At the start of this month, Brazil-based Grupo RBS made it known that its subsidiary e.Bricks Digital has started a $100 million venture capital fund that will look to make investments in 12 to 15 companies during each year with its main focus on early-stage companies. However, initially when e.Bricks Digital was formed in 2012, its sole objective was to take care of the digital portfolio of Grupo RBS. But now with its dedicated fund the subsidiary is entering into a new zone, where it will source and manage investments in early-stage companies. Explaining their new role the strategy and portfolio executive director of e.Bricks Digital, Andiara Petterle, said that the new strategy is linked with the current state of tech scene in Brazil:
“The Brazilian digital market is still in the very beginning and the ecosystem has not fully been developed yet. For that reason, there are more early stage companies than there are [in] growth stage. We’ve decided to separate growth and early stage [by] creating a specific fund for early stage companies, with a dedicated team. This fund will profit [from] e.Bricks’ ecosystem with entrepreneurs and digital experts to help [provide] leverage [to] the companies.”
Practically this means that now e.Bricks Digital has the dual responsibility or structure. On one hand the growth-stage department of the subsidiary comprises of 20 people will take care of portfolio management, M&A, legal and financial matters. While, on the other hand e.Bricks will bring in a new team of three people, who will handle early-stage investments under the supervision of Pedro Sirotsky Melzer.
Prior to joining the dedicated fund of e.Bricks, Sirotsky Melzer was working at a Brazil-based VC firm called Warehouse Investimentos in the capacity of managing partner. Before that Melzer has worked at Apple for two years. This indicates that Sirotsky Melzer is bringing lot of experience to e.Bricks Digital.
The CEO of e.Bricks Digital, Fabio Bruggioni says this dual structure of the subsidiary was the best choice, as according to him, “Our appointed teams are extremely specialized, dedicated and allocated for each operation while respecting the independence of each strategy.”
As far as the investment focus of e.Bricks is concerned, it will be divided into three different sectors, which are segmented e-commerce, mobile and digital media & tech. Let’s see how e.Bricks will manage its dual structure, especially the new fund, which is completely a new are for the firm.
Source: TNW
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