Connect Ventures

🚀 Big news! We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Cino, the world’s first real-time shared payment app that’s revolutionizing how groups pay together. No more IOUs, no chasing payments—just seamless, instant transactions that make splitting bills effortless. With their €3.5M Seed round, Cino is set to expand across Europe, including a much-anticipated UK launch. Cino is founded by Elena Churilova and Lina Saleh, two exceptional product founders with a relentless focus on user experience, network effects, and a bold vision to redefine social spending. We're excited to invest alongside our friends at Balderton Capital and leading angels, including Barney Hussey-Yeo. Sitar shares more detail behind why we invested, and what we love about Cino here: https://lnkd.in/eMPbpwzu

Faks has just raised a €6M round led by Speedinvest, with continued contribution from us and existing investors. We’re proud to continue backing them on their journey 👏 This funding marks a major milestone as Faks scales up—doubling their R&D team (from 7 to 15) and expanding into Spain and Italy. 🌍 Two years ago, we led their €5M seed round alongside Cocoa 🍫, FJ Labs, Seedcamp, and others. A lot has changed since then, but our conviction in high-velocity product founders Corentin Geoffray & Félix Pignard remains as strong as ever. Check out Sitar Teli's original blog post for more on why we invested in Faks: https://lnkd.in/ehN-bTQ8

Our Product Summit is back - this time bigger and bolder🕺🏻 On 19th June 2025, we're bringing together the founders, makers and investors building and backing Europe's defining product companies for the second edition of our annual summit, Built By Few. We'll spend the day talking with the pioneers who understand first-hand what it takes to build opinionated products with worldwide appeal. Previous speakers include rockstars like: Luca Martinetti (co-founder of TrueLayer), Saasha Celestial-One (COO at Olio • Share More, Waste Less), Gabriel Hubert (co-founder of Dust), David Okuniev (former co-founder at Typeform), and Bronwen Foster-Butler (CMO at Finisterre) 🚀 Limited spaces - apply to join here 👉 https://builtbyfew.co/ Sitar Teli Pietro Bezza Rory Stirling Mark Pettit Sammy Daniels Amira Naik Sai Tatireddy Sarah O'Donoghue

Product love strikes again 🙌 Plain, a collaborative B2B Customer Support Platform and a Connect portfolio company, has just announced their $15M Series A round led by Battery Ventures! When we first met Simon Rohrbach and Matt Vagni at the end of 2022, we knew instantly they were archetypal product founders—with a distinct anatomy and a shared DNA that defines and differentiates them from other company builders. We couldn't be prouder to be on this journey with them. Congrats to their whole team! 🤓 Read Pietro Bezza's take here: https://lnkd.in/eEmaSEt5

As a venture generalist and product specialist fund, we were thrilled (and proud 😉) to welcome eight new founding teams to our portfolio in 2024: Torg: Where retail & wholesale buyers find 100,000+ verified food & beverage suppliers in Europe. Tuza: The digital exchange for card acquiring services. Cloud Capital: Helping companies gain visibility, predictably and control of their cloud spend. Neverless: A crypto investment platform for the masses. Steep: A BI platform for the modern data stack. Ogment AI: Autonomous AI workforce for HR processes. Plus two solutions in stealth - a female-founded solution in consumer fintech with awesome PLG and network effects, and a solution rethinking social networks, aiming to do what video did for phone calls, building a better space for groups. Safe to say 2024 was spent in good company... Let's go, 2025 🙌 Check out our full 2024 highlights here: https://lnkd.in/eNnDAg4C Sitar Teli, Pietro Bezza, Rory Stirling, Mark Pettit, Amira Naik, Sammy Daniels, Sai Tatireddy, Sarah O'Donoghue

Buckle up: Neverless, crypto investment platform for the masses, is coming out of stealth today. Your "pocket hedge fund", Neverless is an institutional-grade crypto app offering a radically better user experience: instant purchases, zero fees, no minimums, and no lock-ups. We are thrilled to partner with Phuc To, Mikael Peydayesh and Arthur Johanet on their journey to redefine the future of decentralized finance.

We’re delighted to welcome Molten Ventures to our Fund I, as they’ve acquired 97% of the fund’s positions. In today’s challenging M&A and IPO environment, secondary transactions provide an excellent pathway for LPs to fully realize their gains, without divesting the portfolio. Connect Ventures Fund One, launched in 2012, has generated several liquidity events over the years, and its residual value is driven by two stellar companies we backed at the seed stage: Typeform and Soldo. This secondary transaction is a testament to our core thesis: high-conviction investing in product founders who are uncompromisingly committed to building companies that scale efficiently and generate long-term value. We’ll continue managing Fund I and remain committed to the future success of our portfolio. 🚀 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eHWdquhd

Two product founders obsessed with user-centricity. A giant market category dominated by unloved legacy products. A core technology shift in the data infrastructure. BI is the only layer in the new modern stack without a new multi-billion leader and Steep is building the product to win it. We're thrilled to partner with Johan Baltzar and Nino Höglund, leading a $4m seed round, with existing investor Rebecka Löthman Rydå at Inventure and participation from Alliance VC, Antler and Greens. Read Pietro's post on how Steep are building the future of business intelligence here - https://lnkd.in/e_5V5iKE

We recently travelled to the heel of Italy’s boot - the beautiful Salento coastline - to host our fifth founder retreat, disConnect 2024. Getting the chance to spend quality time with founders and connecting them to each other makes this our favourite event of the year. And for this edition, we focused on a much-discussed but often misunderstood topic - resilience. That’s why we partnered with Jenny Campbell, author, founder and lead researcher from The Resilience Dynamic, on the retreat. Resilience is actually about our ability to deal with change, and to maintain our resilience reserves so we can cope with what life - and business - throws at us, which is pretty valuable for those building in the context of high uncertainty and low information, aka all founders. More importantly, the retreat is an excellent opportunity for founders across the portfolio to connect with each other and over the course of a few days new relationships, both personal and customer 😉 were formed. Simon Rohrbach, founder and CEO at Plain, said “disConnect was one of the best things I’ve done for myself lately. I came back having made new friends, and full of energy and excitement about the journey ahead.” disConnect ‘24 is a wrap - but we can’t wait til next year for the chance to reflect, connect, check in with ourselves and check out of the day to day. https://lnkd.in/eCKUdxap Alec Mocatta Amos Wittenberg Ben Holdham Corvin Jaedicke Ed Hardy Fabian Seipel Hans Kristian Furuseth Jeylani Jeylani Jonathan Tiret Louis Lecat Madeline Parra Matias Szarfer Barenblit Matt Vagni Max Hardy-Werbin Michael Lazarenko Nino Höglund Paul Anthony Ravinder Bhadhal Rita Kerbaj Sam Shannon Sean Conley Simon Rohrbach Simon Wolff Jenny Campbell Pietro Bezza Rory Stirling Katy Turner Mark Pettit Sammy Daniels

Some founders are cut from a different cloth — those you know you want to back within the first thirty minutes and with whom you aspire to partner over the next decade. They're deeply opinionated about the problem. For us, Madeline Parra and John Talbott are two of those founders - on a mission to solve the problem of unsold inventory by re-inventing e-commerce. Congratulations to you and Purple Dot - The Pre-Commerce Company for raising your Series A and welcome to the journey OpenOcean. Read about Pietro's experience of working with two product founders in Madeline and John who think at venture velocity. https://lnkd.in/er-evNnS