A brand new enterprise agency goals to show that essentially the most profitable startup concepts don’t must 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 facility, however founder and managing accomplice Alexandre Lazarow calls the agency’s technique “geographic alpha.”
Fluent’s premise is that lots of the world’s most useful startups aren’t fully 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 automobile with restricted companions. It’s writing preliminary checks of $250,000 to $2 million from pre-seed to Collection A and plans to make 22–25 investments, with follow-ons.
“We’re contrarians at coronary heart,” mentioned Lazarow, who beforehand invested at Omidyar Community and Cathay Innovation. “We imagine the world’s greatest improvements aren’t the unique purview of Silicon Valley.”
Fluent just isn’t precisely working in a bubble: the final decade has seen a large decentralization within the expertise business. In 2013, simply 4 cities had produced a unicorn. At this time, that quantity exceeds 150.
And that has been on the again of rinse and repeat, with lots of the high tech gamers in rising markets mirroring profitable startups which were constructed elsewhere, resembling Amazon clones in e-commerce, Stripe clones in funds, and neo-banking apps in fintech. The primary 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,” mentioned Lazarow.
Lazarow insists Fluent doesn’t simply copy-paste.
“That not often works, in our opinion. Native adaptation is essential,” he mentioned.
The agency factors to ride-hailing for instance. Uber might have pioneered the class, however in Indonesia, Go-Jek localized it by incorporating bike 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.
Whereas the agency handed on a number of development marketplaces globally, it backed BRKZ in Saudi Arabia, a localized tackle India’s Infra.Market. The founder, a former Careem govt, was a powerful operator in a area with surging infrastructure demand, Lazarow famous.
Regardless of calling itself a worldwide fund, Lazarow says Fluent doesn’t goal for equal allocation throughout each geography. As an alternative, it goes deeper within the areas the place it sees essentially the most potential. Proper now, meaning a give attention to 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. But 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. Inventory markets wish to construct native itemizing capabilities. Sure, the U.S. has far more developed IPO and M&A markets. However below the hood, among the largest and most worthwhile exits are already occurring exterior.”
Fluent has additionally constructed out a distinct sort of community across the sorts of founders it invests in. Greater 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 around the globe. In accordance with Lazarow, many are energetic 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 provides LPs one thing few corporations can: diversification.
“We imagine one of the best concepts come from anyplace and scale in every single place,” says the accomplice whose agency claims a spot on Kauffman Fellows’ high‑returner index, because of his earlier private stakes in Chime, ZenBusiness and Sidecar Well being.
