We're excited to announce that we now have a fully dedicated team looking into pre-seed opportunities to invest in high-performing and ambitious founders. With this, we want to bridge the gap between pre-seed and seed stages by systematically writing the first institutional checks at scale, enabling founders to focus on what really matters: building exceptional products that customers want to use.
At Kfund, our goal has always been to support companies through their earliest stages. Starting in 2016 as a seed-specific fund, we invested between €500k and €2m in startups that showed early signs of product-market fit. After approximately 60 investments across two seed funds, and working with exceptional founders building companies like Factorial, Abacum, Exoticca, and others, we gained key insights and more comfort into how we would like to invest in later stages.
This experience led us to launch Leadwind, our $250m fund for Series A/B investments with check sizes ranging from €3m to €10m. As our portfolio expanded, so did our vision; we evolved from being primarily a Spanish-focused fund to having an international footprint. We also realized that our investment appetite extended beyond just product-market fit stages or early growth, to being a key partner right from the very beginning.
This realization spurred a series of pre-seed investments from our second seed fund, laying the groundwork for what is now our pre-seed strategy. Investing in pre-seed stages means being part of the inception stage—there is no “too early.” In fact, our mission is to serve as the first institutional and professional money, while acting like an angel: agile, intimate, and 100% founder-focused.
We couldn’t be more confident that this approach makes sense as we can leverage the wider Kfund umbrella in terms of value generated from the combined efforts of portfolio founders, co-investors, LPs, and key talent we can tap into, not to mention the accessing the rest of the Kfund team which includes serial founders of marketplaces and B2B Saas; experienced operators in high growth companies, and long-time investors.
We have been actively closing our first investments, with 9 portfolio companies already onboard in the first quarter. These investments include co-investments with tier-one funds like a16z, Speedinvest, Notion, Precursor, Pear, among others.
Pre-seed overview:
Below is a glimpse into the investments so far, each selected based on strategic rationale deeply aligned with our pre-seed philosophy. In the end, pre-seed investing is fundamentally about people, and we are enthusiastic about backing even the most unconventional founders.
Lend helps companies gain access to card receivables processed by every acquirer in Brazil, both as a data source for credit decision making and as collateral for credit recovery, increasing recovery rates while facilitating debt collection.
Why we invested:
With a dynamic team comprising two second-time founders and Stanford MBA graduates, Lend faces significant tailwinds as a first mover addressing a $54B problem in Brazil—defaulted credit lines, which are currently being handled traditionally and unsuccessfully. The large market opportunity, combined with the founders' unique insights into the regulatory, technical, and market complexities, provides a strong basis for defensibility. This gave us the confidence to invest alongside a16z and Canary in our first pre-seed investment.
Alinia helps companies adopt open source LLMs safe and reliable use across various applications. This solution simplifies the deployment of AI technologies by removing the need for specialized ML and governance expertise, addressing ML infrastructure challenges, and providing an easy-to-use interface for non-technical users.
Why we invested:
Our investment in Alinia was driven by the exceptional expertise of its founding team and the significant tailwinds in the AI sector. Adriana, has 23 years of experience in NLP and AI, from Carnegie Mellon spin-off to leadership roles at IBM Watson and Twitter's ML platform. Carlos brings a unique perspective specializing in AI Governance & Regulation at Hugging Face and the OECD. Their blend of deep technical expertise and regulatory insight, favorably positions them to tackle this opportunity, as the adoption of AI Increases along with the demand for ethical governance.
Remuner streamlines sales compensation by automating the creation, adjustment, and execution of commission plans. Their no-code platform connects to CRMs/ERPs, integrates various data sources for comprehensive insights, and simplifies compensation management, fostering a motivated and high-performing sales team.
Why we invested:
Remuner addresses a significant pain point in the market: the complexity and opacity of sales compensation schemes, particularly in traditional businesses with intricate product portfolios and varying commission structures, commonly seen in insurance, banking, HORECA and so forth. These challenges have long led to dissatisfaction among sales reps and managerial headaches, stemming from a lack of real-time performance visibility and flexibility in adapting compensation plans. Our investment was deeply influenced by the team’s track record, in particular the CEO, Sergio, ex-BCG, second time founder and experienced operator (previously founded CornerJob, and later joined Signaturit as COO).
GPTadvisor is a B2B SaaS leveraging GenAI to revolutionize the wealth management sector. It seamlessly integrates with banks, custodians, and independent advisors, providing an advanced toolkit to enhance portfolio and wealth management services for their end clients, such as streamlining data analysis, optimizing advisory processes, and delivering insights with unprecedented speed and accuracy, 100% compliant to the complex financial industry.
