Amsterdam-based Connected Capital, a VC and private equity firm that teams up with leading European B2B SaaS companies, announced on Thursday that it has closed its Fund II at €154M. The investment came from new blue-chip institutional investors alongside returning LPs as well as a substantial GP commitment.
The firm says that the second fund is 3 times the size of its previous fund and brings total assets to over €200M.
Capital utilisation
Connected Capital says the funds will help it to continue its hands-on investment approach involving smart capital with SaaS expertise that helps founders expand their businesses.
In addition to continuing investments in growth-stage B2B SaaS companies, the firm is also evaluating businesses in the buy-out stage and considering investments up to €40M.
Connected Capital’s managing partner Mathijs Robbens says, “New, innovative, and scalable solutions are unlocking functionality at an incredible speed. It is inspiring to support cloud-based business models, and our second fund will help us have more impact on SaaS growth and innovation in the next few years.”
Supporting B2B SaaS companies to scale and grow
Founded in 2017 by Wim Haring, Geert van Engelen, Mathijs Robbens, and Olaf te Spenke, Connected Capital is an investor in growth and buy-out stage European B2B SaaS companies.
The firm provides capital and expertise in pure-play SaaS to entrepreneurs in order to accelerate the growth of their businesses. To date, they have successfully completed nine platform investments across Europe.
Robbens says, “We look for founders with a thoughtful and pragmatic tolerance for risk, who can also recognise their strengths and weaknesses in order to build a larger pool of talent and delegate properly. Strong fundamentals are key for business growth, but a flexible, diverse and adaptive team is what makes success sustainable in an evolving, competitive industry like B2B SaaS.”
Investments made from Fund II
Connected Capital has already made its first investment from Fund II by investing in Surepay, a Dutch fintech providing a confirmation of payee in the form of SaaS to banks.
Besides the investment from Fund II, Connected Capital is also supporting the continued international growth of the portfolio companies in Fund I.
One such company is Foleon, a martech platform to create adaptive digital content. It has grown aggressively in both Europe and the US. In the HR tech space, they have backed Speakap and Concentra Analytics, which have both shown accelerated global growth since Connected Capital invested. Portfolio companies Omnia and ChannelSight provide critical digital tools that help retailers and brands execute their e-commerce operations more effectively.
Recently, Connected Capital also completed investments into high-performance cloud hosting specialist UpCloud and virtual event platform Brella. Additionally, in 2021, the team also helped the merger of Onegini and iWelcome to form OneWelcome, the ‘leading’ European provider in Consumer Access and Identity Management.
In order to ensure strategic and operational support to their portfolio, Connected Capital plans to make no more than 10 investments from the new fund. Mathijs Robbens adds, “Our ambition is to become the most sought-after B2B SaaS investor in Europe. The most important ingredient of that is the value we bring and our portfolio companies and founders benefiting from that. When we invest in a company, we commit to the founders and we do everything we can to help their companies accelerate growth.”
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