Founders of Wise and Skype raise $436 million to build tech giants in Europe
The partners of European venture capital firm Plural, from left to right: Ian Hogarth, Taavet Hinrikus, Carina Namih, Sten Tamkivi and Khaled Helioui.
Plural
The founders of Wise, Skype and Songkick have raised 400 million euros ($436.4 million) for a new fund to back technology startups in Europe. It seeks to compete with established funds like Atomico, Balderton Capital and Creandum with its founder-led focus.
Plural Fund II, the firm’s second to date, arrives just 18 months after the firm raised its last fund, a 250 million-euro vehicle. Its co-founders include Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of fintech firm Wise, Ian Hogarth, co-founder of concert discovery service Songkick, Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of communications platform Skype, and Khaled Helioui, former CEO of Bigpoint Games.
Hinrikus told CNBC that Plural could serve as a better partner to startups in Europe than most venture capital funds, given that it was started by people with the “scar tissue” of proven entrepreneurs. Only 8% of VCs in Europe are former founders, he says, much lower than the 60% in the United States.
“If we look at a lot of VC funds, you have lots of people who have done great work with spreadsheets, not with startup life,” Hinrikus told CNBC in an interview. “In our case, it is seen as a core criteria for choosing our partners that they’re totally unemployable.”
“It feels like it’s world war three, and we’re in the trenches together as one of the founders. So, if we look at the track record, and our ability to get the deals done, I think that all seems to say that this is really missing in Europe,” Hinrikus added.
Plural raised the funds from a mix of limited partners, including British and American university endowments, U.S. foundations and insurers, strategic family offices in Europe and the United States. The firm said it saw “significant appetite” from LPs — limited partners, the institutional backers of venture funds — for its new fund and exceeded its own fundraising target, despite being in the “toughest environment” for raising a fund.
“The fact that, in a difficult fundraising environment, we’ve been able to raise a fund of this scale, with a huge amount of appetite from LPs, just shows you that some of the most sophisticated investors in the world are really recognising the opportunity in Europe, and really want to see a fund the shape of Plural,” Carina Namih, partner at Plural, told CNBC in an interview.
“I think it’s a real testament against the sort of macro backdrop that we’ve raised a fund of this size and scale so quickly,” she added.
The ‘unemployables’
Plural plans to invest at a pace of two to three investments per investor per year with its new fund. The firm has five partners in total, whom it dubs the “unemployables,” owing to the fact that they wouldn’t readily join a VC firm, or be employable at a startup. Each of the partners is an active angel investor.
Plural has made 27 investments in total, backing companies including law-focused artificial intelligence firm Robin AI, nuclear fusion power plant developer Proxima Fusion, and most recently drug discovery platform Sano Genetics. Its largest sectors by investment are AI (31%), frontier technology (16%), and climate and energy (14%).
Hinrikus said Plural isn’t interested in finding the next major software-as-a-service name in Europe, referring to companies that make software for businesses to ease the burden of storing data, accessing infrastructure, and carrying out data analytics. It’s more interested in deep tech, focusing on founders looking to solve fundamental scientific problems around energy, unlock AI “superpowers,” and make groundbreaking progress in health care.
Building tech giants in Europe
Plural says it wants to build technology giants in Europe, identifying winners in emerging categories that other funds may tend to ignore, such as deep tech and clean tech.
Carina Namih, a biotechnology entrepreneur-turned-partner at Plural, said she wouldn’t be surprised to see major technology names on a par with U.S. and Chinese giants start to emerge in Europe in the not-too-distant future.
She noted technological breakthroughs are happening much faster now, boosted by key developments around AI and more established pools of capital.
“Look at how quickly OpenAI burst onto the scene with ChatGPT,” she said, adding it’s taking shorter amounts of time for new technologies to hit major milestones. “Clearly, the big tech companies have a lot of advantages and are entrenched in many ways. But I think now is a time more than ever, where new players and emerging players can come in and dominate entirely new spaces that didn’t exist a year ago.”
Namih previously worked on applying AI to mRNA-based medicine at her former startup HelixNano.
Plural’s new fund launch adds to the wave of startup activity that’s been happening in Europe in the last decade or so.
A report from venture capital firm Accel late last year showed that $1 billion-plus unicorn firms often serve as catalysts for startup creation, with 1,451 new startups being founded by former employees of European and Israeli unicorns.
Of that new batch of startups, a great deal of them tend to come from fintechs, according to the report, with 70 fintech unicorns producing 423 startups.
