Cultivate investor platform aims for Silicon Valley in Europe
Executives from Klarna, Transferwise and Checkout.com have all joined a new angel investment platform aiming to inject $5 million in European start-ups.
Cultivate will make $5m available for new start-ups
Cultivate was created by Blossom Capital founder Ophelia Brown and describes itself as a “first-of-its-kind” platform aiming to create a Silicon Valley culture within Europe.
Guillaume Pousaz CEO of Checkout.com, Nilan Peiris vice president of growth at Transferwise, and Shakil Khan, an early investor in Spotify, are all involved in the project.
Brown tells TechCrunch that the first year of the program has been designed for people “spinning out of unicorns” to give those firms a hope that people are “going to go off and start something great.”
Blossom Capital will invest a total of $5 million through Cultivate in a group of 20 start-ups, focusing on seed and pre-seed funding.
There will be a total of 30 angel investors in the programme available for participating start-ups for their first year in programme.
Fintech start-ups have experienced a surge in usage and uptake in the wake of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
According to a study by financial advisory deVere Group, the use of fintech apps in Europe surged 72% in the last week of March.
Related: TransferWise teams with Alipay in latest Asian expansion
