Should Government get involved with VCs ?

17th of December 2008 by admin

Techcrunch France editor – and LGiLab VC in Israel – Ouriel Ohayon has a great piece on Can governments become good VCs?

This topic came up in VC discussion at last week’s LeWeb – and Ireland was mentioned as an example.

Enterprise Ireland in a June press release provided an update on the 2007-2012 Seed and Venture Capital (VC) Programme

To date €148.75m has been committed to 8 Seed & Venture Funds.

Of these, 6 have completed first closings, including

- Delta Partners [100m fund]
- AIB Seed Capital Fund [30m fund]
- Atlantic Bridge Ventures
- Kernel Capital Partners [70m fund]
- Fountain Healthcare Partners – not for technology – life science fund.
- NCB Ventures – [75m fund] – closed its fund in November.

€275m funds readily available – and from EI press release – 8 funds [2 funds still to close] have succeeded in raising in excess of €500m for investment in early stage and growing companies.

Enterprise Ireland announced that €30m is remaining and is now available for co-investment – and a recent advertisement in the FT is targetting UK VCs for partnership.

Given the recent UK news @ Government funds for NESTA, the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, will oversee a £1bn emergency venture capital fund aimed at pre-revenue technology start-up firms – and the follow on discussion – We’d like to hear from Web2Ireland companies who have raised monies from these EI backed funds [make sure you update your Crunchbase details]

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2 Responses to “Should Government get involved with VCs ?”

I guess the big questions is; Are these VC’s making this money available now?

[...] the fund has €30m still waiting to be used. A recent FT article went out recently, to announce that they are looking for co-investment [...]