ACT Venture Capital establishes a new seed fund, AIB Start-up Accelerator Fund 2

PUBLISHED: 13th February 2017

LK Shields Solicitors acted for Enterprise Ireland in connection with its investment in the AIB Start-up Accelerator Fund 2

The Fund is backed by Enterprise Ireland and ACT’s main expansion fund which includes investment from AIB and other private investors. The investments made by the new Fund will focus on developing high-growth, export-oriented companies in sectors such as Software, Internet, Digital Media, Communications and Mobile.

The Fund is a successor to the ACT managed AIB Start-up Accelerator Fund 1 which backed 39 companies over the past five years and has already had a number of successful exits including the sale of Storyful to Newscorp, FeedHenry to Red Hat, Embo to Baird, Trustev to TransUnion and Soundwave to Spotify.

The objective of the fund is to assist promising early stage companies getting ready for scaling. Examples from Fund 1 include Cubic, Swrve, Endeco and Silvercloud, which together with other portfolio companies have collectively raised over €140m of expansion capital.

The new fund aims to back 25 new companies over the next four years and will invest up to €1m into each company. ACT can further invest up to €7m from its main fund into successful companies which require further expansion capital and specialises in syndication with international investors for larger amounts having completed over 50 such deals.

For further information, please contact Emmet Scully at escully@lkshields.ie.