The number of “operator VCs” — former founders turned VCs — in Europe in recent years. This is common in the U.S., where the majority of VCs are former founders. The reverse is true in Europe, where most come from banking or finance. Recent examples in Europe include Wise founder Taavet Hinrikus, Glovo founder Oscar Pierre (Yellow Fund), and Pitch founder Christian Reber.
After exiting MuleSoft to Salesforce in 2018 for a cool $6.5 billion, founder Ross Mason set up DIG Ventures initially as a family office and later transitioning it to VC. He did this with co-founder and general partner Melissa Klinger, the former U.K. sales lead at MuleSoft. DIG has now launched its second — and first institutional — fund closing out at $100 million, to invest in B2B SaaS, AI, and cloud infrastructure startups, at pre-seed and seed stages, mainly across Europe, but also considering startups located in Israel and the U.S.
The new fund is backed by LPs including The Hillman Company, Granite Capital, Sofina, and Grove Street. The round also drew participation from Datadog founder Olivier Pomel and a number of MuleSoft executives, among others.
With the idea that it is a fund built by former startup operators, DIG positions itself as a hands-on, operator-led fund capable of a range of things, such go-to-market strategy and execution.
Mason and Klinger are joined by: Rytis Vitkauskas, founder of YPlan (acquired by Time Out) and former partner at Lightspeed; and Scott Grimes, co-founder of Stackin’ and Uproxx (acquired by Warner Music).
The portfolio currently includes People.ai and Karat, as well as Bubble, ComplyAdvantage, PlanetScale, Rasa, Taktile, Rossum, Flock, and Prophecy.
This second fund has already started deploying capital from the fund, investing in such companies as observability platform Dash0, AI orchestration platform Nexos.ai, and enterprise middleware offering PolyAPI.
“After MuleSoft, I saw a big opportunity to come back to Europe and build an operator-led fund,” Mason told TechCrunch. “And we managed to figure out a strategy where we could pick and meet founders quicker and earlier than most other funds.”
“Founders tell us that we just engage with them on a conversational level, because we’ve come out of MuleSoft … We like taking very technical products and selling them well. And that is half the battle in this space,” Klinger added.
She said highly technical products are the fund’s sweet spot, but that “go to market” is also something DIG knows intimately. “Going from zero to one and actually helping package that and selling it is not something any VC can do — but we can,” Klinger said.
Mason said he sees the next big shift being in enterprises building their own AI. “It’s a new arms race, especially with LLMs being built and run within enterprises … The foundation layer isn’t done yet, even though every vendor would love you to think it is. A lot will become packaged Open Source because they don’t want to send their data off to an LLM in the cloud where they have no control over where the information goes.”
Klinger said she thinks Europe has unrealized strengths in AI. “I think Europe’s a real dark horse in AI. We’ve got the talent at half the cost of the US. A lot of the brilliant research is coming out of our universities. The challenge we have is raising the amount of money that some of these AI-driven plays will need.”
In the U.S., former founders/operators (e.g. Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen) have become highly influential venture capitalists. And with geopolitics playing havoc with economies at the same time as strong early-stage momentum appearing in Europe, this might well become the “operator VC” market.
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