Luxembourg city. Image: © SergiyN/Stock.adobe.com
Based in Luxembourg with offices in Dublin and Washington DC, MiddleGame Ventures is seeking early stage European fintech start-ups that are driving the transformation of financial services, with an emphasis on middleware and back-office solutions.
On Monday (25 November), MiddleGame Ventures, a fintech-focused investment firm, announced that it has raised a new fund targeting post-seed Series A and Series B lead investments in Europe and North America.
Established in 2018 by Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt, MiddleGame Ventures is headquartered in Luxembourg with offices in Dublin and Washington DC.
Bouvier and Meyer have substantial fintech investment experience, having co-founded Route 66 Ventures and consulted with Santander InnoVentures. 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.
MiddleGame Ventures also runs the NadiFin growth stage accelerator which is run in Luxembourg.
The €150m fund
The group’s new venture fund will invest in and partner with B2B and B2B2C start-ups driving the transformation of financial services from analogue to digital and from centralised to decentralised, with an emphasis on middleware and back office-solutions.
MiddleGame Ventures said its remit extends to enabling technologies such as regtech, digital identities, financial data 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 fund, while other investors include institutional, strategic and family offices. The fund remains open to additional institutional and private investors ahead of a final close later in 2020.
Commenting on the €150m fund, Bouvier said: “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 characterised 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.”
The EIF’s chief executive, Pier Luigi Gilibert, said: “We are delighted to be supporting MiddleGame Ventures as an anchor investor in its new fund. 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.”
Over the past decade, MiddleGame Ventures partners have invested over $300m in early-stage financial services firms including Ripple, Tandem Bank, SimpleSurance, Coverhound and CompareAsia.
Already, MiddleGame Ventures has used its new fund to make three representative investments in UK companies Nivaura, Railsbank and Gardenia Technologies.
