- Fintech investment firm MiddleGame Ventures announced it has set up a new fund called Venture Fund I with a final close of $165 million
MiddleGame Ventures — a fintech investment firm — announced that it has set up a new fund targeting post-seed, Series A, and Series B lead investments in Europe and North America. And MGV’s Venture Fund I achieved its first close with a final close target size of $165 million.
MGV’s Venture Fund I is going to invest in and partner with B2B and B2B2C startups driving the transformation of financial services from analog to digital and from centralized to decentralized with an emphasis on middleware and back-office solutions. And its remit extends to enabling technologies such as RegTech, Digital Identities, “FinData,” and crypto-enabled infrastructure across banking, asset management, insurance, payments, and capital markets.
The Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) and the European Investment Fund (EIF) are anchor investors in the new MGV fund while S&P Global is included among other institutional, strategic, and family office investors. And the fund remains open to additional institutional and private investors ahead of a final close later in 2020.
MiddleGame Ventures was launched by FinTech investment veteran Pascal Bouvier, Patrick Pinschmidt, and L. Michael Meyer, CFA.
“We are pleased to have new capital from substantial investors to support great, transformational businesses across Europe and the US with our highly focused fund. Our investors agree that specialist funds with experience working with entrepreneurs, incumbent financial institutions and regulators are best placed to thrive in an environment characterized by financial and technological cross-currents and significant regulatory constraints. We are excited to put our platform to work on behalf of investors and the next wave of innovators solving hard problems and re-architecting the industry,” said Pascal.
MGV partners have invested over $300 million in early-stage financial services firms over the past decade, including Ripple, Tandem Bank, SimpleSurance, Coverhound and CompareAsia. And MGV’s new fund has already made 3 representative investments in a capital markets digital platform and banking as a service and big data analytics startups in the UK (Nivaura, Railsbank and Gardenia Technologies).
“We are pleased to be an investor of MiddleGame Ventures fund aiming to support early stage FinTech companies. The Luxembourg Future Fund believes this commitment will help to strengthen the FinTech industry in Europe and generate positive spillovers in Luxembourg. This is a strategic sector for Luxembourg for economic diversification and we are delighted to contribute to its continuing development,” added Patrick Nickels, chairperson of the Luxembourg Future Fund Board of Directors.
Disruption in banking, payments, capital markets, asset management and insurance business models by new intermediaries will drive a fundamental re-architecting of incumbents and create entirely new value chains is central to MGV’s thesis.
“We are delighted to be supporting MiddleGame Ventures as an anchor investor in its new fund,” explained EIF’s chief executive Pier Luigi Gilibert. “The EIF has a strong commitment to innovation in Europe, and we hope that this fund, with its focus on FinTech entrepreneurs, will assist us in that goal.”
Bouvier and Meyer have substantial FinTech investment experience as they co-founded Route 66 Ventures and consulted with Santander InnoVentures. And Pinschmidt was a senior official at the US Treasury Department following a decade as a sell-side research analyst covering financial services for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. MGV is based out of Luxembourg and has offices in Dublin and Washington DC.
