BADideas.fund targets up to EUR 15m for debut vehicle

Agne Mazeike
16 September 2022

Tweet
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google plus
Send to

BADideas.fund, a Latvia-based venture stage investor, is preparing to raise its first investment vehicle with a target of EUR 10m to EUR 15m, CEO and founder Raimonds Kulbergs told Unquote.

The vehicle, which will be deployed across early-stage Baltic and CEE tech companies, is expected to be raised during 2023 or in 2024, he added.

The investor has already seen interest from LPs active in the tech startup space, such as from founders and operators of sector companies, Kulbergs said. While it makes sense to target private investors and family offices for the new vehicle, BADideas.fund will also assess options to raise capital from governmental fund of funds initiatives in the Baltics or from the European Investment Fund, he added.

BADideas.fund will consider involving financial and legal advisors for the fundraising process and is receptive to their approaches, Kulbergs added.

Founded in May 2022, BADideas.fund now invests via a syndicate model, Kulbergs said. Its community consists of more than 90 members, these are founders and operators, who have been building companies such as Bolt, Vimeo, Printify, Pandadoc, Pipedrive, Apollo.io, Bird, Shopify, Whimsical, Lokalise, Deel, and Printful, Kulbergs said. Together they soft-committed to invest more than EUR 4m over the next 12 months, he added.

It is now in the process of making its fifth investment into an unnamed Estonian company, which will bring its total investments to EUR 500,000 over the past few months, Kulbergs said. So far it has invested into a US- and Lithuania-based events services startup Breezit; Estonian recruitment platform RecruitLab; Latvian credit platform for farmers Lande, and one unnamed Ukrainian startup, he added.

The sponsor is yet to finalise the new fund's investment strategy, nonetheless, it is likely to target pre-seed and seed funding rounds, with an initial investment ticket of EUR 100,000-EUR 200,000, Kulbergs said. It will look for "post-MVP (minimum viable product)" companies, he said, and it is a sector- and technology-agnostic investor. Aside from making investments into CEE and Baltics-based companies, BADideas.fund will look to support founders with roots in these regions, Kulbergs said.

It is yet to decide how many investments it will target for the new fund and if it would offer follow-on investments, he added.

BADideas.fund will not shy away from being "the first money in the round"; it expects to co-invest together with other venture capital funds and angel investors, Kulbergs said.