We are in it – the technology shift of our generation. The consumerization of AI is reshaping every corner of the world, and what an extraordinary moment this is to be a founder – and for us, an investor and partner to those founders, especially Elsewhere.
As Karim Beguir, CEO & Co-Founder of InstaDeep (Tunisia), shared during our International Selection Panel (ISP) in Cambridge in September 2025, “We live in an extraordinary time. When you think about modern AI, it’s incredible what you can do with these tools. By training the next generation, by showing them the potential, you are unleashing tremendous capability – tremendous value economically and socially for communities all across the world.”
Founded in 2012, Endeavor Catalyst is the global investment fund of Endeavor. We invest in the companies of Endeavor Entrepreneurs alongside the world’s leading venture capital and growth equity firms. With $540M+ raised across four funds, we have made nearly 400 investments to date, 50 investments in 2025. This past year we partnered with more repeat founders than ever before, executed a record number of secondary sales, and backed companies that are seizing this moment with conviction. Of course, AI was a common theme, turbocharging growth and driving scale in ways not seen before in our markets. Read on to learn more – and to see why we’re so energized about what’s ahead.
Since launching in 2012, we’ve backed 680+ Endeavor Entrepreneurs leading 395+ companies across 37 countries, fueling Endeavor’s mission to build high-impact entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world.
With data-driven insights from our global portfolio and 600+ team members in local markets, we’re uniquely positioned to observe and shape the evolution of venture capital and technology on a global scale.
2025 marks our most active year since 2022, both in terms of the number of investments and capital deployed. We deployed approximately $70M across 50 new investments, spanning geographies and industries. The capital invested in the second half of the year was double that of the first half, reflecting strong momentum heading into year-end.
Since the 2021–2022 venture capital boom, and subsequent correction in 2023, we’ve seen a steady increase in venture activity. Globally, venture capital investment exceeded $90B for five consecutive quarters through Q4 2025, with growth recorded in every quarter of the year. This surge is driven largely by $500M+ megadeals, particularly among AI companies. With investor attention and capital concentrated largely on AI – and expectations distorted by its explosive trajectory – the funding environment for strong, durable businesses outside of AI has become one of the most challenging in the past decade. These companies haven’t deteriorated as businesses; the narrative has shifted, creating an increasingly polarized market.
Looking ahead, we expect this divergence to persist. While AI continues to dominate headlines and deal flow, opportunities remain for resilient, fundamentals-driven companies – particularly those building efficiently and scaling with discipline. Our own portfolio reflects this, with a steady investment pace and robust pipeline. According to Jackie Carmel, Managing Director of Endeavor Catalyst, “Capital is increasingly flowing to our markets as bold ideas, exceptional talent, and innovative solutions continue to emerge Elsewhere.”
Our portfolio companies are increasingly attracting global capital to emerging markets. In 2025, several of the world’s top venture investors entered Endeavor markets for the first time. See examples below.
Among our most active co-investors in 2025 were Prosus and QED, both partnering with us across multiple regions. We co-invested with Prosus in BrainLogic (Uruguay) and Thndr (Egypt), while QED led rounds in Felix (Miami) and Nymcard (Lebanon) — its first investment in the Middle East.
As investors broaden their reach, we continue to partner with long-standing and highly active co-investors such as General Atlantic, Ribbit Capital, and Sequoia, sharing numerous portfolio companies across diverse regions. See select examples below.
Endeavor Entrepreneurs often build across decades. Selected for life, they move from one problem to the next, carrying the lessons, scars, and instincts shaped in São Paulo, Lagos, Amman, Istanbul, and beyond. As they continue their entrepreneurial journeys, many are launching new ventures — building on experience gained from their earlier companies in which we have invested — and we are backing them again. In 2025, approximately 19% of our investments were in subsequent companies founded by existing Endeavor Entrepreneurs.
As AI reshapes the world, Endeavor Entrepreneurs are seizing the generational opportunity to create AI-native companies rooted in the domain knowledge they’ve developed over years. Jason Wenk founded Altruist (Detroit) in 2018, a digital investment platform for financial advisors that has grown into a unicorn. This year, drawing on the expertise in the RIA market, he is building Prelude (Detroit), an AI-native platform for asset management. Similarly, Spanish serial entrepreneur Pablo Fernandez, built Clicars, an e-commerce platform for used cars, then Clikalia (Spain), a proptech company in which we invested, (proptech), and is building Clidrive, an AI-powered car financing platform we expect to invest in soon.
