A brand new enterprise agency goals to show that essentially the most profitable startup concepts don’t need to be born or scaled in Silicon Valley.
Fluent Ventures, a worldwide early-stage fund, is backing founders replicating confirmed enterprise fashions from Western markets in fintech, digital well being, and commerce throughout rising markets. The extra cynical would possibly describe this as a clone manufacturing unit, however founder and managing associate Alexandre Lazarow calls the agency’s technique “geographic alpha.”
Fluent’s premise is that most of the world’s most dear startups usually are not solely new ideas that haven’t been tried earlier than, however extra merely, native diversifications of fashions which have already succeeded elsewhere.
The San Francisco-based agency, based in 2023, is deploying $40 million throughout a fund, an incubator, and a structured co-investment car with restricted companions. It is writing preliminary checks of $250,000 to $2 million, from pre-seed to Series A, and plans to make 22-25 investments, with follow-ons.
“We are contrarians at coronary heart,” stated Lazarow, who beforehand invested at Omidyar Network and Cathay Innovation. “We consider the world’s greatest improvements usually are not the unique purview of Silicon Valley.”
Fluent will not be precisely working in a bubble: The final decade has seen a large decentralization within the expertise trade. In 2013, simply 4 cities had produced a unicorn. Today, that quantity exceeds 150.
And that has been on the again of rinse and repeat, with most of the high tech gamers in rising markets mirroring profitable startups which were constructed elsewhere, akin to Amazon clones in e-commerce, Stripe clones in funds, and neo-banking apps in fintech. The first breakout neo-bank was Tinkoff from Russia. “That motion scaled globally, and [it] was one of many insights that motivated my investments in Chime within the U.S. and Banco Neon in Brazil,” stated Lazarow.
Lazarow insists Fluent doesn’t simply copy-paste.
“That not often works, in our opinion. Local adaptation is important,” he stated.
The agency factors to ride-hailing for example. Uber could have pioneered the class, however in Indonesia, Go-Jek localized it by incorporating motorbike taxis and tremendous app performance just like China’s WeChat. Now Uber Eats is actually chasing that evolution, Lazarow argues.
To that time, Fluent Ventures, along with discovering tailored fashions, screens for native product-market match and founder-market alignment.
While the agency handed on a number of building marketplaces globally, it backed BRKZ in Saudi Arabia, a localized tackle India’s Infra.Market. The founder, a former Careem government, was a robust operator in a area with surging infrastructure demand, Lazarow famous.
Despite calling itself a worldwide fund, Lazarow says Fluent doesn’t intention for equal allocation throughout each geography. Instead, it goes deeper within the areas the place it sees essentially the most potential. Right now, which means a concentrate on Latin America, MENA, Africa, Southeast Asia, and selective U.S. markets.
Its present portfolio contains Minu, a Mexican worker wellness platform; Sabi, a Nigerian B2B commerce startup; Prima, a Brazil-based industrial market; and Baton, a U.S. M&A platform for SMBs.
The agency says these corporations have raised a number of follow-on rounds since Fluent’s early checks. Collectively, startups from Lazarow’s prior and present portfolios have generated over $30 billion in enterprise worth, with seven reaching unicorn standing.
Skeptics nonetheless query the exit panorama in rising markets, maybe particularly since valuations have gone up in these markets, with extra unicorns than a decade in the past. Yet Fluent sees momentum constructing. IPOs of startups like Nubank, UiPath, Swiggy, and Talabat show that world outcomes can emerge exterior the U.S. and Europe — after which, as within the case of Nubank and UiPath, these corporations can nonetheless go public within the U.S. in the event that they select.
“Exit markets are additionally maturing in these areas,” Lazarow remarks. “New secondary corporations are rising. Stock markets wish to construct native itemizing capabilities. Yes, the U.S. has rather more developed Stock Launch and M&A markets. But underneath the hood, a few of the largest and most worthwhile exits are already taking place exterior.”
Fluent has additionally constructed out a special form of community across the sorts of founders it invests in. More than 75 unicorn founders and VCs again the fund, together with David Vélez (Nubank), Nick Nash (Sea Group), Akshay Garg (Kredivo), and Sean Harper (Kin), alongside institutional LPs and household workplaces from world wide. According to Lazarow, many are lively contributors, serving to portfolio corporations with expertise, fundraising, and enlargement.
The agency additionally depends on a small group of enterprise companions from ZenBusiness, Terminal, Kin, and Dell, bringing each sector depth and geographic attain.
In a world the place enterprise capital may be rethinking overexposure to the U.S. and China, Fluent believes its strategy affords LPs one thing few corporations can: diversification.
“We consider the perfect concepts come from wherever and scale in all places,” says the associate whose agency claims a spot on Kauffman Fellows’ high‑returner index, due to his earlier private stakes in Chime, ZenBusiness, and Sidecar Health.
Other world VCs with an rising markets focus embrace Accion Venture Lab, Alter Global, Endeavor Catalyst, Flourish Ventures, Global Ventures, Quona Capital, and Speedinvest.
