1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Raoul Maier of Eudemian Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Raoul Maier was recorded in July 2020.

Raoul Maier is Founder and Managing Partner at Eudemian Ventures, a fund focused on post-seed investment in North America.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get you introduced to our audience. Tell us a bit about your background as well as about the fund.

Raoul Maier: I started early in venture capital during the crazy dot-com boom in the late 90s. I was quite young at that time. I was able to raise a small fund in Europe.

We thought we were smart and invested in some European and US startups but ran into the dot-com crash, which was a formative experience for me. I had to rebuild, and it was impossible to raise a large fund, so I became an entrepreneur and built a real estate business in Europe which we were able to exit five years ago. In parallel, we had one of the largest management consulting firms before founding Eudemian Ventures in 2018. We are a Silicon Valley-based seed fund. We invest in North American software startups. We are software generalists.

There are a few things we would not do within the digital scene. We do not do blockchain, crypto, and gaming, but other than that, both consumer and enterprise are in our scope. We are very specific with the stage focus because we focus on the post-seed stage, anything between the seed round and Series A round. 

Sramana Mitra: How do you define post-seed? What kind of validation are you looking for? Are you looking for a particular revenue level if you are investing in SaaS?

Are you looking for a particular MRR threshold? If it is B2C, are you looking for a certain number of users? How do you define post-seed?

Raoul Maier: If somebody has already raised the seed round from reputable investors but hasn’t raised an A round yet, that would be the simple definition of what we define as post-seed.

Also from a higher level, you could say anything that has achieved product-market fit to a large degree, we consider that as post-seed. In terms of metrics, it depends on the type of business.

If it’s a SaaS business, we typically look for a $1 million ARR. If it’s a consumer business, we consider 20,000 daily active users as a threshold of what we would like to see. If it’s more of e-commerce or marketplaces, we consider $5 million GMB as a good threshold.   

Sramana Mitra: Are you looking for North American companies? Talk about geography for a bit. 

Raoul Maier: It’s specifically in Silicon Valley. We are building a trans-Atlantic firm and we have been doing so from day one, but not in the sense that we would invest on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s more of a key investment focus in North America which would then later help the startup scale into Europe.

We think this is a must-have market as soon as you reach Series B level. We like to be as helpful as possible in preparing the US segment for that step. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Raoul Maier of Eudemian Ventures
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