Notable European founders launch new investment platform to one-up investors who aren’t former operators

Founders of some of Europe’s significant tech companies have come together and announced on Tuesday the launch of a new investment platform, Plural, along with a €250M early-stage venture fund. The founders of Plural aim to back the next generation of founders with global ambitions.

The platform has been set up by Ian Hogarth, founder of Songkick, Khaled Heloui, co-founder of Wise, Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Certific and Wise, and Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of Teleport. Other recognised founders who are part of the platform will be announced soon.

Mission behind Plural

Plural is a scalable investment platform whose investors are exclusively former founders and operators with decades of company-building experience.

They started Plural after seeing that most investors in Europe lacked expertise in building tech startups. Compared to more than half of IT investors in the US, just 8 per cent of investors in Europe are previous operators. 

The founders of Plural believe that the lessons learned through founding digital firms are crucial in assisting the next generation of entrepreneurs to launch businesses with potential for the entire world.

Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, says, “We’re the investors we would have liked to have when we were building our own companies. Founding a company is a craft and the best way to learn that craft is to work alongside those who have done it before.”

Plural wants to be an active investor and will lead early-stage deals between €1M and €10M.

The “unemployables”

Ian Hogarth says, “We call experienced founders “unemployables” because once you’ve experienced the intense authorship that comes with creating something new it’s hard to work for anyone again. We created Plural to give “unemployables” a place to call home and put their entrepreneurial energy behind missions and founders they deeply believe in.”

Plural’s founders Taavet, Sten, Ian and Khaled, besides founding their own startups, have also played an important role in building three companies – Skype, Bigpoint and Topia.

As Plural, they have already invested in 14 companies, including Feather, NFTport, an NFT infrastructure company; energy storage company Field; metaverse company Ready Player Me, and student banking challenger, MOS.

Speaking on the development, Khaled Helioui says, “So much opportunity is left untapped today as exceptional founders often fail to meet standard investors’ pattern recognition criteria. Sadly, investors lack the risk appetite needed to fulfill founders’ ambitions and consequently, the full impact founders seek can not be realised. By changing the funding mechanisms that act as conservative gatekeepers today we can unlock so much potential.”

Sten Tamkivi adds, “We are huge optimists for the potential of technology coming from Europe which can benefit the whole world, as well as improve the lives of people across the continent. We’ve already seen the real impact a well-funded startup scene can have on economies in small countries like Estonia – now it is time to scale this GDP level impact across the whole of Europe.”

What can you expect from the Plural’s founders?

All four founder-turned-investors have achieved success as angel investors for years. Companies in their portfolio include Deliveroo, Hopin, Pipedrive, Chorus, Uber, Zego, and Bolt. 

Though managing a fund with someone else’s money will be a whole new challenge for the four European founders, this is what they plan on doing: “We will each take on a tiny number of projects each year – 2-3 typically. For each company we partner with, we are able to spend up to a day a week if you need it. You can rely on us to be close enough to deeply understand what is happening with your business and proactively support you vs just turning up to board meetings. For each startup we back, we draw up an SLA so we can hold ourselves accountable for being the best possible partner to you.”

As a group, the founders have already worked with over 10 per cent of the European startups valued at over $1B.