Fan-favourite tennis star, Serena Williams, has raised $111 million for her new venture capital company, Serena Ventures.
The early-stage venture capital firm made this information available via a blog post on Thursday, 3rd March. Serena Williams, via her VC firm, had invested in notable fintech platforms like Propel, Cointracker and edtech platform, Masterclass, among others.
According to the company, over 60 portfolios of angel investments had happened since launch – thirteen of which are unicorns. Serena Ventures is currently headed by Serena Williams alongside Alison Rapaport, former staff at J.P. Morgan, Wasserman and Melo7Tech.
While announcing the update on the website, Serena Ventures, however, did not disclose if its next set of investments on early-stage companies would be focused on any particular sector. It simply revealed, “Today we’re excited to share that we’ve raised an inaugural fund of $111M to continue pursuing our mission…”
With the ongoing pressure in capital valuation for private companies and startups, many venture capital firms are looking to raise more funds for investment and it makes it more important for Serena Ventures to play into this reason for raising funds in this period.
This pressure on capital valuation is leading to more and more acquisitions and sell-offs for many startups.
However, the largest investors like SoftBank, Tiger Global and Andreessen Horowitz are still betting on valuations to recover later in the year. Although these firms are more accustomed to investing in fintech companies, cryptocurrency companies and virtual space companies, bigger opportunities lie beyond these sectors and a few of them have come to recognise this.
Fintech investment in Africa is growing rapidly with Flutterwave being the highest-valued startup with a $3 billion valuation that came with a new $250 million Series D round of funding.
In 2021, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $400 million funding round for OPay Nigeria – an investment that raised the startup’s value to $2 billion and marked its first bet on an Africa-focused startup. In 2022, OPay is currently valued at over $2 billion. Although Serena Ventures have made a few investments in African companies – notably, Adela, Wave and Esusu – the company still has a strong portfolio across a wide demographic.
Serena Ventures currently has nine years of angel investing under its belt, and investments with 13 unicorns and with six exits.
