HackCapital launches investment platform competitor to Odin, Vauban

Much in the way that AngelList and CircleUp have helped U.S. startups with angel investing, HackCapital wants to do the same for Europe's impact solution-focused startups.

Co-founders and industry angel investors, Arman Anaturk, Camille Bossell and Emilie Dellecker launched the Switzerland-based entity out of stealth Tuesday to joins similar groups, like Vauban, Odin and Roundtable, in helping founders, fund managers and syndicates in the climate tech industry raise capital from their networks for their own raises.

HackCapital is the fundraising and financing arm of Hack Group, the creators of the foodtech community FoodHack and HackSummit. It provides a way for startups, funds and syndicates to use the HackCapital platform to launch an investment vehicle and pool capital from multiple investors in their network into the funding round, said Arman Anaturk, co-founder and CEO of HackCapital, via email.

HackCapital manages the legal and administrative services behind these pooling mechanisms via a fully digitized platform that makes issuing and investing easier and more affordable.

To date, over 30 funds and startups have used the infrastructure to roll-up investors into their rounds, including Vienna-based Arkeon and Canada-based New School Foods, Anaturk said.

Where Anaturk said HackCapital is doing something different is that it is using a securitization structure, which centralizes the administration to bypass the needs of traditional special purchase vehicles, which limits the number of investors.

"HackCapital's infrastructure is specifically designed for liquidity and secondaries," Anaturk said. "We believe that the private markets will play a critical role in solving climate and health in the next decades, but the lack of liquidity is one of the main factors that prevents more capital flowing towards meaningful innovation and impact, especially in deep-tech fields, where the innovation cycles take longer than the typical 10 years fund return."

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