UAE-based VC Modus, has led the $1.2 million pre-Seed funding round for UK-based investment firm Koble alongside Belgium-based VC Pitchdrive and other angel investors.
The round was led by Modus, a Venture Platform in Mena, and Pitchdrive, a Belgium-based VC. A group of angel investors dedicated to exploring the disruptive potential of AI in venture investing also participated in the round.
Damian Cristian, Co-Founder and CEO at Koble commented, “The ‘normal science’ of the venture capital industry relies on subjective value judgments. Everyone sat around a table comparing founders, startups, and business models with the same metrics. We’re coming at this from a completely different angle, asking what if the paradigm shifted and startup investors adopted a dispassionate, quantitative approach? Investors have spent the past decade saying that quant VC is impossible. They’re wrong, and we have the data to prove it.”
The newly raised funds will be used to further develop Koble’s groundbreaking algorithms and technology, which identify early-stage investments that outperform the market, mitigate human bias and capture sustainable alpha for investors.
Koble is on a mission to re-engineer the ethics, economics, and scalability of startup investing. Its co-founders Damian Cristian and Guy Conway have dedicated several years to building a unique dataset and groundbreaking proprietary algorithms to transform the process of sourcing, evaluating, and investing in pre-seed and seed-stage startups.
The startup is tackling a huge problem. Just 2.5 per cent of early-stage investments yield the target 20x+ return, which means less than 5 per cent of VC funds return the target 3x on investment. The costs are massive: LPs lose money (or worse avoid early-stage investing altogether), founders with good ideas cannot access capital, and ultimately economic and social progress suffers.
Technology and systematic strategies have already transformed public markets, unlocking trillions in value. Now, Koble is using quant strategies to disrupt early-stage startup investing, delivering risk-adjusted LP returns that outperform traditional human-centric VCs. The benefits of quant investing for startups, investors, and society are clear: capital is routed to the people and ideas that deserve it most, investors get better risk-adjusted returns, and society moves forward.
Koble believes in good startups over-hyped startups, and first principles over FOMO. Its quant models have no concept of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, personality, and physical appearance. Ultimately, understanding the importance of making venture capital fair and inclusive for all.