The Untitled Ventures, a London-based early growth stage venture capital fund, is raising €50m (£46m) to invest in tech start-ups in Eastern Europe.
Its new second fund will look to invest in B2B AI, robotics, agritech, medtech and data management.
To date, The Untitled Ventures has invested in 26 start-ups and exited three. Businesses that Untitled has invested in to date include AI-driven streaming platform Sarafan.tech, clothes-sizing solution Sizolution, Portugese dating app Pure, and Latvian commercial drone company Fixar.
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Untitled claims the new fund will be backed by European institutional investors.
The investor also has offices in Moscow, Russia and Riga, Latvia.
Oskar Stachowiak, the Untitled Ventures founder, told EU-Startups: “We target Eastern Europe talents for a reason. Given that Silicon Valley is filled with them, we are looking in the right place. Education [in Eastern Europe] still has a strong focus on STEM and it is not a coincidence that Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian university teams consistently win global programming competitions.
“Additionally to companies that are still located in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, we target those companies that came to the West, but have not yet developed a true presence in the market. We suspect the number of companies under this description is large.”
>See also: Venture capital has £8.4bn ready to invest in fast-growth businesses
Venture capital activity in Europe remains robust, with €18.4m worth of deals closing in the first half of 2020, according to Pitchbook. Of this, €9.5bn was closed in the second quarter of this year along – the third-largest figure on record. In total, 2,494 venture capital deals closed across Europe between January and June.
And UK/Ireland also remains a strong centre of venture capital activity with €6.8m worth of deals closing in the first half of this year, equating to 916 deals done.
Further reading
British tech start-ups have raised over £4bn so far this year
