Enzo Ventures closes €20m second fund for Southern European founders
The Barcelona firm has doubled its first fund's size to back pre-seed founders from Spain, Portugal and their diaspora, including a London-based clinical trials startup.
Barcelona-based venture capital firm Enzo Ventures has closed its second fund at €20m, continuing its focus on backing pre-seed founders from Southern Europe and the region’s diaspora entrepreneurs.
Fund II follows the same approach as Enzo’s debut €10m fund, launched in 2023, but with double the capital and what the firm describes as a stronger platform behind it. The strategy targets founders from Spain, Portugal and wider Southern Europe, including those who have relocated to build companies in cities such as London and Paris while retaining links to the talent networks and startup communities they came from.
A bet on diaspora founders
Enzo defines this group as diaspora entrepreneurs: people who leave cities like Barcelona and Lisbon but stay connected to their home ecosystems even as they build elsewhere. The firm says its aim is to identify these founders early, before larger venture firms turn their attention to them.
Fund II is writing cheques of between €250,000 and €600,000. It has already backed three startups, among them London-based Cori Clinical, alongside companies in Madrid and Zurich. Enzo’s existing portfolio includes Orbio and Murphy, both of which the firm says are now generating millions of euros in revenue.
UK links through London deal and diaspora thesis
The fund’s investment in London-based Cori Clinical gives Fund II a direct UK presence, reflecting Enzo’s broader thesis that Southern European founders are increasingly choosing hubs such as London to scale their companies. For the UK startup ecosystem, this points to continued inbound capital and founder talent arriving from Spain and Portugal, even as those entrepreneurs keep ties to their home markets.
Founders behind the fund
Enzo was founded by Edgar Vicente and Iván Fernández Lucas, both of whom have backgrounds in startups. Vicente was 23 when he co-founded the firm. The pair set up Enzo to fill what they viewed as a gap in Southern Europe: early-stage capital that is founder-friendly, globally ambitious and willing to take what they call “day-zero” risk, at a time when they believed many local VCs were too conservative.
Vicente, founding partner at Enzo Ventures, said: “When we started investing in 2023, our conviction was that something structural was changing in Southern Europe. The new generation of founders coming out of the region was more ambitious, more technical and much more global from day one. We didn’t want to build a fund around where companies were incorporated. We wanted to build one around where exceptional founders came from.”
What it means
The close of Fund II signals growing institutional appetite for early-stage bets on Southern European talent, with Enzo betting that founder origin matters more than company domicile. For the UK, the firm’s investment in Cori Clinical adds another data point to London’s role as a landing spot for ambitious founders from Spain and Portugal.
What to watch next is how Enzo deploys the remainder of its €20m across further pre-seed deals, and whether more of its diaspora-founded portfolio companies choose to incorporate or scale operations in the UK as they grow.