Yvonne Bajela launches Evertrue Capital with oversubscribed $17M debut fund

What's the deal? Yvonne Bajela has launched Evertrue CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a pre-seed venture firm investing across the UK and Europe, and closed its oversubscribed $17 million Fund I. Evertrue had targeted around $13 million and turned away additional investors rather than grow the fund. "Fund size is a strategic decision, not a measure of success in itself," she said.

Strategy: Evertrue will lead and co-invest at pre-seed, mainly in AI, fintech and frontier technology. Average cheques will be around £350,000, with plans to back at least 20 companies over the next three years. The fund has already made seven investments, including Revion (AI agents for the automotive sector), Poindexter Labs, Zuba and Zaro, and more than half of the portfolio already operates in the US.

Who backed it? Five institutional investors: the British Business Bank, Basecamp (the fund of funds of Phoenix Court, home of LocalGlobe and Latitude), Better Society Capital, Bootstrap 4F (Bootstrap EuropeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s Women Backing Women fund of funds) and Allocator OneDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, alongside founders, operators and GPs. Evertrue is one of 10 first-time managers in the British Business Bank's £400 million Investor Pathways initiative. Around 80% of LPs are UK-based.

Who is Yvonne Bajela? She began her career at Goldman Sachs, invested in Wise at Mitsui & Co., was a founding team member at Impact X Capital, where she led the seed investment in Marshmallow, and was most recently a partner at Phoenix Court and LocalGlobe, where she invested in Moove. Saul Klein, co-founder of Phoenix Court, wrote on LinkedIn that he is "super excited to be working with Yvonne Bajela on the next stage of her amazing investor journey".

Why it matters: An oversubscribed close that was deliberately capped, in a hard market for emerging managers, signals real LP appetite for focused pre-seed specialists in Europe, with public capital from the British Business Bank still playing a key anchoring role.

Sources: TechCrunch, Tech.eu, The Next Web, Bootstrap Europe

Image: Yvonne Bajela, via TechCrunch