Former Accel investor Candice du Fretay, who worked on the firm’s investments in buzzy agentic AI startup H Company and fantasy football unicorn Sorare, is launching a solo GP fund of $20m.
Dubbed Outlier Grove, the fund will back European B2B startups at angel and seed stages with tickets ranging from $200k-500k. Half of the fund’s target ($10m) has been secured so far.
Du Fretay says that her objective will be to help European entrepreneurs engage with the US market from the earliest stages.
“There’s some conventional wisdom that European startups should wait before engaging with the US market,’ Du Fretay tells Sifted. “In reality most of Europe’s most successful B2B platforms, like [robotic automation software company] UiPath and [search platform] Elastic, were selling products in the US ahead of their Series A.”
It comes at a time of uncertainty for European startups looking to the US, as Donald Trump pushes an aggressive ‘America-first’ agenda that has left many companies wondering how to approach the market.
“Right now there is no visibility,” says Du Fretay. “But whatever happens, the US remains a large and lucrative market for B2B tech. For B2B startups in most categories, winning the US will be crucial to achieving global category leadership.”
Going to the US
Du Fretay worked for four years at Accel in London, where she focused on consumer, enterprise software and fintech startups. Before that, she spent nearly a decade in the US, first in financial advisory at banking giant Lazard, and then completing an MBA at Harvard.
Her new fund is backed by institutional investors and family offices, but also operators and C-suite execs from 25 high-profile US scaleups including Anthropic, Google, Datadog, OpenAI and Stripe.
“I wanted to leverage my background… and this network I’ve built, plus an exceptional LP base, to bring early exposure to the US [for founders],” says Du Fretay.
She says that she will act as “an extension of the founding team,” helping to secure early customers, sharing best practices and providing access to the fund’s network of LPs.
The fund will back up to 25 companies over the next four years.