In Brazil, the most mature venture ecosystem in Latin America, a new wave of repeat founders is emerging. After more than a decade of high-growth company building, seasoned entrepreneurs are returning to launch new ventures at greater scale. Benjamin Gleason and Gonzalo Parejo Navajas, who became Endeavor Entrepreneurs through different companies and met through Endeavor, have joined forces to create Kamino (Brazil), a financial management platform for SMBs.
Below are additional examples of seasoned entrepreneurs launching new companies we backed in 2025.
Each year, we expand into new markets where founders are driving innovation. In 2025, we invested for the first time in a company out of Puerto Rico, bringing our portfolio footprint to 37 countries.
While Latin America continues to account for roughly 40% of our total investments, Europe and the Middle East have emerged as our fastest-growing regions in recent years, now representing nearly one-third of our global investment activity.
In Europe, our investment activity has increased 9x since 2016, supported by increasingly mature venture ecosystems across Western and Southern Europe. The region is now a global hub for foundational AI and frontier technologies such as robotics and climate tech. With a growing AI talent base and strong technical and research foundations, European startups are driving deep-tech innovation and shaping the next generation of technology.
The Middle East, meanwhile, has experienced a sharp acceleration, rising from just a handful of deals in the mid-2010s to becoming one of our top three regions globally. This surge underscores the region’s ongoing transformation into an innovation hub, fueled by government-backed entrepreneurship programs and efforts to develop local capital markets and stock exchanges such as the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) that support liquidity opportunities.
In 2025, among our most active countries for new investments — aside from Brazil, where we made ten investments alone — were Nigeria, Poland, Spain, Argentina and the UAE. This reflects our growing global diversification and the strength of emerging innovation hubs where entrepreneurs are attracting significant investor interest across sectors such as AI, fintech, healthcare, and mobility. Below are some notable investments in each of these markets.
Our first investment in crypto was in 2014 with Xapo Bank (Argentina), the first Bitcoin-enabled bank bridging traditional finance and digital assets. By 2021, Bitcoin had surged from $7K to nearly $60K, establishing crypto as a mainstream asset class and igniting demand for regulated exchanges. That same year, we invested in Bitso (Mexico) and Mercado Bitcoin (Brazil), two of Latin America’s leading crypto platforms addressing this need.
Today, crypto has moved from speculation to infrastructure, becoming a core layer of the new global financial system. Stablecoins and tokenized assets now power payments, savings, and cross-border transfers, particularly in emerging markets where utility is driving adoption.
As highlighted in our 2026 Venture Capital Trends report, emerging markets are poised to lead the wave of stablecoin adoption. Latin America and Africa are already at the forefront, with stablecoin activity rising 40% year-over-year. According to Standard Chartered, up to $1 trillion could shift from traditional banks in emerging markets into stablecoins, driven by inefficient financial systems and volatile local currencies. Farooq Malik, Co-Founder and CEO of Rain (Puerto Rico), shared at our 2025 Endeavor Catalyst Gathering in New York City, “The moment someone earns money in dollars, when it’s time to get paid out locally, you’re relying on traditional financial infrastructure and pushing that money into local currency. In many of these markets, local currency can be volatile. So in the moment you receive the payment, you’ve already lost purchasing power.” Rain defines its own job as providing “dollars as a service”.
Below are some of our most recent investments shaping the future and real-world applications of crypto globally.
AI is driving record levels of venture investment, with over ~$200B deployed in 2025, marking the first year it accounts for more than half of all global VC funding.
The way AI is built, scaled, and applied today can be understood through three layers. The Infrastructure Layer forms the foundation, encompassing the specialized hardware, servers, and cloud platforms that power AI workloads (e.g., NVIDIA, AWS). The Model / Platform Layer serves as the intelligence engine, containing the algorithms and machine learning models that transform data into insight and capability (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic). Finally, the Application Layer brings these technologies to market, embedding AI into end-user products such as chatbots, recommendation engines, and creative or productivity tools that are now integral to how consumers and businesses operate (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot).
PitchBook data shows that investors are simultaneously backing horizontal AI platforms, scalable infrastructure designed to serve multiple industries, and vertical AI applications that drive focused innovation within specific sectors. We are, too. As Linda Rottenberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Endeavor, shared on the Sifted podcast, “When we start talking about AI as solving real-world problems, both at the consumer level and the enterprise level, we will hear a lot more about founders Elsewhere.”
Our investments span general-purpose AI tools — from voice and video generators to platforms that power automation and intelligence across both enterprise and consumer use cases — to specialized applications in financial services and healthcare, where AI is addressing industry-specific challenges and unlocking new efficiencies. See examples below.
