Something is puzzling me big time: How do all these YouTubers, bloggers and social media people find the time to write all of that content? On my side, this year 2023 has been packed with news, accelerating on several fronts and some people in my network wondered where did I go to ghost online conversations like this.

Allegory Capital diversified to fin-tech

As we come from digital health especially myself from Women’s Health, the reality of portfolios in this sector is somewhat quite dangerous when you start an investment firm. First, good teams are hard to find and timing is everything when it comes to the time frame between seed rounds and A series which is where we focus. As a reminder, we are trying to fix with my team a specific growth issue that we believe is not answered by accelerators, incubators and the current VC scene in Europe and the US. As a catalyst for hyper-growth, Allegory Capital’s position is now clear and our mission is well defined: we are dedicated to regulated industries, with companies using emerging technologies and channels to penetrate the market at a high velocity. This also constrained us to Europe and the US, not because of a choice but mostly because we know these markets better. Now as any VC starting a first fund, our discussions with limited partners taught us that healthcare on its own would be too slow and risky to hit IRR targets, especially in the current market conditions. And digital health startups unfortunately need time to demonstrate value, due to the clinical impact assessment or the reimbursement schemes going on. That said, we are committed to making that a priority for the next few years, but we needed another industry with a different pace to compensate for the timing issues. Hence Fintech, also a regulated field, is a great way to diversify the portfolio. We started recently with Unblock, a company originally in South America and now in Europe, Switzerland and the US. Unblock is typically what you can call a hypergrowth startup and a future unicorn if we believe in our assessments. Talking about that, we spent the whole summer working on the Serie A for the startup, our biggest so far, with an incoming 73M pre-money valuation. Shoutout to BDO Switzerland for giving us a hand in this as this is clearly a great exercise to put this company on commercial orbit.

What’s next for Allegory? Building the team with Lorenzo heading our startup ecosystem, finalising our rounds with limited partners looking to follow us in this adventure and of course recruiting startups to build a portfolio that is going to smash our KPIs. We have identified also an SPV as a service model that took more of our time and helped us raise funding for teams using our data-driven methodology. This is something that we truly want to keep as it gives us a nuclear approach to investment and a vc-as-a-service model that a lot of teams appreciate out there.