The Next Venture Advantage Isn’t Capital

Venture capital has spent the past decade getting bigger.

Funds got larger, platforms got larger, and firms built out recruiting, marketing, talent and operating teams to prove they could offer more than a check.

FGV Capital has taken a different route.

The firm formerly known as Fiat Ventures announced today that it’s closed a $35 million second fund, oversubscribed from an original $25 million target, while Fiat Ventures and Fiat Growth, its sister consultancy, are coming together under the FGV brand.

The fund isn’t enormous. That’s part of what makes the strategy interesting.

FGV is betting that the next generation of venture firms won’t win because they can write the largest check. They’ll win because founders believe they can actually change what happens after the money arrives.

Drew Glover, FGV co-founder and general partner, put it more plainly after the close: “If your only product as a venture capitalist is money, your product is becoming harder to differentiate.”

FGV built the growth business first

Most venture firms raise a fund first and then start adding services around it.

FGV came at it from the other direction.

Since 2018, Fiat Growth has worked with more than 325 companies across customer acquisition, sales, partnerships and other go-to-market problems. The firm says that work has helped drive billions of dollars through those businesses.

The venture arm came later.

“We started by building the infrastructure founders actually needed,” Glover wrote. “Strategy, execution, and distribution.”

There’s another distinctive piece to the model.

Fiat Growth negotiated a contractual Right to Invest in many of the companies it worked with. That meant the team wasn’t simply meeting startups through the consultancy and hoping those relationships might someday lead to deals. In many cases, it had a defined path to invest if the company became compelling enough.

That gave FGV something most new venture firms spend years trying to build, access with additional information attached.

Instead of meeting a founder for the first time in the middle of a fundraising process, the team could sometimes watch how that company operated before an investment decision ever came up. They could see whether a sales strategy worked, how the founders reacted when growth stalled, and whether the team could actually execute against the story in the deck.

Marcos Fernandez, co-founder and managing partner, has described FGV’s investment framework as the “Four Ts”: Team, TAM, Traction and Trust.

The first three are familiar. The fourth is where the broader platform starts to matter.

“We see, we develop a thesis, we work with companies, and then we invest,” Fernandez has said.

That’s a different information set from meeting a founder during a fundraise and trying to make a conviction call in a few weeks.

It also explains why FGV doesn’t really fit the traditional venture-platform model. The consultancy can work with companies whether FGV Capital invests in them or not. Some of those relationships may later become investments. Portfolio companies can use the growth business, while limited partners can become customers or partners.

Fernandez described it to TechCrunch as a “full-stack model.”

“Companies we invest in can become clients we help scale. Companies we work with can become investments. LPs can become customers or partners to the portfolio.”

It’s an unusual setup, and probably more useful to think of it as a network of commercial relationships with a fund running through it than as a traditional venture platform.

Can the investor get you in the front door

None of this means capital is easy to raise. It isn’t.

But for the startups every venture firm wants, there are often several sources of money around the table — specialist funds, angels, family offices, corporate investors, syndicates and former founders investing personally.

So if two investors are offering roughly the same amount of capital on roughly the same terms, the founder eventually has to ask a simple question — why you?

This is where venture firms tend to say the same things. They’re founder friendly. They’re hands-on. They have a deep network. They can help.

Founders have heard it all before.

The better test comes later. Can the investor get you in front of the person who actually owns a budget at a bank? Can they recognize that you’ve got a sales problem before you spend six months blaming marketing? Do they know a customer acquisition channel is getting too expensive because they’re seeing the same thing across the market?

That’s harder to fake.

And it’s why Glover’s point about capital being commoditized holds up. A $1 million check from one fund looks remarkably similar to a $1 million check from another once it lands in the bank account.

Whatever makes the investor valuable has to show up after that.

AI is making the distribution problem more apparent

Fund II will focus on early-stage companies where fintech intersects with AI, healthcare, commerce, insurance and other parts of financial services. FGV expects initial checks to fall between $1 million and $1.5 million.

The firm plans to invest in at least 25 companies and has already backed 13 from the new fund. Across its funds and co-investment vehicles, FGV has invested in more than 40 companies, including Possible Finance, Wagmo, Splitero, Brellium, Trellis and Sunfish.

The timing of the growth-first strategy is interesting because AI is making some parts of company building dramatically easier.

Small teams can ship software faster, automate support, test creative, build internal tools and get products into market without hiring nearly as many people as they might’ve a few years ago.

That doesn’t mean the technology stops mattering. It does mean more decent products can arrive at roughly the same time.

We’re already seeing that play out. Someone ships a useful AI feature, and a few months later several competitors have something that looks pretty similar.

Then the problem changes.

The best demo doesn’t necessarily win. The company still has to reach customers, earn trust and stay there.

That’s especially true in fintech, where selling financial technology is rarely as simple as finding a user and getting them to download something. A startup may need a bank partner, an insurer, regulatory approval, enterprise procurement or access to customers who already trust a much larger institution.

You can’t prompt-engineer your way into those relationships.

That’s where FGV’s growth background starts to feel less like an add-on and more like the logic behind the fund.

An LP base that’s part of the strategy

FGV spent about 18 months raising Fund II, and its LP base includes Bank of America, MassMutual, Reinsurance Group of America and the Stellar Development Foundation.

The mix lines up closely with the markets FGV is investing into.

A young fintech company doesn’t need “access to Bank of America” in the abstract. It needs the right person inside the bank, preferably someone who understands the problem, controls a budget and can explain where a pilot is likely to get stuck.

That kind of access can save months.

The same is true in insurance. Knowing an executive at RGA or MassMutual only matters if the relationship turns into useful information, a partnership conversation or a customer opportunity.

FGV says that’s the point of the network.

Every venture firm can produce a slide full of impressive logos. Founders usually figure out which networks are real the first time they ask for an introduction.

The fund isn’t the interesting part

A $35 million fund isn’t going to outspend a multibillion-dollar venture firm, and it shouldn’t try.

The better emerging managers usually have one thing they do really well. Maybe they own a community. Maybe they understand a technical field better than generalist investors. Maybe they have access to a market others overlook.

FGV’s answer is growth and distribution.

And unlike “founder friendly” or “deep network,” that’s something founders should eventually be able to measure.

Did the investor help shorten a sales cycle? Open a door that would’ve taken six months to find? Spot a growth problem early? Help the company avoid hiring around the wrong strategy?

FGV built the growth business before it built the venture firm, and Fund II is its attempt to prove that sequence matters.

Money still matters. So does brand. So does access.

But the venture firms that define the next decade probably won’t be the ones that simply accumulate the most money.

They’ll be the ones founders believe can materially change what happens to the company after they take it.

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