Announcing Connect Fund IV to back products loved by many

We’re excited to announce our fourth fund today, at $80M: “Product is back, baby!”

This marks another milestone on our journey to building the go-to seed firm for product founders. We’ve been investing in Europe’s early-stage software for over a decade, and we’ve seen the power of product companies to build outlier businesses firsthand.

With this new fund, we’re excited to add capital and resources to achieve our two goals with Connect: 1. back the best product founders to bring their visions to life and help them wildly succeed; 2. make our LPs a lot of money.

We’re sticking to our tried-and-true recipe: low volume, high conviction, high support. We’re not interested in spreading ourselves too thin. We want to have the time and attention to give our portfolio founders the support their need to succeed.

We’re also staying true to our roots as pre-seed and seed stage specialists. We love being the first believers in great teams, and we’re passionate about the 0-1 phase, which is why we do so many first rounds.

We’re looking for founders who are obsessed with product and have a clear strategy for creating “built-in” distribution advantages and defensible moats, like PLG and network effects.

We’ve started to deploy Fund 4, and have already partnered with great teams building high potential companies in B2B Health (Stitch, Faks), generative AI (Carter, Embedd, Metavoice, Dust), B2B payment infrastructure (Sprinque), B2B SaaS (Ourspace) and developer tools (Plain).

Raising this fund was not a slam dunk given the challenging market conditions. We had a great start with a significant re-up from our existing LPs; we also built some great new relationships and welcomed new LPs to Connect.

What we preach to founders is also true for us: fundraising sucks…time, but it makes you stronger and sharper. During the process, we had lots of enriching conversations that made us better GPs. And, believe it or not, we had many fun moments too.

A huge thanks to our existing LPs for their continued support and trust, and to the numerous new investors who have joined the Connect family. We’ll work hard to deliver exceptional results.

I’m also very proud that a number of previous Connect-backed founders are now investors in our new fund. Shout out to Francesco, Paul, Carlo, David, Hana, Luca, David and Toby, amongst others, for your amazing support.

We also want to give a special mention to our amazing team, especially Mark, who played a big role in the fundraising process.

Finally, we want to thank all of our portfolio founders and their teams. You’re the reason we do what we do, and we’re incredibly proud of what you’re building. Our success is a reflection of yours, and you make us shine. We’re honoured to be your partners.

Pietro, Rory and Sitar