Why we invested:
Financial advisors traditionally face significant challenges in consolidating and analyzing data from various fragmented private and public sources to tailor investment advice. The stringent compliance standards common in this industry, particularly around privacy and security, lead to inefficiencies and unproductivity due to the extensive manpower and time required to deliver personalized product recommendations. GPTadvisor tackles this process by aggregating all relevant data into a unified, conversational interface that is 100% compliant with security and privacy protocols, dramatically enhancing efficiency and accuracy in advisory services. Salvador has a proven track record and deep market understanding as a serial entrepreneur, having built and sold three fintech startups, the most recent of which was acquired by AllFunds. After the acquisition, he served as the Global Head of Digital at AllFunds for over five years, gaining unique insights into the dynamics and challenges of building a compliance-ready product for the broader financial industry.
Livo is a marketplace connecting hospitals with skilled professionals, initially focusing on finding nurses.
Why we invested:
Staffing platforms for health professionals is not new, yet it remains a critical problem to be solved, as global shortage of healthcare professionals is increasing by rising patient numbers, staff shortages, and longer working hours, presenting more and more operational challenges. This backdrop is combined with a €2.2B TAM in markets in dire need of efficient staffing solutions. As a result, Livo has been faced with fast growth, evidenced by high fulfillment rates and early signs of product-market fit. This reflects the execution-driven team behind it, with robust experience developing and scaling marketplaces at Glovo and CloudKitchens.
AI-driven B2B lead generation and outreach automation platform, providing a seamless solution that streamlines the sales process from start to finish. Genesy allows users to efficiently create targeted lead lists, enrich them with verified company and contact information from top-tier tools and databases, and automate outreach campaigns via email and LinkedIn—all within a single platform. What sets Genesy apart is its AI sales agents, which engage, qualify, and schedule meetings with prospects in a completely automated manner, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of B2B sales activities.
Why we invested:
Genesy addresses the significant inefficiencies in B2B sales processes, such as time-consuming data gathering and management, and the use of disjointed tools that lead to siloed information and poor data quality. Targeting mid-to-large B2B sales teams, often supported by sales or revenue operations, Genesy stands out in a fragmented market by providing a comprehensive, AI-driven automation platform that streamlines the entire sales cycle, distinguishing itself from its competitors (such as clay.com)
Teal is building a fully modular payroll data API platform for consumer lenders. The aim is to provide credit providers with an all-in-one solution for their income verification flows, based on real-time affordability data.
Why we invested:
Our investment in Teal was motivated by the ongoing challenges of the cumbersome manual income verification process in B2C lending. By integrating with payroll providers for real-time income verification, Teal offers lenders an enhanced user experience for their end clients, thereby improving conversion rates. This approach effectively addresses key industry challenges such as fraud risks, operational delays, and poor consumer experiences. The collective market insights and fintech expertise of the founders, garnered from their experiences at companies like Vivid, Curve, Yapily, and Lakestar, solidify our confidence in their founder-market fit profile we like at pre-seed.
LegalTech leveraging AI to automate significant work for lawyers and paralegals, addressing a critical demand in consumer and labor litigation—sectors overwhelmed by high-volume, repetitive cases.
Why we invested:
LegalTech, powered by AI, is projected to grow at a CAGR of 34% from 2021 to 2028. This growth is driven by the increasing adoption of AI-powered solutions in law firms, spurred by the demand for speed, efficiency, in-depth insights, and the need to ensure consistency in legal work. Both co-founders have an impressive track record at Google, 21st Century Fox, JP Morgan, Citibox, and Wallbox. Notably, the CEO was part of the early days of AI application into law with JP Morgan’s automating 360,000 hours of legal work and reducing it to mere seconds.
Algo.ai is a skill assessment platform that revolutionizes hiring by focusing on skill-based evaluations rather than traditional CVs. It speeds up the hiring process by 70%, enhances candidate quality, and promotes inclusivity by reducing bias. The platform supports the entire employee lifecycle through tools for recruitment, ongoing development, and mobility, helping companies manage talent efficiently from hiring to internal growth.
Why we invested:
Algo’s mission to address the often-overlooked need for comprehensive soft skills assessment during the hiring process, is something we resonate a lot with and witness firsthand. Market research indicates that 89% of hiring failures can be attributed to poor evaluation of soft skills, which is exactly what Algo aims to solve. Positioned within the rapidly growing $970B work tech market, Algo.ai targets the underserved white-collar segment in Europe, capitalizing on the shift towards agile and inclusive workforce solutions.
