Billionaire investor Marcelo Claure is bringing some former SoftBank Group Corp. colleagues with him to his new Latin America-focused venture capital fund that launched Wednesday following the end of his noncompete clause.
(Bloomberg) — Billionaire investor Marcelo Claure is bringing some former SoftBank Group Corp. colleagues with him to his new Latin America-focused venture capital fund that launched Wednesday following the end of his noncompete clause.
Besides managing partner Shu Nyatta, who co-founded SoftBank’s Latin America funds with Claure, Bicycle Capital has hired Felipe Fujiwara, Ezequiel Piantoni and Matthew Pieterse as partners to help invest. The three worked at SoftBank previously and are based in Sao Paulo and Miami.
The firm is targeting $500 million for the initial fund with $440 million of that already amassed between funds from Claure’s family office, Mubadala Investment Co. and outside investors that include a group of 30 Latin American founders and business executives.
Bicycle Capital plans to invest in Series B rounds and later to help tech companies grow to scale and have been in talks for initial deployments but have yet to close any funding deals, Claure and Nyatta said in an interview.
“The growth market has been in a coma but the patient is starting to twitch their toes,” Nyatta said. “It’s less about the rates cycle and more the fact that companies need capital, they’ve been trying to not raise capital but now many have a six to nine month runway and they need to.”
Claure and Nyatta were part of the team that invested billions of dollars of SoftBank capital into Latin American startups between 2019 and 2022. They have no plans to acquire any of SoftBank’s stakes in those companies but could partner on future deals, Claure said.
Before working at SoftBank, Fujiwara and Pieterse spent time at JPMorgan Chase & Co, according to their LinkedIn pages. Piantoni previously worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
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