Venture capital talks like it is borderless, but the reality is often far messier, especially when the flow is between Europe and the US.
Odin, the investment platform out of the UK, has launched a Delaware, US vehicle for global investors, and plans to take the fight back to AngelList, Carta and Sydecar.
When you zoom out 30,000 feet, investing in startups can often appear as if it’s a wholly global affair, with today’s hottest startups attracting investor interest from around the world. But in fact, apart from the brief blip of the COVID era, when some deals were done over Zoom, that’s very rarely the case.
In practice, ventures still get snarled up in country-based legal structures, tax treatments, currencies and regional compliance. That becomes especially painful when capital wants to move across borders fast, whether that is US investors backing European startups early, or international investors into VC funds getting exposure to US deals without taking on hidden tax risk.
Odin, a platform which emerged out of the UK, is betting that this friction is now big enough to become a product category in its own right.
The London-founded platform has launched institutional-grade Delaware LP SPVs aimed at global investors, arguing that the venture market needs structures that are cheaper, faster and genuinely cross-border, rather than built for a purely US domestic market.
The company, which was founded in 2021 by Patrick Ryan and Mary Lin, is pitching the new product as a way to solve a growing problem in venture capital: capital is increasingly global, but the legal, tax and compliance rails underpinning private market deals remain stubbornly local.
Ryan told the Pathfounders Podcast that US investors increasingly want exposure to early European startups, while European, Middle Eastern and Asian LPs want cleaner access to US deals without taking on unexpected tax or regulatory risk.
At the core of the launch is a Delaware Limited Partnership structure designed to be used across jurisdictions and currencies. Odin says the product can be launched in under two hours, supports USD, EUR and GBP, and is fully compatible with UK and EU AIFMD rules. The company is also positioning the structure as a cleaner alternative to the Delaware LLCs commonly used by US competitors, which can create tax complications for non-US investors if they are treated as opaque rather than transparent by foreign tax authorities.
Speaking on the Pathfounders podcast, Ryan said the broader mission is to make it easier “for anyone, anywhere to run their investment firm on their phone,” arguing that venture remains clogged by fragmented service providers, manual workflows and legacy systems.
“There’s lots of email and paperwork and documents flying around, and things aren’t integrated,” he said. “We’re just trying to put that all in one place and make it a really smooth, seamless experience.”
That does not mean removing every layer of friction. Ryan was clear that parts of the process still need people in the loop, especially in a heavily regulated market.
“Some friction you need to keep,” he said. “You need to ensure you’re adhering to compliance standards.”
That combination of software plus service is also part of Odin’s pitch against incumbents. Ryan said parts of venture administration still cannot simply be automated away, particularly once global legal structures and multiple regulatory regimes are involved.
“This isn’t the kind of product you could just vibe-code,” he said.
The launch also reflects a bigger view about where capital is heading. Odin says it already supports investors and managers in more than 100 countries, has administered over 1,500 vehicles and more than $600 million in assets, and now wants to formalise its push into the US with a New York office and event space alongside its London base.
Ryan said the geopolitical noise around Europe and the US drifting apart does not match the underlying economic reality.
“People can say that politically. But if you look economically at how things operate in reality, we are deeply embedded in the US economy as a trade partner, and the US is deeply embedded in Europe as a trade partner. And that’s not going anywhere just because of what people say,” he said.
He also argued that demand is already there from both sides of the Atlantic. “There’s tons of investor interest in getting into the next Lovable, ElevenLabs, Revolut, Spotify, whatever, at the earliest stages,” he said. “US investors are kind of dumbfounded at how cheap pre-seed and seed and Series A rounds are in Europe.”
Ryan noted that 25% of deals already happening on Odin’s platform are in US companies, even before the company offered a dedicated US legal structure.
“Basically we’re making something easier that we already see happening a lot,” he said.
The target customers range from angel syndicates and solo GPs to family offices and investors using SPVs to access secondaries in high-profile private companies such as SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Anduril and Stripe. Odin says prices for the new Delaware LP SPVs start at $6,000 per deal, with costs rising depending on complexity, speed and regulatory demands.
Ryan said the structure is particularly useful where a manager wants to bring together LPs from both sides of the Atlantic into a single transaction. “Let’s say you’re a fund manager and you want to do an SPV like a sidecar into a deal you’re already doing through your fund… and you’ve got some European LPs, but also some US LPs. This is a really great structure that allows you to do that very easily.”
The new product also sharpens Odin’s competitive positioning against players such as AngelList, Sydecar and, to a degree, Carta. Ryan’s view is that those platforms remain too US-centric, especially for European managers or investors navigating UK and EU rules.
“There is no Delaware Limited Partnership structure available that you can run deals in euros, pounds, other currencies at the moment,” he said. “There’s also no platform with a good understanding of UK and European regulation that would let you run a Delaware structure compliantly.”
He also said the use of LLC structures for cross-border investing could be tricky. “A lot of people doing SPVs through LLC structures at the moment from the UK and Europe are running unnecessary risk,” he said.
Given it is also opening event spaces in London and Manhattan for customers to use for dinners, gatherings and community events, Odin is leaning into its origins as a community running events in London, with the physical spaces intended to help recreate the kind of dense networks that power startup ecosystems.
Ryan made the same point in more operational terms. “As online gets more saturated with slop, in person becomes more valuable as a distribution channel to everyone,” he said. “If we put ourselves in the middle of communities that exist anyway and give them a space to congregate, that’s a good go-to-market strategy for us.”
That community layer also points to a longer-term ambition for Odin beyond fund admin and SPVs. Ryan said he would ultimately like to see more founder-investor connections happen through the platform itself, though he acknowledged that private markets remain relationship-led and difficult to productise in a lightweight way.
For now, though, the more immediate goal is straightforward: use a European vantage point to attack a piece of infrastructure that remains messy, manual and increasingly global.
“We want to enter the US market and focus on the US, within the US, and go up against the players [Sydecar and AngelList]… we see as competitors,” Ryan said.
Their bet is that venture’s back office can be more that service layer, but a product category in its own right.
