Paul Judge and Marcelo Claure Are Raising $200M Open Opportunity Fund For Diverse Startups

Paul Judge and Marcelo Claure have announced plans to raise $200 million after buying SoftBank’s Open Opportunity Fund.

SoftBank Group is a Japanese multinational investment holding company focusing on investment management. Serial entrepreneur Judge and Former SoftBank executive Claure recently acquired the firm’s $100 million Open Opportunity Fund 1, $150 million Fund 2, and the entire portfolio. They planned to increase Fund 2 to $200 million, which they are now doing.

Meet Paul Judge and Marcelo Claure 

Paul Judge is the Executive Chairman of Pindrop and a serial tech entrepreneur. He’s also the CEO and founder of Luma, the home WiFi company acquired in 2018. He is a Co-Founder & Partner of TechSquare Labs. And of Purewire before it was acquired by Barracuda Networks in 2009. 

Judge has invested in over 60 technology startups. Before this, Paul served as CTO on the founding team of CipherTrust, a leader in email security acquired by Secure Computing in 2006 for $273 million. He also worked briefly with IBM and NASA.

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Meanwhile, Marcelo Claure is a globally-recognized entrepreneur, investor, and operator and the Founder & CEO of Claure Group, a multi-billion-dollar global investment firm spanning multiple high-growth sectors, including telecom, tech, media, real estate, infrastructure, climate & energy transition, fashion, and sports.

Through his investment firm, Claure Group, Claure provides strategic capital and expertise to his portfolio companies and funds’ management teams, including through his role as Group Vice Chairman of SHEIN.

He is also the Founder, Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Bicycle Capital, Latin America’s leading growth equity fund, and Vice Chairman and Managing Partner of eB Capital, a Brazil-focused investment platform.

A New $200M Fund

The two investors are now raising the second Open Opportunity Fund, aiming to replicate the same winning recipe with an eye toward backing companies in the fintech, health tech, and tech spaces.

Judge told Business Insider they plan to invest in late seed to early Series A startups, with about one-third of the fund dedicated to growth-stage investing.

For Judge and Claure, the fund’s focus is deeply personal. Both men experienced firsthand the difficulties of raising capital as entrepreneurs of color, and they didn’t want the same experience for the next generation of startup founders.

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“The joy and satisfaction that I get by helping diverse founders, not one at a time, but 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 at a time,” Claure said. “We’re going to be able to create an exponential effort.”

Claure stated they received a soft commitment from SoftBank but now need to close that investment. He added that he’s contributing $20 million to the new fund.