FinTech news in Angel Investor category

The second PV angel fund is backed by some of the U.K.’s more active angels, including Chris Adelsbach, Will Neale and Michael Pennington, alongside founders from Credit Kudos, FreeAgent, BrandWatch, Wayve, Passfort, ContentCal, Griffin, Bibliu, Rahko and Fixflo. PV makes much of its community-driven culture, with a network of founders, investors and others alongside the PV founders Will Martin and Will Brooks who put the fund together in 2014. Starting Funding Club (SFC) is the funding services provider, and all investors are committed to the fund and Portfolio Ventures are discretionary fund managers deploying from a pot of capital put in by these investors. A good example of that is Portfolio Ventures (PV), which has now closed its second angel fund (which they claim was oversubscribed), where many of the investing angels do so under EIS.

Alejandro Echavarria and Leon Papu, both managing partners, co-founded the venture capital firm in 2020 with Pablo Navarro, operating partner, to focus on early-stage, business-to-business startups in emerging markets. They started Marathon initially as a company builder in 2020, which is how they ended up investing in Tul, ​​a B2B e-commerce marketplace that optimizes the construction-material supply chain for hardware stores across Latin America. Brazil and Mexico are most known as Latin America hot startup ecosystems, but other countries, like Colombia, are gaining visibility and interest from investors. In addition to Tul, the fund has invested in eight companies and is already seeing an approximate two-time return over the total fund size to date.