500 Eurasia is the newest fund in 500 Global’s family of 35 funds worldwide and, until recently, the firm’s only dedicated vehicle in Europe. It is a $20M fund based in Tbilisi, investing in the pre-seed and seed-stage companies that go through its Georgian accelerator program, with a mandate covering 29 countries from Central Asia to the Baltics. Its LP base mixes Georgian capital, including the Georgian government, with the World Bank and family offices from several regions.
The partner leading it, Pedro Santos Vieira, has spent most of his career building things from zero. “I am a founder at heart,” he tells Laura Iriarte in this episode of 0100 Impact Talks, recorded live in Budapest. After co-founding GoodGuide, a Silicon Valley company backed by NEA and DFJ that used science to help consumers choose healthier products and was acquired in 2012, he decided he would rather work with founders than keep building companies himself. He launched West to West, a nonprofit bridging European and U.S. West Coast entrepreneurs, then returned to Europe to start the Shilling Founders Fund with an established Portuguese angel group, deploying roughly 60% of its capital in Iberia and the rest across Europe. 500 Eurasia was the next zero-to-one challenge.
Why Georgia
The answer to the question Santos Vieira hears most often is less exotic than it sounds. Before the pandemic, the Georgian government set out to attract an international accelerator to position the country as the region’s tech hub. 500 Global ran a first program with 30 companies; the results were strong, and after the pandemic the firm won a public tender for a four-year contract to train 120 companies. With that long a commitment on the ground, launching a dedicated fund to invest in those companies was the logical next step.
Founders from across the mandate spend a few weeks a year in Tbilisi working with 500’s international mentors and staff, and the program culminates in two demo days a year designed to put the region in front of international investors.
The lab and the destination
Twenty-nine countries spanning two continents are not one market, and Santos Vieira doesn’t pretend otherwise — Kazakh and Estonian founders need to be spoken to differently. But with a handful of exceptions, they share two traits. Almost all are small markets, and their deep tech founders — increasingly AI-native — tend to have the same gaps: commercial strategy, customer profiling and go-to-market. That is precisely what the accelerator is built to fix.
Small markets, in his view, are a feature rather than a flaw. Founders in them can get a meeting with the CEO of the national telco, the biggest bank or the leading insurer, and test fast. “Your small market becomes your lab,” he says. “But you know that’s not where you’re going to build a big company.” He points to a Kazakh portfolio company solving health insurance claims processing for the U.S. market, cutting roughly 80% of the workload — a Central Asian team building for a global problem from day one. Logistics and last-mile delivery follow the same pattern: solve it in Eurasia, then take it to the U.S., Southeast Asia or the Middle East.
Santos Vieira resists the popular idea that emerging-market founders are simply hungrier than Western European ones — “we invest in the outliers,” he says, and ambitious founders exist everywhere. What he does see consistently is that founders from these regions come from a world of capital scarcity, and that shapes how they operate. Every dollar an investor puts in, he argues, gets “fought three times” before it is spent — which is exactly the kind of risk management an LP wants to see.
No strings attached
The most pointed part of the conversation concerns how public LPs structure their commitments. Across Europe, most government-backed investors require that the capital they commit be deployed in their own country — often at a ratio of two to one. For a manager building a pan-regional fund, Santos Vieira calls that prohibitive.
Georgia took a different approach. The government invested without geographic restrictions, valuing instead 500 Global’s long-term operating presence in the country and its ability to bring international founders to Tbilisi — many of whom end up opening operations and hiring locally. Had the fund been forced to deploy a fixed share in Georgia, he argues, it likely wouldn’t have found enough strong founders, the fund would have underperformed, and the government would have lost both its returns and the international talent it wanted to attract. His message to any country aiming to become a regional tech hub: reduce or remove those restrictions.
For LPs from outside the region, the pitch is different: a large, young and underserved population, and a firm with a track record of spotting category winners in other emerging markets. If 500 Global found Grab in Southeast Asia, the logic goes, finding its equivalent in Central Asia is the bet. Santos Vieira acknowledges the “stan” stigma that makes many Western investors switch off, and believes the only cure is to visit. He singles out Uzbekistan — around 30 million people, a very young population, growth approaching double digits and an economy opening to international capital — as a case in point, while noting that the Baltics’ three very different markets offer their own opportunity.
Accelerators still matter
Santos Vieira closes by taking on a bias he often hears from LPs: that accelerator-linked funds only get founders who couldn’t raise elsewhere. 500 Global’s portfolio of 3,000 founders includes 35 unicorns, half of them outside the U.S. “If these were bad companies, what are we doing with them?” he asks. The real distinction is between good and bad accelerators — the quality of content, mentors, platform, and market access. In emerging markets, where go-to-market gaps are wider, good accelerators also provide the bridge to global markets that founders wouldn’t find alone.
500 Global is now extending that model further upstream, with two- to five-day pre-acceleration programs across Eurasia, each focused on a single topic, from customer discovery to enterprise sales, delivered one country at a time.
As an SEC-regulated firm, 500 Global can’t discuss active fundraising. What Santos Vieira can say is that 500 Eurasia’s first seed fund is performing strongly on its metrics — and that the firm “would be stupid not to renew this fund.”
