June Updates – Mara
The last few months have been some of the busiest for Mara, with many groups seeking us out for our structuring expertise. These investors had the deal; they had the capital commitments; but lacked the infrastructure to make it all happen.
Setting up an SPV felt like building a mini fund from scratch: legal, compliance, onboarding, wiring, reporting.
Too slow.
Too manual.
Too expensive.
We’ve seen this story play out again and again.
So we decided to rewrite the script.
🚨 New Partnership: Mara x Sphera Partners – Powering the Future of Women’s Sports Investing
We’re excited to announce our partnership with Sphera Partners, a new investment group supported by senior private equity executives, to support their bold investment thesis in the fast-growing world of women’s sports.
Sphera turned to Mara to provide the speed, flexibility, and compliance infrastructure they needed to execute deals with confidence.
Through this collaboration, Sphera has already deployed capital into Upshot, a women’s basketball league in USA, backed by Mara’s scalable structuring, seamless onboarding, and commercial alignment.
Together, we’re paving the way to a brighter future for women’s sports and society as a whole.
EUVC – Calm/Storm Ventures
We recently had the privilege of helping the EUVC (European Venture Capital) community come together to back a fund that’s anything but ordinary: Calm/Storm VC, a Vienna-based fund investing in digital health and wellbeing.
Calm/Storm isn’t just another early-stage VC. Their mission is clear: To invest in founders building health and wellbeing solutions that actually move humanity forward.
From mental health platforms to accessible healthcare tech, Calm/Storm backs ventures that aim to tackle the most pressing challenges in our lives—not with hype, but with heart.
Their “calm” stands for human-centric, founder-first partnerships. Their “storm” is the bold ambition to disrupt what’s broken in the system.
It’s a thesis that resonated deeply with the EUVC network, and one that deserved to be accessible to more than just traditional LPs.
How Mara Helped
To help EUVC members invest collectively in Calm/Storm, Mara structured and launched a fully-managed SPV:
✅ Legal setup built for cross-border EU participation
✅ Seamless onboarding and KYC/AML for dozens of individual investors
✅ Transparent reporting and investor communications
✅ Simple capital calls and cash management
The result? A clean, compliant, and beautifully coordinated way for a growing community of emerging investors to get behind a mission that matters.
Why The Players Fund Chose Mara
Co-founder of The Players Fund on Backing Game-Changers in Sports & Wellness
Whether you need a feeder solution for your fund, or have a group of investors that you want to help invest into a private asset, we are here to help!
Book an introduction call with us to learn more
🚀 Empowering Access to AI Infrastructure Innovation: Mara Powers Hersir Ventures’ Investment in hosted·ai
We’re excited to share that Hersir Ventures has completed an SPV investment into hosted·ai’s $3.8M seed round, with structuring and execution powered by Mara.
hosted·ai is building the GPU-as-a-Service layer for cloud providers, enabling dynamic allocation, usage-based billing, and enterprise-grade scalability for AI workloads. Led by a deeply experienced team with two prior exits, hosted·ai is well-positioned to make a major impact on the AI infrastructure landscape.
This round, led by People Ventures, brought together an impressive syndicate of global founders, angels, and operators — all coordinated seamlessly through a Mara-hosted SPV.
👏 A special thanks to Ditlev B. and the founding team, and to Hersir Ventures for trusting Mara to support this milestone. We’re especially proud to help first-time and emerging managers like Hersir scale high-integrity syndicate investments with institutional-grade infrastructure.
How Mara Helped IBT Technologies Launch a Seamless SPV Solution
We’re excited to share a recent success story showcasing how Mara empowered IBT Technologies with a tailored Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) solution, streamlining their capital raise and investor management with ease and efficiency.
About IBT Technologies
IBT Technologies builds critical infrastructure for modern fintech platforms, offering APIs and tools that power everything from digital banking to real-time payments. With a client base that spans start-ups to established financial institutions, IBT is focused on enabling fast, compliant, and scalable financial innovation.
As the company continued to grow, they needed a capital-raising solution that matched their own standards for transparency and efficiency. Managing an SPV in-house, however, proved too complex and operationally burdensome, prompting them to seek a purpose-built solution.
The Mara Solution
Introduced by Founder Catalyst, a legal services firm, Mara stepped in with its full-service SPV-as-a-Service platform: handling everything from legal SPV structuring, KYC/AML compliance, suitability assessment, and cash aggregation. Mara became the trusted operations partner behind IBT’s capital raise.
The Outcome
IBT Technologies successfully launched their SPV with minimal friction, reducing administrative burdens and accelerating their fundraising timeline. Investors benefited from a clean, user-friendly experience, reinforcing trust and confidence.
This collaboration underscores how Mara’s SPV solutions can unlock growth opportunities for innovative companies like IBT Technologies, helping them focus on what they do best, while we handle the complexity behind the scenes.
Book an introduction call with us to learn more
Mara Events
The Future of the VC: Consolidation, Liquidity and the Road Ahead
We had pleasure of convening a room full of GPs, LPs, and emerging managers to explore one of the most important questions in our industry: What does the future of VC look like?
A huge thank you to our outstanding panellists, Hannah Leach and Farhan Lalji, for their candid insights, and to Chris James, Managing Partner at Quadri Ventures, for moderating such an incisive and engaging discussion.
Key Discussion Themes
Together, we unpacked key themes shaping the venture ecosystem, including:
- VC consolidation and the search for scale
- Ongoing challenges around liquidity
- The evolving role of emerging managers
- The growing influence of AI across sourcing, diligence, and operations
We’re also grateful to the Quadri Ventures team, Laura Ireland and Chris James for making the event possible.
It was a pleasure to see so many of our SPV and feeder clients in the room. If you’re interested in how Mara is supporting the next generation of private market investors, we’d love to hear from you.
EUVC Summit and Awards Show
The EUVC held its inaugural Summit at Google’s Central Saint Giles office in May, featuring the “who’s who” of European venture.
Event highlights:
- Itxaso del Palacio, GP from our client Notion gave a fascinating overview of the European SaaS market
- Stride’s Fred Destin delivered an impressive Ted-style talk on life, philosophy, venture and AI
Congratulations to all the winners!
