Yvonne Bajela, one of Europe's best-known venture investors and a long-standing advocate for under-represented founders, has closed her first fund as a solo general partner. Evertrue Capital's debut vehicle comes in at about $17 million.
The fund, reported by Tech Funding News on November 3, will invest at the pre-seed stage in artificial intelligence and frontier technology startups across the UK and Europe, with an average cheque size of about £350,000.
For Bajela, the close is the culmination of a career spent on the other side of the table: helping build funds, backing founders and arguing that venture capital's talent pool is far narrower than it should be. Now she is building an institution of her own.
Who is Yvonne Bajela?
Bajela's career spans investment banking, corporate strategy and venture capital across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She worked at Goldman Sachs and the Japanese trading house Mitsui before moving into venture. She has lived and worked in Israel, Kenya and Japan, advising high-growth companies on international expansion.
She was a founding member of Impact X Capital, a UK venture fund established in 2019 to back entrepreneurs from under-represented backgrounds. There, she co-led the seed investment in Marshmallow, the insurance technology company that became one of Britain's few Black-founded billion-dollar startups. She later joined LocalGlobe, one of London's most prominent seed-stage investors, as a partner, investing across LocalGlobe and its growth-stage sister fund Latitude.
Over her career, she says she has invested in companies including Wise (formerly TransferWise), Moove and Marshmallow. She has been named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe finance list and has received recognition including a Funder of the Year award for her work backing under-represented entrepreneurs.
Building a fund the hard way
The phrase that headlined Tech Funding News' coverage, "I didn't let that stop me", captures the difficulty of raising a first fund, particularly for a woman and a solo general partner.
Debut funds face a structural chicken-and-egg problem. Institutional investors, known as limited partners (LPs), such as pension funds, endowments and funds of funds, generally prefer managers with a long track record of returns from previous funds. First-time managers must persuade LPs to back them on the strength of individual deal records, networks and strategy rather than fund-level performance. The challenge is sharper for solo GPs, who lack the reassurance of a multi-partner team.
The data on gender compounds the challenge. Women make up a minority of investment decision-makers at venture firms in Europe and the United States, and funds led entirely by women manage only a small share of total venture capital. Founders and investors who are both women and from ethnic minority backgrounds face even steeper odds.
Institutional backing for women-led funds
Evertrue's fundraising was helped by a new generation of investors focused on closing that gap. In June 2026, Bootstrap 4F, which manages the Women Backing Women fund of funds, announced its first commitments, and Evertrue Capital I LP was the first recipient. The fund of funds, which reached a £130 million first close in March 2026 and is targeting £250 million, is dedicated to channelling institutional capital into female-led venture managers in the UK and Europe. The British Business Bank participates in the initiative.
Evertrue describes itself as 100% female-owned and female-led. It says it uses a proprietary "Founder DNA" framework to assess early-stage teams, focusing on the qualities it believes predict a founder's ability to build a large company.
The strategy: pre-seed, AI and frontier tech
Evertrue's focus on pre-seed investing in AI and frontier technology places it at the riskiest and most formative stage of a company's life. Pre-seed investors often back founders before a product is fully built and before there is meaningful revenue. Judgement about people, markets and technology matters more at this stage than at any other.
The thematic focus is timely. Europe has produced a wave of AI startups, from foundation-model builders to companies applying AI in finance, health, climate and industrial sectors. Frontier technologies such as robotics, quantum computing and advanced materials are also drawing growing interest from investors. The UK, with world-class universities and research institutions, is a fertile source of science-led companies.
An average cheque of £350,000 suggests Evertrue intends to build a reasonably concentrated portfolio, likely several dozen companies, and to reserve capital for follow-on investments in its strongest performers.
Why emerging managers matter
The rise of solo GPs and emerging managers is one of the most significant structural shifts in venture capital. Many successful investors have left established firms to raise their own funds, often with tighter focus, faster decisions and closer founder relationships.
For the ecosystem, emerging managers expand the range of founders who get funded. Investors with different backgrounds and networks tend to see different opportunities. Research has repeatedly found that diverse investment teams are more likely to back diverse founders, which means funds like Evertrue can widen the pipeline of companies that reach later-stage investors.
Europe's pre-seed market has also become more crowded in recent years, with micro-funds, angel syndicates and accelerators competing for the most promising founders. Bajela's networks across London's venture scene, her record of early bets on companies that went on to lead their categories, and her reputation among under-represented founders are likely to be Evertrue's main advantages in winning access to the best deals.
Lessons for India's women investors and founders
Bajela's journey resonates beyond Europe. In India, women remain under-represented among both venture capital partners and startup founders, despite the growth of women-led funds and networks in recent years. Women-founded startups still receive a small share of total startup funding.
Initiatives such as dedicated fund-of-funds programmes, mentoring networks and angel syndicates focused on women have begun to change the picture, but progress is gradual. The Women Backing Women model, which uses institutional capital to anchor women-led funds, offers one template that policymakers and LPs in India could study.
For aspiring women investors, the lesson of Evertrue is that the path to running a fund often runs through years of building credibility, relationships and a personal track record, and through persistence in the face of rejection.
With $17 million in hand, Yvonne Bajela now has the chance to prove her thesis with her own fund. If Evertrue's portfolio produces breakout companies, it will strengthen the case for backing more managers like her, and for more founders who might otherwise have been overlooked.
