London-based Blossom Capital, the first fund from ex-Index Ventures and LocalGlobe investor Ophelia Brown – one of Europe’s best-known female venture capitalists — has raised €75 million. Blossom’s funds include leading institutional investors, as well as high-profile tech entrepreneurs such as Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev and Mikkel Svane, founder of Zendesk.
Blossom is one of Europe’s most diverse VC firms, and its partners have helped to build some of the biggest names in technology including Facebook, Klarna, and Deliveroo.
With Europe’s tech ecosystem rapidly maturing to the point where successful exits are sparking a new wave of founders and operators who have already scaled businesses, Blossom will be investing in European Series A stage consumer and enterprise startups across most sectors.
Each partner has their particular area of deep expertise, including financial services (Ophelia Brown and Louise Samet), design and travel (Ophelia Brown), marketplaces (Mike Hudack), B2B software (Louise Samet) and developer-focused tools in security and infrastructure, and API-first companies (Imran Ghory and Mike Hudack).
Investments will typically be in the $5 million to $10 million range. To date Blossom has backed Duffel, Fat Llama, Frontify and Sqreen, co-investing with tier one Silicon Valley and European funds including Y Combinator, Greylock and Index.
While Blossom is not a ‘female-focused fund’, the team want to ensure that the firm is approachable to anyone regardless of background or gender. Blossom will be holding dedicated office hours for female founders as it seeks to level the playing-field so that women receive equality of airtime. Ophelia Brown has already established the networking and mentoring group Ambitious Ladies in Tech (ALT) in a concerted effort to help redress gender imbalance across the industry.
“Blossom’s new fund provides early-stage founders in Europe with the opportunity to partner with a local investor that can guide them through the operational support needed to turn their visions into reality,” said Sequoia Partner Alfred Lin. “The Blossom team is filling a longstanding gap in the European market and has the expertise to help the boldest outlier companies scale internationally. With our own recent investments in European-based companies such as Tourlane and Graphcore, we’re increasingly excited by the ambition and talent in Europe. We look forward to potentially co-investing with Blossom in the future, as we continue to support founders from idea to IPO and beyond.”
“We founded Blossom to offer Europe’s leading entrepreneurs a new top-tier VC fund that understands exactly what it takes to scale an early stage company into a global category leader,” says Ophelia Brown. “The European ecosystem has changed dramatically over the last decade; we believe that mission-driven entrepreneurs today want investors who match their ambitions and can help them reach goals far beyond what they thought possible. Too often founders have felt they need to go to the West Coast to raise their Series A — with our unique Silicon Valley ties and deep networks, we’ve set up Blossom to help change that.”
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