Solution-Max: K Fund has another €70M to back early-stage Spanish startups and is launching a pre-seed program

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

K Fund has another €70M to back early-stage Spanish startups and is launching a pre-seed program

K Fund is officially outing its fund II today, which sits at €70 million, up from €50 million the first time around.

The remit remains the same, however: targeting Spanish startups with an international outlook, the seed-stage firm plans to invest from €200,000 to €2 million, writing first checks in 25-30 companies. A portion of the fund will also be set aside for follow-on funding for the most promising of its portfolio.

“We’re business model and sector agnostic, and we currently have a healthy mix of B2B and B2C companies across a wide variety of sectors, including travel, fintech, insurtech and others,” says K Fund.

Following in the footsteps of Europe’s Heartcore Capital, K Fund is launching a pre-seed funding program, too. Dubbed “K Founders,” it will seek out companies that are less than 6 months old, and invest up to €100,000 pre-seed. The program will initially be quite modest in size, targeting between 10 and 20 startups.

“We won’t take board seats in these companies and we won’t have preferential rights. We’ll use convertible notes to speed up the process and we have a commitment of taking no more than three weeks from first meeting to money in the bank,” explains K Fund’s Jaime Novoa.

“Since we also believe in building bridges with other co-investors (funds and business angels), we’ll be super happy to share deals with co-investors to reach the capital needed by the companies.”

Meanwhile, K Fund’s first fund portfolio includes online travel agency Exoticca (which says that in 2019 more than 35,000 people from 6 different countries traveled to 50 destinations using its platform), HR software Factorial (which has more than 60,000 clients in 40 different countries and just raised a $16 million Series A round from CRV), insurtech startup Bdeo, and conversational messaging tech provider Hubtype.

“We continue to be super bullish on the Spanish startup ecosystem and Southern Europe in general, with markets such as Portugal or Italy that we believe are punching above their weight,” adds the VC firm. “We’ve already invested in four Spanish startups with the new fund; all of them are going after huge markets, and have experienced professionals in their founding team”.

One of those is sales prospecting platform Bloobirds. The others will be disclosed in the coming weeks.