Rali_cap Debuts $30M Fund for Emerging-Markets FinTech

Rali_cap, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in emerging markets FinTech, has increased its new fund by $10 million, Yahoo reported Thursday (May 5).

This comes after the company, which used to be called Rally Cap Ventures, last month reached a close of $20 million, which was its original target. Then it increased the fund size to $30 million.

Rali_cap invests in business-to-business (B2B) and application programming interface (API) FinTechs in Latin America, Africa and South Asia, at pre-seed and seed stages. The company plans to get a second close by the end of June.

Haymond Simmons, the general partner who launched the firm in 2020, said it used to be a collective before it became a fund. He said he saw a good opportunity to aggregate a community of experts, including operators and angels, to collaborate on deal sourcing, due diligence and founder support, while investing in emerging FinTechs.

“This way, we thought we could outperform traditional venture models in driving value to founders and getting more people involved in the venture capital game,” Simmons said according to the report.

Rali_cap now has almost 240 individual limited partners, which include executives and managers from companies like Wave, Block, MercadoPago, Rappi, Flutterwave, Yoco, Visa, Plaid, Stripe and Coinbase. There are also eCommerce companies like Jumia and Shopify.

A lot of collectives will eventually try to run funds, which is what rali_cap did end up doing. Simmons said the old strategy had been “too passive” and that the community was energized enough that they wanted to fund the deals they were seeing.

See also: January Ventures Closes $21M Fund for Early-Stage B2B Startups

In similar news, January Ventures is looking at being an on-ramp for early B2B tech startups, which will provide funding and a network.

January Ventures invests in startups working on tech for “the empowered individual” that includes fully capitalizing founders as they work on “moonshot ideas” turning into mainstream solutions.