How we Invest in Seed

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At bValue, our roots lie in backing startups at the beginning of their journey. Since 2016, we have seeded over 30 new businesses and been one of the first investors in some special companies like Tidio, Spin.ai, MoreGrowth, YourKaya, Senuto, Shoplo, Fluentbe and PushPushGo among others.

We like to  invest very early, often together with super angels and individual investors. In Seed, our investments usually range from 100k eur to 1m eur. We are mainly focused on founders based in Central Europe, however our companies are located in various countries such as Poland, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, UK and US. 

We do not limit our investments to specific sectors; we leave it to our founders to find good markets and the best business models. 

We build our conviction on top of certain macro themes that we think will be driving the future:

We began investing in startups back in 2016 because at that time, in our close proximity, we did not see any investors we would like to have in our own startups. The best description for such investor we can find is a good parent which is demanding, challenging, caring and advising, not directing. Also, quite early into our formation we internalized this notion that providing only capital will soon not be sufficient to win the best founders, therefore early in our DNA we embedded the belief that investing is capital + good advice. By good advice we don’t mean any advice, but only areas where the logic suggests it makes sense to act in order to improve your business. If we have no basis to provide good advice, we stay silent and listen. 

As we met over 3000 startups, we figured out what type of founders we are looking for. As a seed founder it is important for us that you have some narrow expertise or maybe just trying to master one, but you need to be relentless to master that expertise deep and quickly. This means your learning curve must be steep. On the other hand, you don’t limit your interest only to your field of expertise but you constantly build your business acumen by listening, filtering, testing and implementing new ideas and frameworks that improve your business.

We  believe that a good investor is likewell oiled transmission belt which passes knowledge, best practices and contacts from one founder to another. We will continue to invest in seed going forward because working with the best early founders every day is fun and provides a learning opportunity for us as well.

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