We're excited to announce that we now have a fully dedicated team looking into pre-seed opportunities to invest in high-performing and ambitious founders. With this, we want to bridge the gap between pre-seed and seed stages by systematically writing the first institutional checks at scale, enabling founders to focus on what really matters: building exceptional products that customers want to use.
At Kfund, our goal has always been to support companies through their earliest stages. Starting in 2016 as a seed-specific fund, we invested between €500k and €2m in startups that showed early signs of product-market fit. After approximately 60 investments across two seed funds, and working with exceptional founders building companies like Factorial, Abacum, Exoticca, and others, we gained key insights and more comfort into how we would like to invest in later stages.
This experience led us to launch Leadwind, our $250m fund for Series A/B investments with check sizes ranging from €3m to €10m. As our portfolio expanded, so did our vision; we evolved from being primarily a Spanish-focused fund to having an international footprint. We also realized that our investment appetite extended beyond just product-market fit stages or early growth, to being a key partner right from the very beginning.
This realization spurred a series of pre-seed investments from our second seed fund, laying the groundwork for what is now our pre-seed strategy. Investing in pre-seed stages means being part of the inception stage—there is no “too early.” In fact, our mission is to serve as the first institutional and professional money, while acting like an angel: agile, intimate, and 100% founder-focused.
We couldn’t be more confident that this approach makes sense as we can leverage the wider Kfund umbrella in terms of value generated from the combined efforts of portfolio founders, co-investors, LPs, and key talent we can tap into, not to mention the accessing the rest of the Kfund team which includes serial founders of marketplaces and B2B Saas; experienced operators in high growth companies, and long-time investors.
We have been actively closing our first investments, with 9 portfolio companies already onboard in the first quarter. These investments include co-investments with tier-one funds like a16z, Speedinvest, Notion, Precursor, Pear, among others.
Pre-seed overview:
Below is a glimpse into the investments so far, each selected based on strategic rationale deeply aligned with our pre-seed philosophy. In the end, pre-seed investing is fundamentally about people, and we are enthusiastic about backing even the most unconventional founders.
Lend helps companies gain access to card receivables processed by every acquirer in Brazil, both as a data source for credit decision making and as collateral for credit recovery, increasing recovery rates while facilitating debt collection.
Why we invested:
With a dynamic team comprising two second-time founders and Stanford MBA graduates, Lend faces significant tailwinds as a first mover addressing a $54B problem in Brazil—defaulted credit lines, which are currently being handled traditionally and unsuccessfully. The large market opportunity, combined with the founders' unique insights into the regulatory, technical, and market complexities, provides a strong basis for defensibility. This gave us the confidence to invest alongside a16z and Canary in our first pre-seed investment.
Alinia helps companies adopt open source LLMs safe and reliable use across various applications. This solution simplifies the deployment of AI technologies by removing the need for specialized ML and governance expertise, addressing ML infrastructure challenges, and providing an easy-to-use interface for non-technical users.
Why we invested:
Our investment in Alinia was driven by the exceptional expertise of its founding team and the significant tailwinds in the AI sector. Adriana, has 23 years of experience in NLP and AI, from Carnegie Mellon spin-off to leadership roles at IBM Watson and Twitter's ML platform. Carlos brings a unique perspective specializing in AI Governance & Regulation at Hugging Face and the OECD. Their blend of deep technical expertise and regulatory insight, favorably positions them to tackle this opportunity, as the adoption of AI Increases along with the demand for ethical governance.
Remuner streamlines sales compensation by automating the creation, adjustment, and execution of commission plans. Their no-code platform connects to CRMs/ERPs, integrates various data sources for comprehensive insights, and simplifies compensation management, fostering a motivated and high-performing sales team.
Why we invested:
Remuner addresses a significant pain point in the market: the complexity and opacity of sales compensation schemes, particularly in traditional businesses with intricate product portfolios and varying commission structures, commonly seen in insurance, banking, HORECA and so forth. These challenges have long led to dissatisfaction among sales reps and managerial headaches, stemming from a lack of real-time performance visibility and flexibility in adapting compensation plans. Our investment was deeply influenced by the team’s track record, in particular the CEO, Sergio, ex-BCG, second time founder and experienced operator (previously founded CornerJob, and later joined Signaturit as COO).
GPTadvisor is a B2B SaaS leveraging GenAI to revolutionize the wealth management sector. It seamlessly integrates with banks, custodians, and independent advisors, providing an advanced toolkit to enhance portfolio and wealth management services for their end clients, such as streamlining data analysis, optimizing advisory processes, and delivering insights with unprecedented speed and accuracy, 100% compliant to the complex financial industry.
