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MGV holds first close for €150m early-stage fund

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MiddleGame Ventures (MGV), a fintech-focused venture capital investor, has held a first close for MGV Venture Fund I, an early-stage vehicle launched in 2018 with a €150m target.

Unquote understands that the fund has achieved a €75m first close and expects to hit its target by the end of 2020.

Established in 2018 by Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt, MGV is headquartered in Luxembourg, with additional offices in Dublin and Washington DC. The firm also owns and operates NadiFin, a growth-stage accelerator for European startups based in Dublin.

Unquote understands that the fund targets an IRR of around 25% and a 3-5x return on its portfolio.

DLA Piper advised MGV on the structuring, setting up and launch of the fund.

Investors
The Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) and the European Investment Fund (EIF) are anchor investors in the vehicle. S&P Global also committed capital to the fund, Unquote understands.

The investor base is mainly composed of family offices and institutional investors. More than half of the LPs are European, with the remainder from the US. The fund expects to receive additional commitments from both European and North American investors in the coming months.

Investments
MGV Venture Fund I targets post-seed, series-A and series-B lead rounds in startups based in Europe and North America, operating in the transformation of financial services from analogue to digital, and from centralised to decentralised, with an emphasis on middleware and back-office services.

Its remit includes enabling technologies in regulation, digital identities, financial data and crypto-enabled infrastructure across banking, asset management, insurance, payments, and capital markets.

It invests in companies that employ 10-20 staff and are either generating initial revenues or have a strong pathway to revenue generation within a year; investees should be able to sell their innovative products to incumbent financial institutions.

It deploys equity tickets of less than €1m for post-seed rounds and between €2-6m for series-A and series-B rounds. 

The fund has already made three investments so far, backing capital markets digital platform Nivaura, big data analytics startup Gardenia Technologies, and banking specialist Railsbank.

People
MiddleGame Ventures – Partner Patrick Pinschmidt, Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer (co-founders, partner).

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