WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MiddleGame Ventures (MGV), a fintech-focused investment firm, announced today that it had raised a new fund targeting post-seed, series A and series B lead investments in Europe and North America.
MGV’s Venture Fund I has achieved its first close, with a final close target size of $165MM. It will invest in and partner with B2B and B2B2C startups driving the transformation of financial services from analog to digital and from centralized to decentralized, with an emphasis on middleware and back office solutions. Its remit extends to enabling technologies such as RegTech, Digital Identities, “FinData” 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 MGV fund, whilst S&P Global is included among other institutional, strategic and family office investors. The fund remains open to additional institutional and private investors ahead of a final close later in 2020.
FinTech investment veteran Pascal Bouvier is co-founder of MGV along with Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt. Pascal 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.”
Patrick Nickels, chairperson of the Luxembourg Future Fund Board of Directors, added: “We are pleased to be an investor of MiddleGame Ventures fund aiming to support early stage FinTech companies. The Luxembourg Future Fund believes this commitment will help to strengthen the FinTech industry in Europe and generate positive spillovers in Luxembourg. This is a strategic sector for Luxembourg for economic diversification and we are delighted to contribute to its continuing development.”
“We are delighted to be supporting MiddleGame Ventures as an anchor investor in its new fund," said the EIF’s chief executive Pier Luigi Gilibert. “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.”
MGV partners have invested over USD $300 million in early stage financial services firms over the past decade including Ripple, Tandem Bank, SimpleSurance, Coverhound and CompareAsia. MGV’s new fund has already made three representative investments in a capital markets digital platform and banking as a service and big data analytics startups in the UK (Nivaura, Railsbank and Gardenia Technologies).
About MiddleGame Ventures
MiddleGame Ventures (MGV) is a leading financial services technology venture capital firm. Its focus is on supporting innovation in the financial sector as organisations reinvent themselves to compete and service clients in the digital age.
Central to MGV’s thesis is that disruption in banking, payments, capital markets, asset management and insurance business models by new intermediaries will drive a fundamental re-architecting of incumbents and create entirely new value chains.
MGV is well-positioned to help this financial services renaissance based on the founding team’s extensive investment, operational and regulatory experience.
MGV was established in 2018 by Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt. 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.
MGV is headquartered in Luxembourg with offices in Dublin and Washington DC.
MGV also owns and operates NadiFin, a growth stage accelerator for European startups (www.nadifin.com) based out of Luxembourg.
For more information on the MGV team, strategy and portfolio, please visit www.middlegamevc.com.
About the European Investment Fund
The European Investment Fund (EIF) is part of the European Investment Bank group. EIF’s central mission is to support Europe’s micro, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) by helping them to access finance. EIF designs and develops venture and growth capital, guarantees and microfinance instruments which specifically target this market segment. In this role, EIF fosters EU objectives in support of innovation, research and development, entrepreneurship, growth, and employment.
About the Luxembourg Future Fund
The Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) is a EUR 150 million equity fund set up in 2015 by the Société Nationale de Crédit et d’Investissement (SNCI) and the European Investment Fund (EIF) and combines a EUR 120 million commitment from SNCI with EUR 30 million from the EIF. In addition to its role as investor, EIF acts as the adviser of LFF, performing investment advisory, operational, reporting and execution tasks. The LFF invests in Venture Capital funds and co-invests in early and growth stage innovative technology SMEs. Its objective is to provide its investors with a risk commensurate return on investments while at the same time fostering the sustainable development and diversification of the Luxembourgish economy.
