Bulgarian LAUNCHub Ventures, a seed stage VC fund, has closed its new, second in a row deal, worth €18 million. The fund will invest in startups in Bulgaria and Southeast Europe. The newly launched fund will have at its disposal €15 million coming from the European Investment Fund, and additional €3 million coming from private investors from Bulgaria such as Telerik, the company that achieved the largest exit for a Bulgarian software company in 2014.
„Our strategy is to become the obvious first choice for entrepreneurs in our region”, said for Capital.bg, Lyuben Belov, one of the fund’s co-founders. „There is a need for strategy upgrade, and this is what we do with this new fund. There are startups that are in need to move to the next level“, he added.
According to Belov, this Bulgarian fund will invest anywhere between €300,000 and €700,000 per company, and in some cases up to €2 million. The priority would be given to the startups that are in seed phase, but they are also considering investments in the so called Series A startups.
The fund’s first choice would be companies that are mostly focused in B2B and B2C (busuness-to-business & business-to-consumer) segment.
„We are looking into companies that are in B2B and B2C segment, e-commerce and marketplace platforms, as well as digital regional gaming startups with specific segments and niche“.
The main eligibility requirement is for the startup to have a high technical component and to be focused on solving problems, that require specific technical know-how.
Founded in 2012, LAUNCHub is headed up by Lyben Belov, Todor Breshkov, Rumen Iliev, Stanislav Sirakov, and Stephane Gantchev. Their first fund was €9 million worth, and focused mostly in pre-seed startups with up to €200.000 worth investment per company.
Its latest investment is in fintech startup HiCharlie, based in San Francisco but founded by two Bulgarians. Up to date, LUNCHub portfolio includes Fite, a video distribution platform that brings professional ring sports to your TV; Cloudpipes, a workflow automation service connecting hundreds of cloud applications; Doctrina, an online platform connecting pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies; and Coherent Labs, a UI middleware tool used by large number of top gaming studios.
