Three venture funds that will spike your interest.

Three venture funds that will spike your interest. Founder-backed FirstMinute, Toyota Venture in a new avatar, and asset-based financier Architect.

Firstminute Capital

London-based Firstminute closed this week its second seed fund of $160m with funds committed by over 100 founders – all of unicorns.

These founder-funders were from companies such as Farfetch, Flixbus, Checkout.com, iZettle, Babylon, Adyen, Zalando, Ocado, Supercell, Calm, Check Point, MuleSoft, and MongoDB.

The investments show continued interest in the growth of European tech startups. (Sifted)

Architect Capital

San Francisco-based Architect Capital has launched a $100 million fund targeting asset-rich startups whose founders are looking for “non-dilutive” funding. Architect focuses on fintech, e-commerce, and SaaS companies in the U.S. and Latin America, especially the latter. Preferably, the startups should have a stream of recurring revenues.

Architect will generally act as a supplementary source of funding, in addition to, but not in place of venture funding.

For example, Architect will lend against receivables, which providers of venture capital or venture debt generally avoid. (TechCrunch)

Toyota Ventures

Toyota AI Ventures has renamed itself as Toyota Ventures and is marking the occasion with the launch of two new funds, each of $150 million, addressing startups in emerging technologies and carbon neutrality.

The new funds are titled the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund and the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund.

The Climate fund will target investments in startups that can help the auto giant reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

Meanwhile, the Frontier fund will expand the automotive major’s investing field from AI, autonomy, mobility, robotics, and the cloud to new sectors such as smart cities, digital health, fintech, and energy.

“The first mission of the Frontier Fund has always been to discover what’s next for Toyota,” said Jim Adler, founding managing director of Toyota Ventures, told TechCrunch. “Toyota pivoted to cars in the 1930s, and it will grow to other businesses in the future. Startups are experiments in the marketplace, and this is a way for us to understand and get comfortable with where innovations are coming from.”

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