Why we invested:
Financial advisors traditionally face significant challenges in consolidating and analyzing data from various fragmented private and public sources to tailor investment advice. The stringent compliance standards common in this industry, particularly around privacy and security, lead to inefficiencies and unproductivity due to the extensive manpower and time required to deliver personalized product recommendations. GPTadvisor tackles this process by aggregating all relevant data into a unified, conversational interface that is 100% compliant with security and privacy protocols, dramatically enhancing efficiency and accuracy in advisory services. Salvador has a proven track record and deep market understanding as a serial entrepreneur, having built and sold three fintech startups, the most recent of which was acquired by AllFunds. After the acquisition, he served as the Global Head of Digital at AllFunds for over five years, gaining unique insights into the dynamics and challenges of building a compliance-ready product for the broader financial industry.
Livo is a marketplace connecting hospitals with skilled professionals, initially focusing on finding nurses.
Why we invested:
Staffing platforms for health professionals is not new, yet it remains a critical problem to be solved, as global shortage of healthcare professionals is increasing by rising patient numbers, staff shortages, and longer working hours, presenting more and more operational challenges. This backdrop is combined with a €2.2B TAM in markets in dire need of efficient staffing solutions. As a result, Livo has been faced with fast growth, evidenced by high fulfillment rates and early signs of product-market fit. This reflects the execution-driven team behind it, with robust experience developing and scaling marketplaces at Glovo and CloudKitchens.
AI-driven B2B lead generation and outreach automation platform, providing a seamless solution that streamlines the sales process from start to finish. Genesy allows users to efficiently create targeted lead lists, enrich them with verified company and contact information from top-tier tools and databases, and automate outreach campaigns via email and LinkedIn—all within a single platform. What sets Genesy apart is its AI sales agents, which engage, qualify, and schedule meetings with prospects in a completely automated manner, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of B2B sales activities.
Why we invested:
Genesy addresses the significant inefficiencies in B2B sales processes, such as time-consuming data gathering and management, and the use of disjointed tools that lead to siloed information and poor data quality. Targeting mid-to-large B2B sales teams, often supported by sales or revenue operations, Genesy stands out in a fragmented market by providing a comprehensive, AI-driven automation platform that streamlines the entire sales cycle, distinguishing itself from its competitors (such as clay.com)
Teal is building a fully modular payroll data API platform for consumer lenders. The aim is to provide credit providers with an all-in-one solution for their income verification flows, based on real-time affordability data.
Why we invested:
Our investment in Teal was motivated by the ongoing challenges of the cumbersome manual income verification process in B2C lending. By integrating with payroll providers for real-time income verification, Teal offers lenders an enhanced user experience for their end clients, thereby improving conversion rates. This approach effectively addresses key industry challenges such as fraud risks, operational delays, and poor consumer experiences. The collective market insights and fintech expertise of the founders, garnered from their experiences at companies like Vivid, Curve, Yapily, and Lakestar, solidify our confidence in their founder-market fit profile we like at pre-seed.
LegalTech leveraging AI to automate significant work for lawyers and paralegals, addressing a critical demand in consumer and labor litigation—sectors overwhelmed by high-volume, repetitive cases.
Why we invested:
LegalTech, powered by AI, is projected to grow at a CAGR of 34% from 2021 to 2028. This growth is driven by the increasing adoption of AI-powered solutions in law firms, spurred by the demand for speed, efficiency, in-depth insights, and the need to ensure consistency in legal work. Both co-founders have an impressive track record at Google, 21st Century Fox, JP Morgan, Citibox, and Wallbox. Notably, the CEO was part of the early days of AI application into law with JP Morgan’s automating 360,000 hours of legal work and reducing it to mere seconds.
Algo.ai is a skill assessment platform that revolutionizes hiring by focusing on skill-based evaluations rather than traditional CVs. It speeds up the hiring process by 70%, enhances candidate quality, and promotes inclusivity by reducing bias. The platform supports the entire employee lifecycle through tools for recruitment, ongoing development, and mobility, helping companies manage talent efficiently from hiring to internal growth.
Why we invested:
Algo’s mission to address the often-overlooked need for comprehensive soft skills assessment during the hiring process, is something we resonate a lot with and witness firsthand. Market research indicates that 89% of hiring failures can be attributed to poor evaluation of soft skills, which is exactly what Algo aims to solve. Positioned within the rapidly growing $970B work tech market, Algo.ai targets the underserved white-collar segment in Europe, capitalizing on the shift towards agile and inclusive workforce solutions.