“In the last 10 years, the whole ecosystem really has become an ecosystem, whereas before, we were just wild game hunting,” Harry Nelis, partner at Accel, told CNBC. “There was one here, one there, there was no ecosystem.”
“It’s a lot easier to start a company than before. The engineering has been done before, the marketing has been done before,” he added. “That is a flywheel that we have never had in Europe, that we now do have.”
Technology
Trump aims to cut $6 billion from NASA budget, shifting $1 billion to Mars-focused missions
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Chinese bargain retailer Temu changed its business model in the U.S. as the Trump administration’s new rules on low-value shipments took effect Friday.
In recent days, Temu has abruptly shifted its website and app to only display listings for products shipped from U.S.-based warehouses. Items shipped directly from China, which previously blanketed the site, are now labeled as out of stock.
Temu made a name for itself in the U.S. as a destination for ultra-discounted items shipped direct from China, such as $5 sneakers and $1.50 garlic presses. It’s been able to keep prices low because of the so-called de minimis rule, which has allowed items worth $800 or less to enter the country duty-free since 2016.
The loophole expired Friday at 12:01 a.m. EDT as a result of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in April. Trump briefly suspended the de minimis rule in February before reinstating the provision days later as customs officials struggled to process and collect tariffs on a mountain of low-value packages.
The end of de minimis, as well as Trump’s new 145% tariffs on China, has forced Temu to raise prices, suspend its aggressive online advertising push and now alter the selection of goods available to American shoppers to circumvent higher levies.
A Temu spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that all sales in the U.S. are now handled by local sellers and said they are fulfilled “from within the country.” Temu said pricing for U.S. shoppers “remains unchanged.”
“Temu has been actively recruiting U.S. sellers to join the platform,” the spokesperson said. “The move is designed to help local merchants reach more customers and grow their businesses.”
Before the change, shoppers who attempted to purchase Temu products shipped from China were confronted with “import charges” of between 130% and 150%. The fees often cost more than the individual item and more than doubled the price of many orders.
Temu advertises that local products have “no import charges” and “no extra charges upon delivery.”
The company, which is owned by Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings, has gradually built up its inventory in the U.S. over the past year in anticipation of escalating trade tensions and the removal of de minimis.
Shein, which has also benefited from the loophole, moved to raise prices last week. The fast-fashion retailer added a banner at checkout that says, “Tariffs are included in the price you pay. You’ll never have to pay extra at delivery.”
Many third-party sellers on Amazon rely on Chinese manufacturers to source or assemble their products. The company’s Temu competitor, called Amazon Haul, has relied on de minimis to ship products priced at $20 or less directly from China to the U.S.
Amazon said Tuesday following a dustup with the White House that had it considered showing tariff-related costs on Haul products ahead of the de minimis cutoff but that it has since scrapped those plans.
Prior to Trump’s second term in office, the Biden administration had also looked to curtail the provision. Critics of the de minimis provision argue that it harms American businesses and that it facilitates shipments of fentanyl and other illicit substances because, they say, the packages are less likely to be inspected by customs agents.
— CNBC’s Gabrielle Fonrouge contributed to this report.
WATCH: Trump tariffs mean higher prices, big losses for Amazon sellers
Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, takes the stage during The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, Dec. 4, 2024.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares in the company over the next year, according to a financial filing on Friday.
Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 but remains Amazon’s top shareholder, is selling the shares as part of a trading plan adopted on March 4, the filing states. The stake would be worth about $4.8 billion at the current price.
The disclosure follows Amazon’s first-quarter earnings report late Thursday. While profit and revenue topped estimates, the company’s forecast for operating income in the current quarter came in below Wall Street’s expectations.
The results show that Amazon is bracing for uncertainty related to President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs. The company landed in the crosshairs of the White House this week over a report that Amazon planned to show shoppers the cost of the tariffs. Trump personally called Bezos to complain, and Amazon clarified that no such change was coming.
Bezos previously offloaded about $13.5 billion worth of Amazon shares last year, marking his first sale of company stock since 2021.
Since handing over the Amazon CEO role to Andy Jassy, Bezos has spent more of his time on his space exploration company, Blue Origin, and his $10 billion climate and biodiversity fund. He’s used Amazon share sales to help fund Blue Origin, as well as the Day One Fund, which he launched in September 2018 to provide education in low-income communities and combat homelessness.
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