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The identification number of “ wheeler dealer VCs ” — former founders rick VCs — has risen in Europe in recent years . This is vernacular in the U.S. , where the bulk of VCs are former founders . The black eye is reliable in Europe , where most come from banking or finance . Recent examples in Europe admit Wise founder Taavet Hinrikus , Glovo founder Oscar Pierre ( Yellow Fund ) , and Pitch founder Christian Reber .
After exiting MuleSoft to Salesforce in 2018 for a cool $ 6.5 billion , founderRoss Masonset upDig Venturesinitially as a family office and subsequently transitioned it to VC . He did this withMelissa Klinger , Dig pardner , and the former U.K. sales lead at MuleSoft . Dig has now launched its second — and first institutional — fund close out at $ 100 million , to vest in B2B SaaS , AI , and cloud substructure startups , at pre - seed and cum stages , mainly across Europe , but also considering startups located in Israel and the U.S.
The raw fund is backed by LPs includingThe Hillman Company , Granite Capital , Sofina , andGrove Street . The daily round also drew involvement from Datadog founderOlivier Pomeland a routine of MuleSoft executives , among others .
With the approximation that it is a stock built by former startup operators , Dig position itself as a hands - on , operator - top stock capable of a range of things , such as go - to - market strategy and instruction execution .
Mason and Klinger are joined by : Rytis Vitkauskas , founder ofYPlan(acquired by Time Out ) and former partner at Lightspeed ; andScott Grimes , carbon monoxide gas - beginner ofStackin’andUproxx(acquired by Warner Music ) .
The portfolio presently includesPeople.aiandKarat , as well asBubble , ComplyAdvantage , PlanetScale , Rasa , Taktile , Rossum , Flock , andProphecy .
This second fund has already started deploy capital from the investment firm , gift in such companies as observability platformDash0 , AI orchestration platformNexos.ai , and enterprise middleware offeringPolyAPI .
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“ After MuleSoft , I saw a big opportunity to come back to Europe and build an operator - led monetary fund , ” Mason order TechCrunch . “ And we manage to figure out a scheme where we could pick and run across founders faster and in the beginning than most other funds . ”
“ founder tell us that we just engage with them on a conversational level , because we ’ve come out of MuleSoft … We wish taking very technical product and sell them well . And that is half the battle in this place , ” Klinger added .
She say highly technological product are the fund ’s cherubic spot , but that “ go to market ” is also something Dig knows intimately . “ go from zero to one and actually helping software program that and sell it is not something any VC can do — but we can , ” Klinger suppose .
Mason said he sees the next big fracture being in enterprises building their own AI . “ It ’s a new arms airstream , especially with LLMs being work up and run within enterprises … The creation layer is n’t done yet , even though every trafficker would love you to mean it is . A spate will become packaged open germ because they do n’t want to post their data off to an LLM in the cloud where they have no command over where the data belong . ”
Klinger said she thinks Europe has unrealized strength in AI . “ I recollect Europe ’s a real dark horse in AI . We ’ve got the talent at half the toll of the U.S. A lot of the brilliant research is coming out of our universities . The challenge we have is elicit the amount of money that some of these AI - driven plays will ask . ”
In the U.S. , former founder / operators ( for instance Peter Thiel , Paul Graham , Marc Andreessen ) have become extremely influential venture capitalists . And with geopolitics playing havoc with economies at the same time as strong other - stage momentum seem in Europe , this might well become the “ hustler VC ” market .
