Berlin based venture capital firm Paua Ventures has raised its debut institutional early stage fund (Paua I) with a first close of $45 million. The final close is expected to be $65 million. The firm had previously been bootstrapped with $2 million coming solely from the management team, starting in 2010.

In the Baltics Paua Ventures is known as one of the investors of Estonian Customer Resource Management software maker Pipedrive. This fund has also invested in the Swedish web security analysis SaaS provider Detectify.

With the new fund Paua continues to target promising tech startup companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as the Baltic, Nordic and CEE countries. The focus is on business models like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), B2B-marketplaces, B2C mobile, mobile enterprise solutions as well as commerce 2.0. 

“We’re huge fans of the Baltics and Lithuania specifically. Having been invited to Vilnius by Enterprise Lithuania and mentored local startups I know about the resourcefulness, ambition, and high degree of education of founders and engineers. I look forward to doing our first investment in Lithuania soon”, says Christian Thaler-Wolski, partner at Paua Ventures.

Ch.Thaler-Wolski has not only mentored Lithuanian startups but investigated the local ecosystem by participating in LOGIN Startup Fair few years in a row. Startup Lithuania and Enterprise Lithuania is expecting him at LOGIN Startup Fair 2016 which will rock Vilnius on May 5-6.

Paua I already has a portfolio of seven active companies and has deployed around $9 million in capital to date. Paua is aiming to invest into another 20 startups within the next three years. The fund typically writes its first check at Seed or Series A stage, investing amounts between $200.000 to $2 million -with the ability to follow up to a maximum of $6 million.