The American investment fund Pear VC will land in Barcelona in the coming weeks with Pepe Agell, the entrepreneur co-founder of Chartboost, a mobile advertising platform that has become a successful business.
The Barcelona office will cover the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem in Europe from the Catalan capital, with the objective of "finding the best startups with an international business vision, who think the market is global," Pepe Agell recently explained.
The investment arm Pear VC, created by the also Catalan Mar Hershenson (who adopted her partner's surname) and by the Iranian Pejman Nozard, has several capital funds that generally invest in emerging and innovative ideas from various sectors. Since its creation about eight years ago, Pear VC has promoted different projects, some of which have been the basis of companies of the caliber of DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, Dropbox or Branch, among others. Pear VC's investments in seed-stage companies range from 100,000 euros to 5 million euros.
Created in Silicon Valley and headquartered in Palo Alto, Pear VC has focused until now on the US and Latin American markets. In the latter, it has already carried out several operations and has stakes in eight companies. "But we hadn't tackled Europe yet," says Agell. For this entrepreneur, who settled in Silicon Valley in 2008, it has been easy to understand the culture of Pear VC and he joined this year as a partner (visiting partner) because he wants to put his savings "at the disposal of other entrepreneurs," he explained during his participation in the session Technology at the service of advertising and marketing, organized by Tech Barcelona and with the participation of its general director Miquel Martí and Oriol Sans, director of Acció's financing unit. During the conversation, Agell recounted his experience as an entrepreneur and co-founder of the ad auction-based advertising platform Chartboost, which he created with Maria Alegre and Sean Fannan. Chartboost was sold in April of that year to Zynga, for 200 million euros.
A member of the California Spain Chamber, an entity that commercially connects Silicon Valley with Spain, Pepe Agell wanted to take "a sabbatical year after leaving Chartboost," but nothing could be further from his intentions. For several months now, he has been involved in Mar Hershenson's project, "initially part-time," but he has ended up taking the lead to expand into Europe. "I have already started to see European startups and I am confident that we will close some operations very soon," he insists.
"There are already many programs within Pear VC that will be very valuable for European projects with a global vocation and that have the United States within their objectives," Agell stated. He assured that what they will be looking for will be "entrepreneurs whom we admire: good and solid founders and billion dollar opportunities". Therefore, their selection process involves understanding very well how the company's founding team thinks, knowing their leadership dynamics, and above all, understanding that the business opportunity must be very ambitious.
Following the experience accumulated so far by Pear VC in the United States thanks to its relationship with Stanford University (California), close to its Palo Alto offices, the Barcelona office will also focus on discovering new talent in universities across Europe. Agell pointed out that the example of Pear's Garage program could be followed, where they give 25,000 dollars to young university entrepreneurs to encourage them to create their own company, and he mentioned that they currently have one open for engineering students at Stanford.