Defiant is a new early-stage VC firm focused on B2B SaaS and Fintech that has come out of stealth today. Joseph Pizzolato (pictured right) and Cam Rayle (pictured left), the duo who met when they were 6 years old and lead the company, have already secured $30 million and have raised $70 million in initial funding. are planning.
Defiant, based in London and Lisbon, plans to invest in early-stage startups at the “late-seed” or Series A stage. But unlike many new early-stage VC firms, Defiant is more willing to lead or co-lead funding rounds. The goal is to spend between $1 million and $10 million per deal.
While Pizzolato is an investor who previously worked at Felix Capital and Vitruvian Partners, his co-founder Kam Lehr has a different background. He joined one of the world's largest market makers before moving to Macquarie Bank in London to build a prop trading desk. He then founded his own startup called Stackup Risk and sold it to Creativemas.
What sets Defiant apart from the average early-stage fund is that the company wants to rely heavily on data to find the next promising investment. That's why the company is building a unique suite of products to support investment teams and drive inbound interest.
“Our thesis is that the future of venture is going to be quite different from today, and it will be more technologically enabled and more sophisticated in terms of the use of data and AI products. ” managing partner Joseph Pizzolato told TechCrunch.
“We dedicate a third of our budget to funding product builds. Again, I don't think there are funds in Europe that would do that from an OPEX perspective,” he added later in the conversation. Ta.
He says most VC firms haven't changed much in the past 50 years. The new company is still run the same way it was back then.
Image credit: Defiant
Defiant's flagship product is Morpheus, an internal tool for sourcing new deals. When a user uploads a pitch deck to the platform, LLM automatically analyzes it and extracts relevant data such as annual recurring revenue, acquisition cost, and number of employees.
Everything is stored in a database and serves as the basis for competitive analysis. Companies can be filtered and sorted based on various criteria. Defiant has also built a scoring formula for these startups.
“And what we do is we enrich it with external sources. We go to TechCrunch, we go to LinkedIn, we go to PitchBook. We go to public We handle anything in the domain. We also pay for large datasets. We pull down and build these profiles,” Pizzolato said.
Over time, as the Defiant team uploads more data and watches companies evolve through stages, they will be able to identify companies that are overperforming and companies that are underperforming. This tool serves as the data infrastructure backbone for VC firms.
The second product is called Blueprint, which helps founders understand how their startup stacks up against competitors and what VCs think about their business.
Founders enter their data and get a report that ranks their company's metrics compared to similar companies in the same field. Of course, this tool is also a great way to generate deal flow and collect up-to-date data for Defiant's own database. Defiant also offers templates for KPI dashboards and Series A funding decks.
Next, the company is working on a macro analysis product to find the next big investment theme based on large data sets.
So far, Defiant has raised funding from family offices and individuals working in the technology industry, including general partners at Aomico, Cherry Ventures, Hedosophia, Salesforce Ventures, Earlybird, Vitruvian, GRO, Mubadala, and Seek Ventures. Now, let's see if the Defiant team can turn this investment theme into a portfolio of 15-20 high-performing startups.