Samaipata, a European entrepreneur-led fund investing in seed stage platforms and marketplaces across Europe, announces today a €100m second fund, with c.€75m of commitments already received. They did their 2nd closing over the summer.
“We raised our first €30M fund back in 2016, and we have invested in 20 seed platforms & marketplaces across Europe; more than tripling our fund size will allow us to do the same but better” , said José del Barrio, founding partner at Samaipata.
Samaipata is led by José del Barrio, co-founder and former CEO of La Nevera Roja, sold to Rocket Internet in 2015 for $100M and Eduardo Díez-Hochleitner, senior executive and business angel, currently chairman at MásMóvil, recently acquired in a $5bn private equity buyout, in which has become the biggest deal in Europe this year. Eduardo is also a former APAX partner – a Private equity fund with more than $50bn in assets under management. Both founders started working together at Jose’s startup La Nevera Roja 10 years ago where Eduardo was one of the first business angels and a key advisor for the company.
The fund has kept a strong thesis-driven approach since its inception, making specialization the core of its investment approach. Some of its first investments include FoodChéri (sold to Sodexo in 2018), Matera, Streamloots, Colvin, Spotahome, Procsea, Deporvillage, Legl or OnTruck.
They started deploying Fund II at the beginning of 2020, with 3 deals already closed in France, Germany and Spain. Samaipata plans to build a portfolio of 20-25 companies, aiming at backing pan-European category leaders. Samaipata is now a remote-first company with 12 full time team members distributed across London, Paris and Madrid.
“We strongly believe in the rise of platforms as a global technological trend: trillion-dollar global industries are being disrupted by platforms (travel, food, transportation, real estate…) and massive amounts of value are being created, but we are still in the early days. Moreover, we believe in defensibility and scalability as key drivers of value creation in digital businesses, and platforms are typically highly scalable and defensible through network effects.” said Díez-Hochleitner.
“We also want to leverage our operational experience as entrepreneurs and the network effects generated by our community of platform/marketplace founders, LPs and advisors, to back global leaders born in Europe”.
Del Barrio explains that they are operating as a tech company, investing significant resources in internal technological tools and ensuring all decisions are made on the basis of data. “It’s ironic: we, the VCs, invest in technology; yet we are still one of the less digitised industries in the world. At Samaipata we strive to change this: we’re building tech ourselves to optimise our ops processes and better analyse the businesses we are happy to support. This also keeps alive our tech entrepreneur soul”.
“We also want to leverage our operational experience as entrepreneurs and the network effects generated by our community of platform/marketplace founders, LPs and advisors, to back global leaders born in Europe”.
Del Barrio explains that they are operating as a tech company, investing significant resources in internal technological tools and ensuring all decisions are made on the basis of data. “It’s ironic: we, the VCs, invest in technology; yet we are still one of the less digitised industries in the world. At Samaipata we strive to change this: we’re building tech ourselves to optimise our ops processes and better analyse the businesses we are happy to support. This also keeps alive our tech entrepreneur soul”.