Yvonne Bajela closes £13m debut fund at Evertrue Capital, with the state development bank as cornerstone

The former LocalGlobe partner, an early backer of Wise, Marshmallow and Moove, has already written seven pre-seed cheques and says half of those companies now operate in the United States.

Yvonne Bajela, one of the more recognisable names among London’s early-stage investors, has closed a £13 million first fund for Evertrue Capital, the firm she set up to back AI and frontier technology founders at pre-seed across the UK and Europe. Evertrue describes the fund as oversubscribed; it has not disclosed how far demand exceeded its target.

The size of the fund is notable. Emerging managers have struggled to raise money in a cautious market, and Evertrue’s own figures, which it attributes to 2024 launches, suggest two-thirds of new venture funds that year targeted less than £7.5 million. Bajela, raising alone as a solo general partner, has gone well beyond that.

Much of the capital comes from public and mission-driven investors that have recently set out to widen access to venture fund management. In June, the British Business Bank committed up to £90 million to 10 first-time UK venture capital fund managers in the first allocation from its £400 million Investor Pathways Capital programme, naming Evertrue among them. Sifted reported at the time that the selected funds ranged from £10m to £20m and that the bank would commit around half of each. Seven of the 10 funds are led by solo general partners.

The same month, Bootstrap 4F, which manages the Women Backing Women Fund, made Evertrue its first commitment after the fund-of-funds reached a £130m first close on 31 March 2026. That vehicle, linked to the government-backed Invest in Women Taskforce, is dedicated to channelling institutional capital into female-led venture capital managers across the UK and Europe. Evertrue is 100% female-owned and female-led.

Other limited partners include Better Society Capital, Allocator One and Bajela’s former employer, Phoenix Court, through Basecamp, its fund of funds for emerging managers. Evertrue also passed through the incubator run by Pathway Fund, which provided £53,000 in working capital, in addition to six months of tailored support and introductions with potential investors. Founders, operators and other general partners from Bajela’s network have invested personally and, according to the firm, will work with portfolio companies.

Evertrue will lead and co-invest in a small number of companies each year. Its pitch rests on backing founders whose understanding of a problem, often drawn from personal experience, is not yet legible to the wider market. “The best moment to invest is before the market has proof,” Bajela said in a statement announcing the close.

The fund has already deployed capital into seven companies, some of which remain in stealth. The disclosed names include Revion, Poindexter Labs, Zuba and Zaro. Revion, a London-founded startup, is building software for automotive retail, starting with a product that automates technicians’ administrative work; it went through Y Combinator’s winter 2026 batch and raised a seed round in March with 8VC, 20VC, Tiny VC and Pioneer Fund among its investors. Its co-founder, Zaki Gabe-Wilkinson, said Bajela wrote the company’s first cheque and introduced it to investors in Britain and the United States ahead of that round.

Poindexter Labs describes itself as an AI capability and efficiency lab. Its co-founder, Jocelyn D’Arcy, said Bajela backed the company at a stage when most investors still treated training data as an afterthought. Zuba is building financial infrastructure for global businesses, and Zaro a shared knowledge layer for enterprises.

Bajela’s track record is the fund’s main selling point. She began at Goldman Sachs and later joined Mitsui & Co., where the firm says she invested in Wise. She was a founding member of Impact X Capital, a fund for underrepresented entrepreneurs, where she co-led the seed investment in Marshmallow, Britain’s second Black-founded billion-dollar tech start-up. In 2022 she joined LocalGlobe as partner, investing across its pre-seed and seed-stage funds as well as its Series B and C fund, and backed the vehicle-financing company Moove during her time at Phoenix Court.

The test for Evertrue, as for the other microfunds in the British Business Bank cohort, will be whether a concentrated pre-seed portfolio can produce the returns that justify public money as an anchor. The bank has said the programme is meant to help emerging managers establish institutional track records, which typically take a decade or more to prove. With seven investments made, Evertrue has a limited number of cheques left before Bajela’s case for a second fund will rest on how those early companies fare at their next rounds.