News

March 29, 2021

Enzo Ventures: a new microfund by Gen Z founders, for Gen Z founders

The new Barcelona microfund has raised €500,000 to invest in pre-seed startups


Tim Smith

3 min read

What skills do you need to invest in pre-seed and pre-revenue startups that are run by founders in their early 20s? Well, you need to be an investor team also made up of early 20-somethings.

Or at least that is the idea of Barcelona-based Enzo Ventures, a new €500,000 microfund run by 23 and 24-year-old former founders.

They’ll be investing between €10,000 to €25,000, hoping to back 20-25 startups in mainly SaaS, marketplaces and ecommerce.

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“Most of the time, we will be investing in younger founders,” explains Markus Törstedt, Enzo partner and cofounder, and former chief executive and founder of SaaS startup Luna, which exited last year.

Törstedt is joined by Edgar Vicente and Iván Fernández, cofounders of DiHola, a mobile sharing app, which was acquired by Social Labs last year. As three Gen Z founders, they say they’re well placed to understand the challenges that young founders face.

“We didn’t have a previous network. We didn't have this experience of rolling out products to potential clients. We needed support knowing if a term sheet was alright,” he remembers. “Those three pillars are where we struggled, and where our founders will be supported.” 

A helping hand

Törstedt, Vicente and Fernández might understand the challenges facing young founders, but they’re also aware they don’t have all the solutions. That’s why they’ve enlisted the help of nine “operational partners”, more experienced entrepreneurs and investors who each own a 1.5% stake of the fund, have the option to coinvest, and will advise Enzo’s portfolio companies.

These include Ammar Amdani of London and San Francisco-based Adapt Ventures, Swiss higher education startup EWOR’s founder Daniel Dippold, and Barcelona-based founder of OneCowork Benjamin Nachoom.

This isn’t the only guidance that Enzo will get. The fund was established with the help of LP PROfounders Capital, who will also sit on Enzo’s investment committee.

And while Enzo will be doing its own due diligence and investment analysis, final sign off on investments will need to also come from that committee.

“We have a big brother, little brother relationship,” says Törstedt. “We have this voting system where two of the founders must agree together with one from the investment committee.”

A bigger problem

Beyond just backing Gen Z founders, Enzo’s team believes it’s addressing a wider problem in early stage investment in Europe.

“And at the moment, in the pre-seed environment, there's only a few funds at a European level that actually invest in the pre-seed stage. Other than, of course, business angels,” Törstedt explains. “So we thought, ‘Why don't we try to cover up this gap that there is in the market right now, especially in the southern European market.’”

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Törstedt describes an investment landscape in Spain that was perilously hard to navigate for inexperienced founders. 

“There are so many other business angels that no one knows about,” he says. “Otherwise, you have seed funds, but those guys also require you to have a certain traction in the market, already having a certain monthly revenue. Spanish funds ask you for Series A metrics.”

Enzo’s young investors hope that their own generational proximity to Gen Z founders, mixed with more experienced guiding hands, will provide the perfect balance to find Europe’s most exciting pre-seed opportunities. And as microfunds gain traction in Europe, this new fund is further evidence that a shake-up of pre-seed investing is well under way.

Tim Smith

Tim Smith is news editor at Sifted. He covers deeptech and AI, and produces Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast . Follow him on X and LinkedIn