Defiant is a new early stage VC firm focused on B2B SaaS and fintech coming out of stealth today. Joseph Pizzolato (pictured right) and Cam Rail (pictured left), the duo at the helm of the firm who met when they were six years old, have already secured $30 million and plan to raise as much as $70 million for their initial fund.
Based in London and Lisbon, Defiant plans to invest in early stage startups at the “late seed” or Series A stages. However, unlike many of the new early stage VC firms, Defiant is willing to lead or co-lead funding rounds. The goal is to spend anything between $1 million and $10 million per deal.
While Pizzolato has already been an investor working for Felix Capital and Vitruvian Partners before, his co-founder Cam Rail has a different background. He joined one of the biggest market makers in the world and then moved to Macquarie Bank in London to build the prop trading desk. He then created his own startup called Stackup Risk and sold it to Creativemass.
What makes Defiant different from your average early stage fund is that the company wants to rely heavily on data to find the next promising investment. For that reason, the firm is building its own suite of products that will help the investment team and also foster inbound interest.
“Our thesis is that the future of venture is going to be pretty different to what it is today. And it’s going to be a lot more technologically enabled, a lot more sophisticated around the use of data, AI products,” managing partner Joseph Pizzolato told TechCrunch.
“We dedicate a third of our budget as a fund to product building. Again, I don’t think there’s any fund in Europe who does that from an OPEX perspective,” he added later in the conversation …