Mouro Capital Hits $1 Billion as Santander Writes a Second $400M Cheque

Banco Santander has written Mouro Capital a $400 million cheque for the second time in six years. The Spanish bank’s commitment to its London-based venture arm’s third fund, announced on Tuesday, pushes total commitments under management past $1 billion and lands at exactly the same headline number as the 2020 spinout that turned Santander Innoventures into the standalone firm.

That repeat figure conceals a sharply different investment thesis. Mouro’s first deployments out of the new fund include ElevenLabs, a conversational artificial-intelligence specialist, and Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based frontier-model lab targeting core banking modernisation. The firm has flagged capital markets, wealth management, insurtech, and AI-enabled enterprise infrastructure as priority areas, a portfolio mix Innoventures could not have written in 2014 and that Mouro itself was not pursuing four years ago.

Santander Writes the Second $400M Check

The first close was announced on Tuesday by Mouro Capital, the venture firm spun out of Banco Santander in September 2020 with $400 million in allocated capital. The new vehicle, Fund III in the firm’s own numbering, takes commitments past the $1 billion mark across all funds it has managed. Banco Santander remains the sole limited partner (LP, the institutions that supply capital to a fund) at first close, the same structural arrangement that has financed every Mouro vehicle since the rebrand.

• $400 million first close for Fund III, supplied entirely by Banco Santander
• $1 billion+ in cumulative commitments under Mouro Capital management
• Seven investments already deployed from the new fund
• 2015 the year the team began investing under the Santander Innoventures banner

Manuel Silva Martínez, general partner at Mouro Capital, said the firm has built a global platform delivering consistent returns and is positioning the new fund to back founders rewiring financial services through what he called the lens of AI, data and infrastructure. He shares the general partner seat with Christopher Gottschalk, the former Blumberg Capital partner who joined as senior advisor in 2019 and later took the GP title.

Why a Single-LP Fund Stands Out in This Cycle

Almost every venture firm of meaningful size raises from a blend of pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth, family offices, and corporate LPs. Mouro Capital sits in a narrow group of independent-branded venture platforms running on one balance sheet, in this case a Tier-1 European bank’s own capital.

The arrangement gives Mouro something most peers lack in a cycle when institutional LP allocations to venture have tightened: certainty of capital. It also caps the firm’s optionality. A multi-LP fund can lean on different pools for different deals; a single-LP fund cannot. Mouro has signalled that will shift soon. The firm has stated it intends to onboard additional investors to the platform for the first time in the near future, language that points to a Fund III second close with outside LPs participating.

Why the bank still bankrolls a spinout: the original 2014 vehicle, Santander Innoventures, delivered internal rates of return in the 25 to 35 percent range across its mature cohorts and produced exits including iZettle’s $2 billion sale to PayPal in 2018 and Kabbage’s purchase by American Express in 2020. Chief executive Ana Botín cited those numbers when she sanctioned the spinout, noting in the Santander 2020 spinout announcement that Innoventures had almost doubled the cash invested despite being young by venture standards.

From Innoventures in 2014 to Fund III Today

The arc through three vehicles tells the strategic story Banco Santander has been writing on its venture book for twelve years.

The $400 million figure has held; the deal flow it underwrites has not. Innoventures wrote cheques to Ripple, Tradeshift, Upgrade, Creditas, and Klar, names that built the first wave of consumer and infrastructure fintech in Europe and the Americas. The Mouro-branded years added Alinia, deeper benches in compliance and payments rails, and the data-infrastructure layer beneath them. Fund III is opening with conversational AI and a Japanese frontier-AI lab, both signals that the team views the next return cycle as coming from AI rebuilding the back end of financial services rather than from another wave of neobank or consumer-payments challengers.

The firm’s own framing supports that read. Mouro told investors it sees growing opportunities in capital markets, wealth, and governance-risk-compliance technologies driven by AI and blockchain, while flagging insurtech as a category it has called underserved and intends to weight more heavily in this cycle.

ElevenLabs, Sakana AI, and a Sharper Investment Lens

Seven companies are already in the Fund III book. Two have been publicly identified by Mouro, both pointing at the AI-rewiring thesis rather than at the legacy fintech category.

• Capital-markets infrastructure where AI agents handle research, surveillance, and trade-allocation work that previously sat with junior analysts
• Wealth-management platforms applying language models to client servicing, document parsing, and personalised reporting
• Governance, risk, and compliance software (GRC, the category banks use for continuous regulatory monitoring) where supervisors are pushing toward real-time oversight rather than periodic review
• Insurtech carriers and underwriting tools, an area Mouro has called underserved and earmarked for heavier deployment
• AI-enabled enterprise infrastructure sold to financial-services buyers as data layers, model orchestration, and observability

ElevenLabs sits in the conversational-AI layer and has been embedded into client-facing voice agents at financial firms. Sakana AI’s lab is targeting model-based modernisation of legacy core-banking systems, the cobol-era infrastructure that has stalled large bank transformation programmes for two decades. The check sizes Mouro typically writes run $8 million to $12 million at first cheque, with selected follow-ons reaching $15 million or higher into later rounds. Portfolio construction targets 30 to 35 companies per fund with a 66 percent follow-on rate, a configuration designed for concentration rather than spray.

Fintech Deal Counts Are Falling While Cheque Sizes Hold

The broader number Mouro is raising against looks bleak for fintech-only managers. Crunchbase tracking through April 2026 puts global financial-technology startups at 751 deals year-to-date, a 31.5 percent fall from 1,097 in the same period a year earlier. Total dollars raised in the category inched up five percent to $12 billion across that smaller deal set, meaning average cheque size grew while deal flow contracted.

The AI-funding picture sits at the other extreme.

AI companies absorbed 81 percent of all venture funding deployed in the first quarter of 2026, totalling more than $240 billion.

That figure, from the Crunchbase quarterly recap, frames why a fintech-rooted firm is now writing the words AI, data and infrastructure into its general-partner letter. Funds raised explicitly against the fintech label have struggled this cycle; funds raised with an AI-applied-to-finance posture have not. Mouro’s pivot reads less as a wholesale strategy reset and more as a relabelling of where the team believes the next exits will sit. European peers face the same gravity. 2150’s €210 million climate-fund first close earlier this year hit a comparable bar by leaning on a thematic identity adjacent to AI infrastructure rather than a pure vertical play.

The Second Close Is the Test Worth Watching

The headline ratio at first close reads one limited partner, $400 million committed, seven deals deployed. The second close is when the structural question gets answered. Mouro has signalled outside investors will be welcomed onto the platform for the first time, and the size and identity of those commitments will tell the market whether institutional capital is comfortable parking allocations next to a single bank in a financial-services-only vehicle. The Capital Group and KKR hybrid private-markets vehicle, launched earlier this cycle to bring private-equity exposure to retail investors, shows the LP base for alternative assets is fragmenting in directions a 2014-era CVC would not recognise.

If a second close brings in pension funds or sovereign allocators at meaningful size before the end of the year, the Mouro model becomes a template other corporate-venture spinouts will try to copy. If outside LPs stay on the sidelines and Banco Santander remains the sole funder through deployment, the firm’s optionality narrows and the deal pace will compress around the bank’s own strategic priorities.