An aerial view of Dublin city, where MiddleGame Ventures has an office. Image: © Roman/Stock.adobe.com
MiddleGame Ventures has received a €10m investment from Enterprise Ireland to create a pool of funding for Irish fintech businesses.
Today (19 June), MiddleGame Ventures announced plans to step up its investment activity in the Irish fintech market.
The venture capital firm, which has offices in Luxembourg, Dublin and Washington DC, announced a €10m investment from Enterprise Ireland to help create a pool of funding of up to €20m for Irish fintech businesses.
The announcement follows the first close of a fund announced by the venture capital firm in November 2019, targeting post-seed, Series A and Series B lead investments in Europe and North America.
The fund aims to raise a total of €150m by the end of 2020. Enterprise Ireland joins other institutional, strategic and family office investors, including the Luxembourg Future Fund, the European Investment Fund and S&P Global.
A partnership with Enterprise Ireland
MiddleGames Ventures said that it aims to partner with B2B start-ups to drive the transformation of financial services from analogue to digital and from centralised to decentralised, with an emphasis on middleware and back-office solutions.
The fund’s co-founders, Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt, said that the firm is “excited” to put its platform to work “on behalf of Irish innovators solving different problems and re-architecting the financial services industry”.
“We are delighted to begin a long-term partnership with Enterprise Ireland to support great, transformational businesses in Ireland with our highly focused fund,” they added.
“Our investors agree that specialists 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.”
The announcement was welcomed by Enterprise Ireland’s executive director of global business development, Kevin Sherry.
“Enterprise Ireland is delighted to partner with MiddleGame Ventures in this new fund focused on scaling deep tech, disruptive fintech companies,” Sherry said. “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.”
