British AI voice startup ElevenLabs’ early investor Carles Reina has raised $15m for a solo GP fund to back AI, robotics and defence startups at pre-seed and seed. The new London and Barcelona-based fund, Baobab Ventures, is backed by LPs including Cendana Capital, Isomer Capital, RSJ Investments, Emergence Ventures, Cyber Fund and partners at early-stage funds early-stage funds Concept Ventures and Credo Ventures.
Reina currently leads go to market at ElevenLabs, and will continue in his role. He is also a longtime angel investor, writing early cheques into startups like Revolut.
Despite the difficult VC fundraising market, Reina says he was able to raise the fund, which closed over the summer, in about three months. He chalks it up to his track record investing in big bets like Revolut and ElevenLabs. Reina tells Sifted he wants to create a “generational fund”; raising numerous funds and potentially hiring in the future.
Baobab Ventures will invest cheques between $300-350k into 30-35 startups; Reina says he’s already done eight deals from the new fund. It will focus half on Europe and half on the US and the rest of the world.
For Reina, “the way of building companies over the past three years has fundamentally changed.” Companies like ElevenLabs, Anthropic and OpenAI “sign enterprise contracts in less than 60 days; that is something unheard of before,” he says.
“It's all about the execution, the speed, the distribution of your products. There's a number of things that have evolved a lot.”
A ‘24 hour’ cycle
Reina believes that in the future, founders will struggle to stay ahead of the competition in AI.
“You're going to be thinking that you're at the top of the world because you just launched a company, and you might be getting some traction... but the reality is that within 24 hours, there's going to be 20 companies that are going to be copying you, and within seven days, you can have hundreds of companies copying you.”
He believes founders will need to focus on distribution and go to market to get an edge. “That pure distribution motion, which will be slightly different for every single one of the markets that you are targeting, will end up defining whether you're successful or not.”
While VCs shifted from backing foundation models to AI ‘wrappers’ to now the application layer, Reina says he’s interested in the “distribution layer” — startups with a keen focus on getting their products into customers’ hands. He points to bigger companies like OpenAI and Cursor as good examples of this.
Reina also wants to invest in defence startups. He’s eyeing startups focused on smart munitions and intelligence analysis and gathering, and his LP agreement, or LPA, is “fully flexible” about investing in weapons.
But launching an AI-focused fund in late 2025 isn’t without risks, and worries of an AI bubble bursting continue to circulate.
“The biggest risk that we have right now is we are still early in the cycle. … At some point, there's going to be some sort of a bump,” he says.
