A first-time fund closes over target

Yvonne Bajela spent more than a decade writing checks for other people's funds. On Tuesday, she announced that her own vehicle, Evertrue, had closed an oversubscribed $17 million Fund I. The firm has already backed seven companies and will invest at the early stage across the U.K. and Europe.

The close arrives at a moment when British startups are drawing unusual attention from investors, and when first-time fund managers in the region are raising more than they did all of last year. Bajela's fund is small by the standards of established European vehicles, but it landed five institutional backers and a founder who says she turned away money rather than let the fund grow.

A decade before going solo

Bajela's investing career spans more than ten years. According to TechCrunch's reporting, she worked at LocalGlobe and Impact X Capital Partners, where she made bets on companies that went on to reach unicorn status, among them the fintech Wise, the insurance company Marshmellow, and robotaxi Mooves.

Earlier in her career she was a senior investment manager at Mistusi and began as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. She has also lived in Japan. Those stops, she said, shaped how she reads founders and markets.

The decision to leave institutional investing for her own firm came down to independence. Bajela described wanting the room to act on her own convictions rather than operating inside someone else's structure.

“After more than a decade backing founders who bet everything on their ideas, it felt like time to make a bet of my own,” she said. “I wanted the independence to act on those convictions and build something that reflected my own approach to investing.”

— Yvonne Bajela, founder of Evertrue

Twenty companies in three years

Evertrue will write early-stage checks averaging around £350,000, Bajela said, with a plan to back at least 20 companies over the next three years. Seven investments are already in the portfolio.

The sector focus is AI and fintech, though Bajela described her selection criteria in terms of people rather than categories. She said she is drawn to founders with an unusual grasp of a specific problem, an uncommon capacity to execute, and ambitions larger than the product they started with.

“I also pay attention to the distance a founder has traveled, what they’ve overcome, and how that has shaped their perspective,” she continued.

— Yvonne Bajela, founder of Evertrue

She said her career had shown her how widely distributed ambition and talent are, and that she wants Evertrue judged by the quality of the founders it backs and the businesses they build afterward.

The AI boom as a launch window

Bajela pointed to the current AI cycle as part of why the timing felt right for a first fund. In her account, it has changed the economics of starting a company and opened room for early-stage investors who can move quickly.

“The ability to build has been democratized,” she said. “But the ability to build something enduring remains rare.”

— Yvonne Bajela, founder of Evertrue

That view runs alongside a broader shift in the U.K. market. TechCrunch has previously reported that the U.K.’s startup scene is having a moment, with King's Cross counted among the world's top AI hubs and companies such as Revolut, Synthesia, ElevenLabs, and the Bezos-backed CuspAI reshaping what scaling in the British market looks like.

For an early-stage investor, that environment means a chance to get into the next cohort of British companies while they are still small. Bajela expects more globally significant businesses to come from a wider range of starting points than the usual clusters.

The grind of a first close

Raising a debut fund is not easy anywhere, and the U.S. market in particular has been described as a barbell, with capital pooling at the top and with managers who already have track records behind them.

The U.K. picture looks different on at least one measure. PitchBook data through the end of September shows emerging fund managers in the region raised $7.4 billion, already ahead of the $6.2 billion they raised in all of 2025.

Even so, Bajela described the process as a grind, and said the hardest rejections were not the flat noes.

“They were the ones that came after months of conversations and significant time invested, only for the answer to ultimately be no,” she said. “Time is one of the most valuable resources a founder has, and a prolonged process without clarity has a real cost.”

— Yvonne Bajela, founder of Evertrue

Five backers, and a capped size

Evertrue closed with five institutional backers, among them the British Business Bank and Basecamp, the fund-of-funds belonging to the investment firm Phoenix Court, which is also home to LocalGlobe.

The fund was part of the British Business Bank's £400 million Investor Pathways capital initiative, which allocated £90 million across 10 first-time fund managers.

Bajela said Evertrue had set out to raise around $13 million and found considerably more interest than that target implied. She chose to turn investors away rather than enlarge the fund.

“Fund size is a strategic decision, not a measure of success in itself,” she said. “I wanted enough capital to build meaningful positions in my highest-conviction investments without creating pressure to deploy capital simply because it was available.”

— Yvonne Bajela, founder of Evertrue

• $17 million — size of Evertrue's Fund I, described as oversubscribed
• £350,000 — approximate average check size
• 20 — minimum number of companies Bajela plans to back over the next three years
• 7 — companies the firm has already backed
• 5 — institutional backers in the fund
• £400 million — size of the British Business Bank's Investor Pathways initiative
• £90 million — portion of that initiative allocated to 10 first-time fund managers
• $7.4 billion — raised by U.K. emerging managers through the end of September, per PitchBook
• $6.2 billion — amount those managers raised in all of 2025
• 80% — share of Evertrue's LPs based in the U.K.

An LP base that reaches outward

Roughly 80% of Evertrue's limited partners are U.K. based. The remainder are spread across Europe, Asia, and the U.S. Bajela framed that spread as the product of relationships built over more than a decade of investing across markets, and as a reflection of the fund's global outlook.

That outlook has a practical basis in the portfolio. More than half of Evertrue's companies already operate in the U.S., a pattern Bajela linked to British founders who keep American expansion in view from an early stage.

What the close says about first funds

Evertrue's raise lands in a narrow but notable slice of the market: first-time managers in the U.K., who have already pulled in more this year than in all of 2025 according to PitchBook's figures. That the fund closed above its stated target, with public money sitting alongside private backers, suggests institutional appetite for new managers has not dried up even as capital concentrates elsewhere.

For founders, the practical read is a small number of new checks in the £350,000 range chasing AI and fintech companies in the U.K. and Europe, with a stated preference for teams that can show what they have already overcome. For the wider ecosystem, Bajela's decision to cap the fund rather than take every dollar offered is a reminder that fund size and fund strategy are separate questions — a distinction that matters most to the founders who will live with the consequences of how quickly a young fund needs to deploy.