 🚚 Louis, Sacha & Victor are a formidable team, who have shipped a product that’s automating 70% of back office tasks in only 6 months. VF led this round alongside a strong fleet of investors & angels: K5 Global, Kima Ventures, STEM AI SAS, Entrepreneur First, Transpose Platform, Olivier Pomel, Florian Douetteau, among others. They’re hiring engineers to aid them in the early stages of Cube’s journey, link to apply in the comments ⬇️