MiddleGame Ventures closes $165M FinTech-Focused Fund to invest in B2B and B2B2C startups

MiddleGame Ventures (MGV), a fintech-focused investment firm, announced has raised $165 million for its Fund I MGV fund. The new fund, which targets post-seed, series A and series B lead investments in Europe and North America, will be invested in and partner with B2B and B2B2C startups driving the transformation of financial services from analog to digital and from centralized to decentralized, with an emphasis on middleware and back office solutions.

Backers for the MGV fund, include The Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) and the European Investment Fund (EIF) are anchor investors in the new MGV fund, whilst S&P Global is included among other institutional, strategic and family office investors.

Founded in 2018 by Pascal Bouvier, Michael Meyer and Patrick Pinschmidt, the Luxembourg-based MiddleGame Ventures (MGV) is a financial services technology venture capital firm. Its focus is on supporting innovation in the financial sector as organisations reinvent themselves to compete and service clients in the digital age. Both Bouvier and Meyer have substantial FinTech investment experience having co-founded Route 66 Ventures and consulted with Santander InnoVentures. Pinschmidt was a senior official at the US Treasury Department following a decade as a sell-side research analyst covering financial services for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. MGV also owns and operates NadiFin, a growth stage accelerator for European startups based out of Luxembourg.

Commenting on the funding, Pascal said: “We are pleased to have new capital from substantial investors to support great, transformational businesses across Europe and the US with our highly focused fund. Our investors agree that specialist funds with experience working with entrepreneurs, incumbent financial institutions and regulators are best placed to thrive in an environment characterised by financial and technological cross-currents and significant regulatory constraints. We are excited to put our platform to work on behalf of investors and the next wave of innovators solving hard problems and re-architecting the industry.”

Patrick Nickels, chairperson of the Luxembourg Future Fund Board of Directors, added: “We are pleased to be an investor of MiddleGame Ventures fund aiming to support early stage FinTech companies. The Luxembourg Future Fund believes this commitment will help to strengthen the FinTech industry in Europe and generate positive spillovers in Luxembourg. This is a strategic sector for Luxembourg for economic diversification and we are delighted to contribute to its continuing development.”

“We are delighted to be supporting MiddleGame Ventures as an anchor investor in its new fund,” said the EIF’s chief executive Pier Luigi Gilibert. “The EIF has a strong commitment to innovation in Europe, and we hope that this fund, with its focus on FinTech entrepreneurs, will assist us in that goal.”

MGV partners have invested over USD $300 million in early stage financial services firms over the past decade including Ripple, Tandem Bank, SimpleSurance, Coverhound and CompareAsia. MGV’s new fund has already made three representative investments in a capital markets digital platform and banking as a service and big data analytics startups in the UK (Nivaura, Railsbank and Gardenia Technologies).