A new era of hardware innovation is unfolding, reshaping technology as AI bridges the digital and physical worlds. Some of the most valuable companies in the world today like NVIDIA and Tesla are hardware-driven, proving that physical innovation remains essential to powering the next wave of AI, automation, and data infrastructure. In fact, hardware was the second-largest sector for venture investment in Q3 2025, with robotics, semiconductors, quantum computing, and data-infrastructure companies collectively raising $16.2B.
The competitive edge for these companies no longer lies in the machines alone, but in the software and data layers embedded within them. The intelligence those systems generate can be applied far beyond their original use.
Companies in our portfolio, spanning ocean vessels to space logistics, combine advanced sensing and computing hardware with AI and analytics platforms that transform raw data into actionable insights. At our 2024 Endeavor Catalyst Gathering in New York, Rafal Modrzewski, Co-Founder and CEO of ICEYE (Poland), shared that they had been working with the Icelandic Met Office to monitor volcanic activity in the region since 2021. “In 2023, we saw a pattern in which that terrain started to elevate significantly quicker over time than it used to. And so that led us to believe that we are about to see a volcano eruption,” Rafal recounted. The Icelandic Met Office decided that it was sufficient evidence to issue a warning for the citizens around and evacuated 4,000 in anticipation of the event. Rafal continued, “Within a week that volcano erupted and the lava actually flooded some of the houses that we thought would be under threat. So it’s, you know, those kind of things which we have never thought would be possible.”
Below are examples of portfolio companies redefining the future of hardware.
Global exit value reached ~$150B in Q3 2025 — the highest quarterly level since Q4 2021 — driven by an uptick in IPO activity in the US and sustained M&A activity worldwide. That said, a meaningful reopening of the IPO window will require a broader wave of listings and evidence that newly public companies can sustain their valuations over time.
With companies staying private for longer, alternative exit channels are becoming more active. In 2025, our portfolio saw ten liquidity events — up from just one in 2024 — including three acquisitions and seven secondary sales. Speaking at the 2025 Endeavor Investor Meeting about alternatives for liquidity, Michael Lahyani, founder and CEO of Property Finder (UAE), shared, “I need to provide liquidity to my shareholders. General Atlantic has been invested for seven years, they’re very happy, but at some point they’re going to need some liquidity.” There are lots more paths that can be taken, Michael highlights: “There are different avenues. There are local sovereigns excited to come in, there’s plenty of growth funds, there’s crossovers, pre-IPO kind of funds, and then finally the IPO.”
Over the past decade, M&A has remained our most consistent and common exit channel, with 22 transactions, including several billion-dollar acquisitions globally. The US mirrors this trend, with M&A representing over 60% of all exits since 2015, highlighted by major deals such as Google’s $32B acquisition of Wiz in 2025.
In response to limited traditional exit opportunities and growing demand for liquidity, the global VC secondary market has shown sustained growth over the past five years. According to Industry Ventures, secondary market volume is on track to reach $122B in 2025 — nearly six times the $21B raised through tech IPOs the same year, based on Bloomberg data.
Our portfolio reflects this broader trend. 2025 marked a sharp increase in secondary sales. After completing our first secondary sale in 2019 and only four more through 2022 amid a slowdown in liquidity, activity accelerated significantly beginning in December 2024, with eight secondary sales closed within just 13 months.
Below are select examples of portfolio companies that achieved liquidity through different exit channels in 2025.
A small number of people – technologists, futurists, even science-fiction writers – envisioned the world we’re living in today decades before it arrived. For most of us, AI still feels like a shiny new frontier, one we’re collectively learning to navigate in real time. The questions are big, and the opportunities even bigger. As companies reach milestones faster and with leaner teams, we wonder about the future of work. We wonder about creativity, human connection, money, mobility – everything.
During Endeavor Week 2025 in New York City, our honoree, Fabricio Bloisi (CEO, Prosus), shared: “AI will have the impact that electricity had, or that the industrial revolution had. We are going to completely change how the world works.” With our rules-based co-investment model, Endeavor Catalyst mirrors the realities on the ground – showing where innovation is happening, where momentum is building, and where opportunity is greatest. As our investment pace accelerates and liquidity continues to rise, in step with global innovation, we’re energized by what lies ahead – and honored to support the founders who are shaping the future.
Behind the 395+ companies in our portfolio are 680+ high-impact entrepreneurs dreaming big. They are transforming lives and economies across multiple industries worldwide. Learn more below!
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For any questions or to learn more, please reach out to Jackie Carmel at [email protected].