Blossom Capital’s ‘Cultivate’ is an angel program seeking to back European unicorns. Ophelia Brown from BC has described it as “the first-of-its-kind investor platform.”
Blossom Capital closed a new $185 million fund to continue backing early-stage European startups and is announcing a new angel investment program seeking to back European unicorn alumnus.
The new platform hopes to “kickstart an angel ecosystem in Europe”, similar to that in Silicon Valley in the US.
This is to be called “Cultivate,” and it is supposed to create a strong angel network made up of founders or operators from European unicorns or those with a European HQ, who will be tasked with backing alumni starting up.
Some top executives from some of Europe’s fintech unicorns, such as Guillaume Pousaz CEO of Checkout.com, Nilan Peiris VP of growth at Transferwise and other execs from companies like Klarna and Spotify, announced to join in the platform.
Over the 12 month period, Cultivate aims to invest a total of $5m pre-seed and seed funding rounds in 20 startups across Europe, with each startup receiving up to $250k.
Ophelia Brown, founder of both Blossom Capital and Cultivate, said: “We set up Cultivate with the aim of giving founders as much access to capital and experience in Europe as they need to scale.”
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“Our ambition is to democratise this access and continue to help tech founders punch well above their weight on a global scale. Even in these uncertain times, there are visionaries in Europe doing groundbreaking, fundamental work and this is not the time to be scaling back on innovation,” she added.
Guillaume Pousaz, CEO and founder of Checkout.com, said: “As CEOs, we’re keen to find and develop the next generation of business leaders, but we don’t have time to search for and uncover these hidden gems.”
A total of 30 angel investors in the program will mentor successful startups in their first 12 months.
Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/07/let-a-thousand-angels-bloom/https://www.altfi.com/article/6409_klarna-transferwise-and-checkoutcom-execs-to-join-new-investor-platform-cultivate
