While Everyone Crowds into San Francisco, Endeavor Catalyst Raised 320 Million Dollars for Founders from "Elsewhere": Europe Is Its Fastest-Growing Region

While AI money pours into a handful of San Francisco streets, Endeavor Catalyst has closed its fifth fund with 320 million dollars (about 275 million euros) in committed capital. That takes the assets it manages past 850 million dollars (about 730 million euros). The whole philosophy sits in one word that keeps recurring in their materials: every place outside the big tech hubs, they call "elsewhere".

The fund is the investment arm of Endeavor, a New York non-profit that has spent 30 years helping founders who don't sit in Silicon Valley. The official general partner is the organisation itself, which means half the profits flow back to it. "Every investment helps the next generation of founders building elsewhere," says Linda Rottenberg, one of Endeavor's co-founders. The fund is run by managing partner Allen Taylor, twenty years at the organisation, and director Jackie Carmel, with a team of 16 people.

Getting in isn't easy. Last year the organisation reviewed more than 10,000 candidates and accepted 88. The network counts more than 3,100 entrepreneurs in over 50 countries. The fund only comes in when one of their companies is raising at least 5 million dollars in a round led by another institutional investor - on the terms the lead investor got, with cheques of 1 to 3 million dollars and never more than 10 percent of the round. The new fund plans 40 to 50 investments a year, up to 150 companies in total.

The numbers Taylor shared sound impressive: across all five funds, 437 companies in 44 markets, 83 of them now valued at a billion dollars or more, 39 exits and 11 stock-market listings. How much money it has actually returned to investors, he wouldn't say. When a fund counts its unicorns rather than its returns, you're looking at a shop window, not a balance sheet.

There are serious names in the window. ElevenLabs, originally founded in Poland, was recently valued at 22 billion dollars in a secondary share sale. Italy's Bending Spoons has been listed since July, with a market value of 26 billion dollars. New York's Reflection AI, founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers - one of them born in Greece - is worth 25 billion. There's also Checkout.com, with its Swiss founder, the African payments system Flutterwave, and Replit, whose co-founders include Palestinian-Jordanian programmer Amjad Masad.

Greece is closer to this story than it seems. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is a long-time friend of the organisation - he studied at Harvard with Rottenberg - and his rare visit to the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of September, with meetings with founders and Greek expatriates, was organised by none other than Endeavor. The neighbour brings its prime minister to investors in California. How many Macedonian founders are standing at the door of networks like this - and is anyone from the state holding it open for them?

About 90 percent of the fund's investments are outside the US. Latin America is the biggest region, but Europe is growing fastest: 12 new investments in the first half of 2026, against 14 in the whole of 2025. The share of founders starting their second company is also rising - from 14 percent in the fourth fund to an expected 20 percent in the new one. The money for "elsewhere" exists, and it's heading for Europe. It remains to be seen whether the Balkans are on their map.