Protester A new early-stage VC firm focused on B2B SaaS and fintech is emerging from stealth today. Joseph Pizzolatto (Image right) and cam rail (pictured left), the duo that led the firm when they met when they were six years old, have already secured $30 million and plan to raise as much as $70 million for their initial funding.
Based in London and Lisbon, Defiant plans to invest in early-stage startups at the “late seed” or Series A stage. However, unlike many of the newer early-stage VC firms, Defiant is willing to lead or co-lead funding rounds. The goal is to spend something between $1 million and $10 million per deal.
While Pizzolatto was already an investor working for Felix Capital and Vitruvian Partners, his co-founder Cam Rail has a different background. He joined one of the world's largest market makers and then moved to Macquarie Bank in London to build the prop trading desk. He then created his own startup called Stackup Risk and sold it to Creativemass.
What sets Defiant apart from your average early-stage fund is that the company wants to rely heavily on data to find the next promising investment. For that reason, the firm is developing its own suite of products that will help the investment team and increase internal interest.
“Our thesis is that the future of enterprise is going to be quite different from what it is today. And it will be much more technologically capable, much more sophisticated in the use of data, AI products,” managing partner Joseph Pizzolatto told TechCrunch.
“We dedicate a third of our budget to fund product development. Again, I don't think there are any funds in Europe that do that from an OPEX perspective,” he added later in the conversation.
According to him, most VC firms haven't changed much in the last 50 years. Even new companies are run the way they were then.
Defiant's flagship product is Morpheus, an internal tool to source new contracts. When users upload a pitch deck to the platform, it is automatically analyzed by an LLM to extract relevant data such as annual recurring revenue, cost of acquisition, number of employees, etc.
Everything is then stored in a database so that it can serve as the basis for a competitive analysis. Companies can be filtered and sorted based on various criteria. Defiant also developed a scoring formula for those startups.
“And then what we do is we enrich it with external sources. We go to TechCrunch, we go to LinkedIn, we go to Pitchbook. Whatever we go for, we go for anything in the public domain. We also pay for a bunch of data sets. We pull down and we make these profiles,” Pizzolatto said.
Over time, the Defiant team uploads more data and looks at how companies evolve from stage to stage, which can identify some over-performers and under-performers. These tools serve as the backbone of the VC firm's data infrastructure.
is called secondary product BlueprintAnd it's a way to help founders understand how their startups stack up against the competition and what a VC thinks about the business.
Founders enter data and receive a report that ranks their company's metrics against similar companies in the space. Of course, this tool is a great way to generate dealflow and collect new data for Defiant's own database. Defiant also offers templates for KPI dashboards or Series A funding decks.
Next, the firm is working on a macro analytics product to find the next big investment themes based on large data sets
So far, Defiant has raised money from family offices and people working for the tech industry, such as Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Hedosophia, Salesforce Ventures, Earlybird, Vitruvian, GRO, Mubadala and general partner Seek Ventures. Now, let's see if the Defiant team can turn this investment thesis into a portfolio of 15 to 20 high-performing startups.