Seaya closes first €600M of its €1B Seaya Nova growth fund, opens London office

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Seaya, the Madrid investment firm, has raised €600 million in a first close for Seaya Nova, its new growth fund, which is aiming for €1 billion. Getting there took six months. Half of the first close comes from the European Tech Champions Initiative, the EIB Group programme set up to fill the funding gap for Europe's growth-stage tech companies. Santander, which owns 25% of Seaya, is also among the investors, as are other institutions, corporates and family offices. Owning a quarter of the firm and also putting money into its fund is a fairly tidy arrangement.

Seaya Nova will write cheques of €20 million to €50 million, leading or co-leading Series B to D rounds in European tech companies that already have working models. It will be run by Beatriz González, Seaya's founder and managing partner, together with Vinoth Jayakumar, a new hire who previously worked at Molten in the UK and has spent more than ten years in European growth investing, with Revolut, Wise, Thought Machine and ICEYE among his past backings. His arrival comes with a new Seaya office in London, alongside the Madrid headquarters.

The fund becomes Seaya's third strategy, after Seaya Ventures for early-stage companies and Seaya Andromeda for sustainability. The idea is to follow companies from their first rounds all the way to international expansion, which also means fewer reasons to hand them over to someone else halfway. Jayakumar's view is that the open question is no longer whether Europe can build category leaders, but "whether we can scale them from here."