e-procurement

Investors

Goat Capital

Goat Capital is a venture capital fund was set up by video livestreamer Justin.tv and Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and Robin Chan, also an angel investor and entrepreneur. Chan met Kan while working at Verizon Wireless when Justin.tv was being launched. Both have since become private investors for over 10 years, with early investments including Twitter, Xiaomi, Bird, Uber and Square. Established in September 2020, the fund’s name was inspired by the goat because good startup founders need to be agile and resilient to survive and be successful, according to Kan.Kan was also an early investor of Indonesian payment gateway Xendit before Goat Capital joined Xendit’s $150m Series C round in September 2021. Goat Capital’s portfolio includes corporate credit card startup Kodo, Indian neobank Bueno Finance, carbon capture developers Holy Grail and web development tool Spore. The hybrid incubator and VC fund has already secured $25m and aims to raise a total of $40m to invest in diverse sectors like digital health, e-commerce, robotics, climate change and gaming entertainment. Funding per startup would range from $500,000 to $3m.

• USA

Investors

Encomenda Smart Capital

Early-stage-focused VC firm with a €24m first fund mainly investing in B2B and B2C digital startups headquartered in Spain. Initial investment amounts range between €70,000 and €300,000, and followup investment amounts go up to €1m per company. Describing themselves as “momentum investors” seeking quick time-to-market projects, Encomenda Smart Capital was founded in 2017 and managed by renowned Spanish angel investors Carlos Blanco, Oriol Juncosa and Miguel Sanz Sanchez, along with a network of angel investors  Encomenda supports the growth of startups' portfolios and helps startups to scale at national and international levels. Encomenda invests 30% in SaaS and in projects with a recurring income model; 20% are fintech, and they also bet on the human resources, edtech and healthcare. Just two out of 25 investments have folded up between 2017 and 2020, with half the fund monies committed. Encomenda is seeking to launch a second fund in 2022 focusing on Spanish and Portuguese startups, of €40m–€50m, and multi-stage, by starting in the early-stage investments, with follow-through investments in subsequent stages.

• Spain

Investors

Alison Gelb Pincus

Alison Gelb Pincus is an entrepreneur who co-founded One King’s Lane, a direct-to-consumer home decor company which was sold to Bed, Bath & Beyond, and more recently, sustainable packaging start-up kari.earth. She is also an angel investor and founder of Short List Capital, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC collective run by women.  Short List Capital currently lists 20 companies in its portfolio, which has a focus on investing in e-commerce platforms with healthy, user-friendly or sustainable products. Gelb Pincus’s recent investments included participation in the May 2020 $5.3m seed round of US cookware maker Caraway and a 2015 investment in US-based unicorn Diamond Foundry, the first certified carbon-neutral lab-produced diamond manufacturer.Alison Gelb Pincus was married to Mark Pincus, the co-founder of Zynga and a founding investor in Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Xiaomi.

• USA

Investors

Aspex Management

Aspex Management was founded in 2018 by Hermes Li Ho Kei who was previously the executive MD and Head of Asia Equities at Och-Ziff Capital Management, aka OZ Management. Prior to joining OZ in 2011 Li worked at Goldman, Sachs & Co in Hong Kong.The London School of Economics graduate is now the chief investment officer at Aspex. The Hong Kong firm focuses on equity investments in Pan-Asia, specializing in sectors with long-term market growth potential and companies undergoing structural changes.Aspex led the $64m funding round for South Korean fintech unicorn Toss in August 2019. The P2P money transfer service platform Toss is created by Viva Republica backed by PayPal. Other participants in the round included existing Toss investors Kleiner Perkins, Altos Ventures, Singapore's GIC, Sequoia Capital China, Goodwater Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.In May 2020, Aspex also invested in another startup Market Kurly, a grocery-delivery service provider that became South Korea’s latest unicorn via the Series E funding round that secured $328m led by DST Global. In July, Aspex also joined the $900m Series C+ funding round of Xpeng Motors, Tesla’s EV rival in China.

• China

Founders

Jorge Araujo Müller

Co-founder of Psquared

Argentinian native Jorge Araujo Müller is co-founder and investor at Psquared, Spain’s first flexible workplace management and design company, Psquared, for hybrid workspaces, where he has worked since its foundation in April 2019.  Psquared is a spin-off of startup innovation hub CoBuilder, founded one year earlier and which Araujo co-founded.  He has several other roles. Since 2020, he is a co-founder at startup development agency We Are Grit and advisor of a talent agency for Latin Americans in Spain, Base España. He is also an investor and advisor at e-commerce recruitment agency RSV Outsourcing. Araujo also holds part-time educational roles, speaking on innovation at Barcelona’s ESADE institution to MBA students and as a mentor at Mexico’s chapter of the MassChallenge accelerator. Earlier, Araujo worked as a business advisor to the digital agency JustDigital, and was co-founder and sales director at the digital talent agency Bandit, for a year. Before that, from 2012–2016, he was CSO and co-founder of Barcelona-based startup Nubelo – a tech recruitment agency for freelancers – until it was acquired by Freelancer.com.  Prior to this, Araujo worked for two years as a business researcher at JP Morgan Chase and for almost two years at West Side Consultants, both in Argentina. Araujo holds a business administration qualification from CEMA University, Buenos Aires.In 2013, Araujo and his brother were named in Forbes Argentina’s 30 Promesas list of young entrepreneurs. 

Founders

Tessa Clarke

CEO and co-founder of OLIO

Tessa Clarke is the British CEO and co-founder of food-sharing app OLIO that was inspired by her experience of having to throw away perfectly good unused food when she was packing up to move from Switzerland back to the UK in 2014.After graduating with a first-class degree in social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge in UK in 1997, she worked for three years at the Boston Consulting Group as a junior associate. She joined an MBA program at Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2002 and met Saasha Celestial-One, who was also studying for an MBA at Stanford. In 2015, Clarke and Celestial-One decided to use their savings to create a food-sharing app OLIO after successfully testing the idea as a private WhatsApp group in North London.Before becoming an entrepreneur in 2015, Clarke has held various senior management roles since completing her MBA in 2004. She worked for global business publisher EMAP from 2005 until 2009, when she joined Dyson Inc as e-commerce managing director (MD). In 2013, she left Dyson to become MD of fintech PayLater based in Switzerland run by the Wonga payday loan company. Known then as Tessa Cook, she later became Wonga’s MD for eight months when she was tasked with “cleaning up” the tarnished reputation of the high interest loan company. From 2013 to 2021, she was also chair of the management board of St George’s Palace, a boutique apart-hotel and spa complex in Bansko, Bulgaria.In 2018, she became a fellow at Unreasonable, an organization that supports social and environmental entrepreneurship. For two years until 2021, Clarke was ambassador for the Meaningful Business 100 global event that advocates the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. She was also a board member for six years at Contentive, a global B2B media and information company. In 2021, her busy schedule now includes becoming a business mentor for not-for-profit Virgin Startup.