Yvonne Bajela closes $17M debut pre-seed fund Evertrue Capital

Yvonne Bajela, a former partner at Phoenix Court, has closed Evertrue Capital’s debut fund at $17M. The fund was oversubscribed, meaning investors offered more money than it set out to raise.

Evertrue invests at pre-seed, the earliest stage of startup funding, in AI and frontier technology companies across the UK and Europe. It plans to lead a small number of deals each year, rather than spread its money across many startups.

Phoenix Court, the parent of venture firms LocalGlobe and Latitude, backed the fund through Basecamp, its fund of funds for new managers. The British Business Bank, Better Society Capital, Allocator One, and Bootstrap 4F, which runs the Invest in Women Taskforce’s fund, also invested.

In addition, founders, operators, and other investors in Evertrue’s network have put money in. They will also help the companies the fund backs.

Evertrue has made seven investments so far, and half of the companies already operate in the US. They include Revion, which builds AI agents for the car industry, and Poindexter Labs, an AI lab.

Zuba, a fintech building infrastructure for global businesses, and Zaro, a shared knowledge layer for companies, are also in the portfolio.

“The best moment to invest is before the market has proof,” said Yvonne Bajela, founder and general partner at Evertrue Capital.

Bajela said almost none of the founders she has backed who went on to build billion-dollar companies looked obvious at the start. She looks for founders who understand a problem deeply, often from their own experience.

According to her Phoenix Court profile, Bajela began her career at Goldman Sachs. She later joined Japanese trading house Mitsui & Co., where she invested in Wise. She was then a founding member of Impact X Capital, where Evertrue says she led a seed investment in insurer Marshmallow. At Phoenix Court, she invested in companies including Moove.

“Yvonne was our first cheque and backed us from day zero,” said Zaki Gabe-Wilkinson, co-founder of Revion, which is backed by Y Combinator.

“Yvonne saw what we were building before it was easy to explain,” said Jocelyn D’Arcy, co-founder of Poindexter Labs.

The fund closes at a time when raising money has become harder for investors who run funds on their own. Two-thirds of new venture funds launched in 2024 aimed to raise less than $10m, according to data from Decile Group.