Maze started eleven years ago. If there is a constant in our journey of building a pan-European impact investment firm, it’s the ability to learn from our actions.
Since launching our first fund, in November 2019, we have invested in 47 impact ventures across Europe (including the UK), deploying around 35 million euros. Five years in, it is a timely opportunity to take stock of learnings.
These learnings guide our future thinking in applying venture capital as a tool to invest in founders tackling the most prominent social and environmental challenges of our time.
We feel at home at the earliest stages. When ideas are being generated, teams are being created and prototypes are being built. That is where our networks thrive and where our team excels at supporting founders (while they are realising that founder is what they are going to be called from then on).
Through investments at pre-seed, seed, and series A, we realised that pre-seed is where we hit our stride. Pre-seed is the first round of capital that founders raise from professional investors. From our experience, it can range from 500k€ to 5m€, depending on the technology, market, and team.
At pre-seed our:
Having built a company ourselves for more than a decade is what gives us the lived experience to honour the opportunity of being there on day 0 with founders.
We’ve learned that, for a pre-seed fund, the focus should be on first investments, with little to no reserves for follow-on. Here’s a summary of our thinking: