New Seed Fund III from Frontline will support European B2B technology founders with global ambition.
Irish-founded Frontline Ventures has revealed a new €70m fund for B2B (business-to-business) focused European tech firms entitled Frontline Seed Fund III.
This brings to €250m the amount of funds under management at Frontline which is offices in Dublin, London and San Francisco. The latest fund includes the European Investment Fund and Ireland Strategic Investment Fund as investors.
“Today, Europe rightfully finds itself on top-tier US investors’ target list, but global expansion remains an important challenge to solve”
The move comes 10 months after the launch of Frontline X, a growth stage fund for US-to-Europe expansion.
At the business end of European tech
Focused on B2B companies both side of the Atlantic, Frontline Seed has been an active investor across Europe for the past nine years, investing in early-stage B2B tech and helping European founders expand to the US market.
The team has backed more than 70 B2B companies across Europe and the US, including Logentries (acquired by Rapid7), Orchestrate (acquired by CenturyLink), and Pointy (acquired by Google in 2020).
Since 2012, 70pc of Frontline’s seed portfolio companies have raised capital from many top-tier US venture capital funds. Seed Fund III will continue to search for globally ambitious entrepreneurs across Europe.
“When we looked at the data back in 2012 – at the very start of Frontline – it was painfully clear that European entrepreneurs lacked the infrastructure and support to build a global business out of Europe,” said William McQuillan from Frontline Ventures.
“Today, Europe rightfully finds itself on top-tier US investors’ target list, but global expansion remains an important challenge to solve. As a team, we’ve pooled all of our experience and resources into helping our founders cross the Atlantic. Seed Fund III will be an extension of our work – to help founders get off the ground – and go global.”
Frontline counts active advisors and LPs in executive roles at dozens of US companies that have successfully navigated expansion, including Slack, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Stripe, Segment, Looker, Indeed, Facebook, LinkedIn and Workday. The transatlantic experience of the Frontline partners at companies such as Google, Twitter, SurveyMonkey, Airtable, and Yammer has been crucial in supporting entrepreneurs’ global growth.
In March of 2020, Frontline announced a $70m US-based growth-stage fund, Frontline X, geared at helping best in class US SaaS businesses with fast and frictionless US-Europe expansion.
To date, Frontline X has invested in; the Series B of TripActions (a company that has gone on to raise from Andreessen Horowitz and was recently valued at $5bn valuation); People.ai’s $100m Series C together with Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ; and Clearbanc’s $50m Series B with Emergence and Highland.
By John Kennedy (john.kennedy3@boi.com)
Published: 5 February 2021
