LocalGlobe, the seed-stage venture capital firm founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, and one of the most active firms in the U.K., is gearing up to launch a new separate fund aimed at Series B.
According to sources — and since confirmed by LocalGlobe — the VC firm is raising a sister fund to formally back the most promising startups in its portfolio to help them scale.
It isn’t unheard for LocalGlobe to follow on after seed during later funding rounds, having done so in successful companies such as Zoopla and TransferWise. However, the thinking here is to have a separate fund to make this more common, and provide LPs a way to double down on LocalGlobe’s most promising bets.
The new fund is to be called “Latitude,” whilst a recent regulatory filing mistakenly and inadvertently surfaced “Senderwood,” the holding company of LocalGlobe and Latitude. It is not known how much Latitude is looking to raise from LPs, although this is aimed at Series B, so I’d expect it to be larger than LocalGlobe’s most recent £75 million fund.
TechCrunch has also learned that Julian Rowe has joined Latitude as a partner from JP Morgan, where, having moved back from Silicon Valley, he latterly was EMEA Head of Internet and Digital Media and worked closely with successful U.K. scale-ups like Farfetch and Deliveroo.
LocalGlobe’s Robin Klein will also be heavily involved in the new Series B fund, formalising a role he has increasingly taken at LocalGlobe. Saul Klein is the third member of the Latitude team.
LocalGlobe issued the following statement, confirming the existence of Latitude, but declined to comment further:
LocalGlobe’s new and existing investors are excited about the opportunity to invest in UK tech companies, both at seed and as they scale up, justifiably since the U.K. has now produced 60 unicorns or 35% of the total from Europe and Israel. We are exploring the technicalities of laying the foundations of a new fund, to be known as Latitude, for launch in 2019. This will enable us to invest in the most successful companies that are coming through from previous LocalGlobe funds at Series B and beyond. Initial conversations with investors have been going well and they are excited about the prospect of a new way to invest in some of the UK’s best early stage tech companies.
Update: Oscar Williams-Grut at Yahoo Finance reports that Latitude’s debut fund is looking to raise $200 million (£156.5 million).