FOV Ventures gathers 16.5m euros for fund

FOV Ventures has raised 16.5 million euros for its new fund. The target is 25 million euros. FOV invests in “early-stage founders at the forefront of the Metaverse.”

PRESS RELEASE

London, UK. & Helsinki, Finland, 07:00 AM CET 10th March 2022: FOV Ventures, a new specialist VC fund to invest in early-stage founders at the forefront of the Metaverse, has today announced the first close of €16.5m of its target €25m fund. The fund will invest in pre-seed and seed-stage companies across Europe, leveraging the industry expertise of its founding partners and its active ‘Edge Network’, a community of leaders in the field helping to scout new deals and support the fund’s portfolio.

Launching a smaller fund with a specialised sector focus has become increasingly common in today’s venture landscape and positions FOV Ventures perfectly to find the best Metaverse companies in Europe and add value to both founders and co-investors.

The Metaverse represents a major expansion of today’s Internet, becoming more immersive, built with new tools such as real-time 3D game engines, and spanning an increasingly blurred line between the virtual and physical world. It has emerged as one of the hottest topics in tech over the past year, with the major tech platforms such as Meta, Epic, Nvidia and Microsoft investing heavily in the area, catalyzing huge interest from investors and founders alike.

Dave Haynes, Founding Partner of FOV Ventures, commented, “We believe the Metaverse represents a trillion-dollar opportunity over the next decade, fundamentally changing the way we play, socialize and shop, but also the way we work and collaborate. We’ll also need new tools for creators to build this new reality. As with previous evolutions on the Internet, we believe the Metaverse will unleash a new generation of billion-dollar companies. Our mission is to identify, fund and support those companies”

The two Founding Partners of FOV Ventures are industry veterans. Prior to launching FOV Ventures, the team have backed Metaverse companies such as Wave, the Warner Music backed virtual music concert platform; Immersal, the exited Finnish AR-cloud startup; and LIV, the mixed reality streaming platform.

The duo has made several more angel investments together into Metaverse related startups whilst raising the fund, including ReadyPlayerMe, the cross-game avatar platform for the Metaverse and The Dematerialised, a Web3 marketplace for authenticated virtual goods.

Based in the UK, Dave Haynes was formerly part of the investment team at Seedcamp and most recently led HTC’s $100m Vive X fund in EMEA. He was also part of the founding team of SoundCloud, one of web 2.0’s category-defining startups in Europe.

Based in Finland, Petri Rajahalme was previously Managing Director at Nordic XR Startups (NXS) where he led eight investments into XR companies in the Nordics. He was also Chairman of the Board at Immersal, where he led the successful exit of its AR-cloud business to Hexagon AB in 2021.

FOV Ventures will make initial investments of between €250-500k in up to 25 companies across pre-seed and seed and as a specialist fund are willing to back founders right from the start of their journeys. Categories of current interest for the fund include identity, avatars, commerce, entertainment & social, future of work as well as creator tools & infrastructure.