Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of (Transfer)Wise and Teleport founder Sten Tamkivi have joined forces to launch a new investment firm.
Hinrikus and Tamkivi intend their new firm to have a strong mission-driven influence on the European tech scene for decades to come. The firm invests the partners’ own evergreen capital with analytical diligence and long-term patience.
“We can get involved in a tech company with a first 250,000-1 million euro seed investment and have the freedom to follow on through all rounds until the IPO. We expect to collaborate with investor peers, rather than lead deals,” Hinrikus said in a statement.
Hinrikus and Tamkivi will operate as equal investment partners, both with high affection to early-stage tech investments and as an investment committee across all asset classes. They are building a professional organization around them to support the management of the investment pipeline and help entrepreneurs already in the portfolio. The early team of 6 is based in Tallinn, Estonia.
“Taavet and I started working together back in high school in Tartu, Estonia, during the original internet boom of the late 90s. Then we regrouped at early Skype ten years later. While we’ve stayed personally close during all the years he was building Wise mostly from London, we’ve now decided that it’s time to get back into business together with full energy again,” Tamkivi wrote in his blog.
“We share a lot of common values and interests. We feel comfortable in the crazy futuristic early-stage technology world. We have both invested decades to help create the future of finance, work and mobility,” Tamkivi said.
Hinrikus and Tamkivi have been both actively investing across European startups. Tamkivi is returning from his paternity leave, while Hinrikus has recently launched a pandemic-related startup Certific.
“There are many futures yet to be created, and this time around we hope to support a much much broader generation of founders. We want our new firm to differentiate with our hands-on experience scaling fast-growing tech companies from Europe, the evergreen and patient capital we can provide and our flexibility across asset classes,” Tamkivi said.
Hinrikus’ and Tamkivi’s current portfolio is geographically focused on Europe, but also spans from the US to Japan and Singapore. This includes a list of mutual investments in companies like Wise, Bolt, Veriff, LHV, Xolo, Oyster HR, Pactum, Starship, Curve, Sunrise, Acapela and others.
