Despite everyone telling her it was the wrong time, after more than a decade working in venture capital, Yvonne Bajela knew that now was the moment to launch her own fund.
“I just felt like it was time. I felt like I’ve got conviction in myself. I’ve got a decent track record. I’ve backed quite a few unicorns, and I just felt an urge,” she tells Pathfounders. “Especially with AI and the industry changing, it suddenly felt like the timing was now to just really just take a bet on myself, as I always take the bet on founders. It’s time to just turn that around and take the bet on myself, and do things in the way that feels authentic to me.”
Her new fund, Evertrue Capital, has just closed an oversubscribed $17m Fund I with the goal of backing the founders that don’t necessarily look perfect on paper, but have the intrinsic, personal motivation to build something great.
“I developed a very good lens of what I think looks like a great founder, which not everyone else sees,” she said.
Looking beyond the CV
In an age of AI where things move fast and speed is of the essence — and some investors are having AI pick which companies to invest in for them — Bajela is going the opposite way. There tends to be a consensus around what a “great founder” looks like, she says. They’ve worked at a successful tech company or at a big lab and they’re probably well-pedigreed.
“But actually, if I look at all the founders that I’ve backed that have broken out,” she says, “They have a few qualities that I think are quite consistent. And no two founders are the same, obviously, but it’s these things that are often not shown on the CV which determine greatness. Which actually, if you look at someone on LinkedIn, you’re just not going to see.”
For Bajela the questions to ask are: ‘Who is it that I’m backing?’ and ‘Why are they doing what they’re doing?’ and while she wouldn’t call it just a ’gut feeling’, with ten years of experience behind her, she can decide pretty quickly if she thinks a founder is worth taking a bet on based on the answers to those questions.
“The greatest potential is often not always immediately obvious,” she says, “and it’s really about recognising it early. It requires independent judgment. I’m someone that conviction is everything to me, but then conviction also requires courage and the willingness to see beyond what others see.”
A track record and a new fund
After starting off at Goldman Sachs, Bajela has spent her career investing at Mitsui, as a founding member and principal at Impact X Capital and most recently at Phoenix Court.
Her early investments include Wise, Marshmallow and Moove. At the time, Wise (then TransferWise) seemed to be a niche remittance product that banks could easily replicate. Marshmallow looked like twins starting an insurance challenger with no insider knowledge working out of the lobby of a Virgin Active gym. Moove started as a vehicle financing startup during the peak of the pandemic. Now, all three startups are unicorns.
Evertrue Capital Fund I is backed by the British Business Bank, Better Society Capital, Bootstrap 4F (Invest in Women Taskforce), Allocator One and Phoenix Court’s Basecamp, which Bajela used to run. It was there that she noticed a lot of first time GPs would raise the majority of their funds from individuals and decided to make an intentional choice to go after institutional funding from the start.
While Evertrue is also backed by around 30 individual founders she’s previously backed, operators and GPs, she saw firsthand that firms raising their second funds would struggle when they had to build relationships with institutions from scratch, and instead is trying to make her own fund an institution “that has multiple funds and is like a franchise.”
Leading a “concentrated number” of investments each year, Evertrue has so far invested in seven companies including Revion, an AI company for the automotive sector; Poindexter Labs, an AI capability and efficiency lab; Zuba, a fintech building the infrastructure for global businesses; and Zaro, a shared knowledge layer for enterprises. Half have already expanded to the US.
It’s deeply personal to me. I truly do believe that this is where I’m meant to be, and I think the same advice I give to my founders, I’m now having to take on myself
The fund is investing at the earliest stages — often before a product, revenue or formal round exists — which might mean even at the idea stage.
“Yvonne saw what we were building before it was easy to explain, back when training data was still an afterthought to most investors,” Jocelyn D’Arcy, co-founder of Poindexter Labs, said in a statement. “That early belief gave us the confidence to go after the partnerships that mattered.”
Cheques will be between £250-500k for startups across frontier technology and AI and the focus is on the founder, backing them before there is a general consensus that they will be successful.
Backing the founder’s psychology
For Bajela, it ultimately comes down to the founder's psychology.
“What I found with the founders I’ve backed, is that there’s something really deeply personal within them which makes them want to build,” she said. “It’s not about money. It’s not about being seen as successful. It’s something really intrinsic that has led them to want to achieve greatness.”
One founder’s uncle laughed at him when he was younger and he’s had a chip on his shoulder ever since and a drive to prove something to himself.
For another founder in the fund it is quite literally life or death — she is a self-taught scientist building a mechanical drug delivery system in a highly technical space because she’s trying to help solve a health issue she suffers from herself.
“I remember one time we were in conversation, and she was like, ‘you know, some days I’m like, why am I doing this?’ But she said, ‘I’m not just gonna quit and get a job at Tesco. This is life or death for me.’ And I think that exemplifies the type of founder I want to back. Someone [for whom] it is truly their life’s work to build what they’re doing.”
It feels the same for Bajela with this fund. Her father used to call her the gentle giant, and while she wouldn’t consider herself an underdog, “I’ve always been the one that people just don’t suspect,” she says. Like the founders she backs, she faced a lot of nos and a lot of people advising against the move to launch her own fund, especially in the current climate.
“I want to be successful, and I believe that I have to just drown out all the noise and focus on why I’m doing this,” she says. “And it’s deeply personal to me. I truly do believe that this is where I’m meant to be, and I think the same advice I give to my founders, I’m now having to take on myself.”
Holding onto conviction
Despite being met with “no” 95% of the time, Bajela stood firm that now was the right time to launch Evertrue.
“You have to find your true believers,” she said.
She had a first close at 20 or 25% when most people said not to close unless she had 50% or line of sight to 50%.
But she held onto the conviction — “I thought if I’m even going to go hard or go home, if this fails, then well, I just figure it out.” She also wanted to demonstrate that momentum and follow through on the advice she’d normally give her founders: show, don’t tell.
Before she had done a first close she had already done three deals. She pulled together money from some of her early backers, wrote her first three cheques for Evertrue and two of those companies have already raised follow-on rounds.
“My whole thesis is coming in super early before the world really notices,” she says. “And I think that that really did prove out exactly what I was saying.”
