The Southern European startup ecosystem is growing with a new Venture Capital fund, Plus Partners, launched by co-founders Enrique Linares and Oriol Juncosa, two prominent figures of the startup space — a unicorn founder and a top investor in over 75 start-ups. They have joined forces to support startups in their earliest stages. The Spanish Securities Market Commission has approved the new VC management firm, named Purpose Capital, fully-owned by Enrique and Oriol, under which Plus Partners, the VC fund, will operate.
Plus Partners will support entrepreneurs in three key verticals, where innovation and technology are having a huge impact: health & nutrition, finance & property, and future of work & productivity. These verticals are key to the well-being of humanity, have high density of purpose-driven entrepreneurs, are being transformed by data and AI and include over 80% of the founding partners’ prior investments. To achieve this, they will focus on pre-seed and seed stage start-ups in Southern Europe with a significant percentage of them coming from Spain.
Plus Partners seeks to lead the “next generation of Venture Capital,” characterized by being focused on specific verticals, actively serve entrepreneurs with global ambitions from the earliest stages, have a capital-efficient mindset and use technology to scale-up their service to entrepreneurs. The fund will ensure real support in the four areas which are most needed in the early stages: vertical-focused business development, talent, fundraising, and growth strategy, through a number of top entrepreneurs and C-Level executives from top tech companies, including several with >$1bn valuations.
Enrique Linares emphasizes that: “We are the fund I would have liked to have when I started my journey as an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is at the center of everything we do, and we will support them to maximize their impact.” He also highlights: “Plus Partners is born at the best possible time. In Southern Europe, there are already entrepreneurs who are role models for new company founders. It has been proven that we have a lot of talent and founders can internationalize very successful startups from here. We want to boost technology & innovation, whilst supporting a new wave of brilliant entrepreneurs from day one.”
Oriol Juncosa highlights that “unfortunately, particularly since the pandemic, I have seen tens of investors doing more harm than good to the entrepreneurs and start-ups, especially at the earliest stages, due usually to inexperience. We aim to change this. Additionally, with our unique methodology, verticalised investment strategy, and professional support to entrepreneurs, we aim to significantly reduce the risk associated with pre-seed and seed investments, whilst maximizing returns for founders and investors.”
Over 30 entrepreneurs and C-level tech executives, whose companies have an aggregate valuation of over 5 billion euros and have secured over 1 billion euros in funding, are engaged in supporting Plus Partners.
The ultimate VC, founded by a successful entrepreneur and a renowned investor
Among the highlights of their careers, Enrique Linares co-founded and led letgo, the first Spanish startup to achieve unicorn status. Letgo counted as investors some of the top tech investment firms in the world such as Prosus, Accel, Insight or 14w. Enrique opened the Spanish office and later moved to live in New York for 4 years to create their New York office. Prior to letgo, Enrique co-founded Captalis, a fintech company with a significant presence in LatAm, and he led the Company from Sao Paulo.
For his part, Oriol Juncosa co-founded Encomenda Smart Capital (currently in divestment phase), was CFO from seed to post-series B of Carto, a leading SaaS company based in the US and Spain that raised over $100m in funding, was Principal at Nauta Capital, and has been an investor/ shareholder in over 75 start-ups such as Cobee (recently acquired by Pluxee in the largest exit of a Spanish start-up since Q2’22), Holded (one of the best exits in Spain of 2021), Housfy, Carto, etc … alongside top international funds like Balderton, Accel, Lakestar, Notion, Elaia, Earlybird, Insight, Octopus, amongst others.
Both founding partners have worked and lived for over 10 years in foreign markets (USA, UK, France, or Brazil) and understand the importance of international expansion from the early stages.