Announcing Faber Tech II

5 min readNov 20, 2020

Dear Friends,

We are truly happy to announce the first close of our new fund Faber Tech II at €20,5M (targeting €30M in the coming months)!

Faber was founded to pursue a long-term mission: to be the best early stage, entrepreneur-led micro-VC firm from Southern Europe, focused on emerging tech and adopting a specialty approach to pre-Series A investment.

This new fund is designed to back a new portfolio of founders who want to transform the world with their AI/data-driven startups starting from Southern Europe.

At this point, we want to take a moment to thank everyone — founders, investors and industry peers — who has been truly supportive and helpful along the way.

Looking back

Faber was born out of the belief that the (very) early entrepreneurial scene around 2012 needed an independent, agile, value-added VC with “founder DNA”, that could help entrepreneurs derisk the early days of starting a company and accelerate their global growth.

We adopted a new approach to early stage investment and chose “faber” as our brand, a latin word meaning “maker”, as a tribute to the importance of relentless execution, focus, velocity and hard work required to build world-class companies from Portugal to the world.

Our first investment vehicle started as a simple operating company with approximately €500k (which grew to ca. €11M over the years after multiple capital increases involving many individuals and a few institutional investors). We planned to act as a blend of venture studio (which we soon abandoned) and seed VC, offering founders a bench of resident technical resources and operational support unique to the region.

Since 2013 we formed our core team and invested in our first portfolio of 19 companies founded by 50+ audacious entrepreneurs — Faber was fortunate to be chosen as a first local investor by many of the most promising startups from Portugal (2013–2017) that went on to international accelerators and/or raised later international VC rounds, such as Seedrs, Unbabel, Codacy or Hole19, together with selective investments in the UK and Germany — mostly B2B/SaaS, mobile and marketplaces.

We worked hard to help our founders accelerate from pre-seed/seed to Series A by serving as their extended team in going to market and by supporting their early scaling process (typically scaling up to the US while keeping engineering/ product teams in Iberia).

Along the way, we always tried to contribute to building a solid ecosystem, to attracting new (local and international) talent to entrepreneurship and to foster co-investments with several of our investors/ LPs (e.g. Shilling, Busy Angels, The Edge, BIG, Caixa Capital and a few individuals) and many international VCs.

We learned from our mistakes, from the insights of many founders and peers, and iterated with each experience — we are incredibly proud of what our portfolio has achieved so far and how we’ve evolved as a firm.

We are very excited about the coming years for many of our portfolio companies and remain totally committed to working hard with all the founders in successfully fulfilling their visions.

Thank you to everyone who believed in our vision and made this possible — early investors, founders, team members and ecosystem partners — with a very special thank you to Alberto Sequerra, José Luís Pinto Basto, Pedro do Carmo Costa and Rui Correia Nunes for their trust, mentorship and early and continued support over the years.

Looking ahead

Three years ago we closed the investment period of our initial vehicle (reserving the remaining capital for follow-ons) and start the fundraising process for our “second fund”, i.e., our first institutional fund.

We decided to do so as an equal partnership — Carlos, Rui, Sofia and myself — and with increased conviction about our specialized value-added approach to early stage investment.

It’s nearly impossible to think about the future of most industries without considering the impact of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, data science and the power of entrepreneurial talent and resolve, while we see so much talent across Iberia wanting to transform their industries with such technologies.

Many successful global companies were born from Iberia over the last two decades, and we believe that Southern Europe will emerge even stronger as a new generation of founders prepares to launch their companies from Portugal or Spain.

Amidst the social and economic challenges of 2020, we (and the LPs supporting us) believe our thesis around data/AI and digital transformation becomes even stronger and more relevant in this context, as data-driven startups will be a crucial engine of future growth and industry transformation.

We believe AI/data-driven founders need support from specialized investors and so we will work with our Professor-in-Residence and our extended network of technical advisors both in due diligence and in portfolio support. We are fortunate to have a collective of 20+ AI/data-centric experts (founders, professors, researchers, industry tech leads) across Iberia and the US united around our thesis and with whom we share carried interest.

We will continue to be the first local investor (pre-seed/ seed) to back the most ambitious founders launching AI/data-driven companies from Iberia — our stage/tech specialty focus and value-add approach fill a gap in South Europe and we believe that we are now well positioned to be investors in the next vintage of Iberian data-centric successes.

We are thankful for the support of the LPs who share this belief and decided to back us based on our differentiated approach, including the EIF, the IFD and several other institutional and individual investors.

We are thankful for the incredible help that we received from so many people along the way, especially from many of our early “fund I” investors, industry peers, portfolio founders and ecosystem players — a very special thank you to António Murta, Carlos Vasconcellos, Chrys Chrysanthou, David Calem Ferreira, Filipe Roup Rosa, Francisco de Lacerda, Gabriel Coimbra, Gonçalo Serpa Pinto, João Paulo Raimundo, Marco Lebre, Pedro Ribeiro Santos… and many others.

It’s still the early days for the ecosystems where we are most active, as well as for Faber as a specialty VC firm investing in teams transforming the world with technology.

But we couldn’t feel more committed to working even harder and helping the next generation of entrepreneurs make the most of Iberia as a launchpad and succeed at global scale.

Thank you all!

Alexandre