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Canadian Pension Group Creates $342 Million European VC Fund

Canadian Pension Group Creates $342 Million European VC Fund

(Bloomberg) -- The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System said it’s setting up a 300 million-euro ($342 million) venture capital fund to invest in early-stage European technology companies.

It’ll be led by Harry Briggs, a veteran VC previously at BGF Ventures and Balderton Capital. He said the fund would back as many as 25 companies across Europe with investments of 5 million euros to 10 million euros each. Some money would be reserved for follow-up financing.

Startups working to transform health care, finance and the future of cities and transport, were of particular interest, he said in an interview. Investments wouldn’t be limited to these specialties though, he added.

OMERS manages about C$97 billion ($72.6 billion) and the new fund will be based in the public pension group’s London office, it said in the statement. In the U.K., OMERS has stakes in Thames Water, one of the country’s major utilities, as well as port authority Associated British Ports, and the Vue chain of cinemas.

Damien Steel, managing partner and head of Toronto-based OMERS Ventures, said the new fund was part of a global expansion strategy. It opened a Silicon Valley office earlier this year.

“We’ve seen the European tech sector reach escape velocity over the past couple of years, producing more and more companies recognized worldwide,” he said in a statement Monday.

In 2017, 7.7 billion euros in VC funding was raised in Europe, compared to 3.8 billion in 2013, according to data compiled by private equity trade association Invest Europe. VC firms including Atomico, Accel Partners, and Index Ventures, have over the past couple of years created new funds that collectively total almost $2 billion.

Briggs said that when it came to early-stage investing, European players have remained largely unchanged, but U.S. firms such as Sequoia, Benchmark, Bessemer and Andreessen Horowitz have increasingly sought early-stage investment opportunities on the continent.

The initial money for OMERS’s new fund will come from the Canadian pension manager itself, but Briggs said additional capital would be raised later in the year from other investors who could "offer something strategic."

Briggs will be joined in London by Tara Reeves, a former partner at VC firm LocalGlobe, and Henry Gladwyn, who worked with Briggs at BGF and who previously managed an angel syndicate whose members included the co-founders of Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy Kahn in London at jkahn21@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Nate Lanxon

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