19th June 2020
MiddleGame Ventures (MGV), a leading financial services technology venture capital firm, has announced a €10 million investment from Enterprise Ireland to create a pool of funding of up to €20m for Irish Fintech companies.
Today’s announcement follows the November 2019 first close of MGV’s new fund targeting post-seed, series A and series B lead investments in Europe and North America. A final close of the fund, with a target size of €150 million, is slated for year-end 2020. Enterprise Ireland joins other institutional, strategic and family office investors, including anchor investors the Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) and the European Investment Fund (EIF), as well as S&P Global.
MGV will target companies at the Series A stage, partnering with B2B and B2B start-ups to drive the transformation of financial services from analog to digital and from centralised to decentralised, with an emphasis on middleware and back office solutions.
MGV co-founders Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt announced: “We are delighted to begin a long-term partnership with Enterprise Ireland to support great, transformational businesses in Ireland 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 Irish innovators solving difficult problems and re-architecting the financial services industry.”
The MiddleGame team looks to deepen its engagement in the Irish marketplace with the establishment of an Irish office. MGV previously hosted a week-long pan-European accelerator for early stage fintechs, NadiFin, and more recently, led an intensive acceleration program for nine Irish fintech startups earlier in 2020. Pinschmidt added that the Irish fintech landscape complements the core investment focus areas of the fund across Europe and the US, noting that “the team sees significant opportunities to partner with the government, investors, and market incumbents to accelerate ecosystem building efforts to help start-ups scale and grow by broadening commercial and investor touch points.”
On the announcement, Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Heather Humphreys TD said: “Venture capital is essential for the growth and development of successful high potential Irish business and I am delighted to announce the introduction of this fund by MiddleGame Ventures, supported by the Government through Enterprise Ireland. This fund is very important because it marks a significant increase in the availability of capital for start-ups in fintech, supporting the sustained growth and internationalisation of this vibrant sector. It will help to drive the commercialisation of new and innovative products and services from ambitious Irish companies. Venture capital has increased in importance for start-ups and high potential firms in accessing finance as we enter the recovery phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Welcoming the announcement, Kevin Sherry, Executive Director of Global Business Development at Enterprise Ireland said: “Enterprise Ireland is delighted to partner with MiddleGame Ventures in this new Fund focused on scaling deep-tech, disruptive Fintech companies. MiddleGame brings an innovative, acceleration-oriented approach to investment and the team has global connectivity that can be leveraged to drive success in Irish Fintech companies. We look forward to working with the team to develop and grow an increasing number of Irish Fintech companies, supporting them to build scale and expand reach in global markets.”
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 one of the industry’s first FinTech-only venture funds at Route 66 Ventures. 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).
For more information on the MGV team, strategy and portfolio, please visit www.middlegamevc.com.
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