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European Investment Fund Commits €15M to Inovo Venture Partners' New €40M Fund

Friday, 24 April 2020 09:45 AM

WARSAW, POLAND / ACCESSWIRE / April 24, 2020 / Inovo Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on Central and Eastern Europe investments, has announced its second fund with backing from the European Investment Fund (EIF) among others. The PLN 170 million (€40M) fund will see the EIF commit PLN 64 million (€15M) to support a string of technology companies throughout the region and to accelerate European startups.

Inovo Venture Partners, Friday, April 24, 2020, Press release picture
Image source: Inovo Venture Partners

Established in 1994, the European Investment Fund finances SMEs through private banks and funds. In the past three years, it has invested in several VC funds focused on Poland and CEE, with its €15M stake in Inovo Venture Partners' latest fund marking its fifth such investment.

Inovo Venture Partners specializes in identifying disruptive tech startups and bootstrapping their development through participation in late seed and Series A rounds. The new fund will see six deals tied up in 2020, with a total of 20 companies on a course to secure investment over the next three years including Tidio, Infermedica, and Eyerim.

This year, the fund completed its first investment into Allset's round B together with the likes of EBRD and Andreessen Horowitz. The fund is actively looking for opportunities, despite the corona epidemic, as its partners believe tech companies can gain an additional boost from current changes in many markets. Inovo's investment team believes the current crisis will result in many outstanding tech companies being built.

Inovo Venture Partners' first fund supported companies such as Booksy and Restaumatic, as well as Brand24 and ECC Games, who are listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. In total, 15 companies were beneficiaries of Inovo's maiden fund, of whom five have since been sold profitably, two have IPO'd, and three remain active.

The Polish VC firm aims to identify and nurture outstanding tech companies, with notable successes including Booksy, whose valuation multiplied 10x to €100M+ under Inovo's stewardship. Inovo Venture Partners LP Stefan Batorv remains CEO of Booksy, which has been transformed into one of the world's top 100 marketplaces with 7 million users and $28M secured in its last funding round.

"We are convinced that over the next 10 years, at least 10 unicorns will be created in Central and Eastern Europe. Most of them will come from Poland. Every year we see a few companies that can follow the path of Booksy or Docplanner. However, even the best ones find it difficult to raise several million dollars in the investment round locally. This is too much for local funds, and often too little for funds from London, Berlin or the USA. This is where we see space for our fund. - says Tomasz Swieboda, Partner at Inovo.

In 2019, Poland's burgeoning tech industry recorded 8x YoY growth, with 85 international and local VC funds participating in over 260 financing rounds, resulting in PLN 1.27B (€294M) being invested in startups. In the first quarter of 2020, Polish VCs committed to deals worth 353M PLN (€78M), with the bulk of these involving foreign investors. This is an increase of around threefold in the same period in 2019.

With the launch of its second fund, Inovo Venture Partners is aiming to cement its reputation as one of the leading Series A investors in the CEE region, while helping enterprising startups realize their potential, paving the way for later-stage funding from international VCs.

Contact Info:

Itai Elizur, Inbound Junction
[email protected]

SOURCE: Inovo Venture Partners

Topic:
Partnerships
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