Hello! Emilia Capital (a Dutch limited liability company) is our holding company. We are Joost de Valk & Marieke van de Rakt and we made our money by building up Yoast. Yoast is most famous for the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which helps your website rank high in Google. We sold Yoast in 2021, and Emilia Capital holds all of our investments.
Emilia Capital invests in companies that play on the world wide web. A lot of our investments have ties to the WordPress ecosystem. We’d like to think they make the web a better place by being who they are. We like to be close to our portfolio companies. At the same time, we’re not there to tell them what to do, but instead to cheer them on and give them advice when they ask. With our combined experience in running a scale-up and development and marketing acumen, we can help the companies we invest in excel.
Our investment philosophy
Our love for WordPress is rather obvious. In the last few years, we’ve already invested in a number of WordPress companies. Next to that, we also made some other investments. All of our investments are in tech companies or in companies with a strong online presence. That just makes sense because of our own background, we can help those companies excel. Next to that: each investment aligns with at least one of our three core values:
- We are open-source fanatics and want to invest in open-source software solutions. In WordPress, that also means we ask companies we invest in to respect the GPL, the WordPress guidelines and understanding the importance of the WordPress community. Some of our WordPress related investments are Atarim, Equalize Digital, Extendify, Castos, WPCS and previously Strattic.
- We are passionate about sustainability and want to invest in companies that provide sustainable solutions. We would like to expand our investment portfolio with products and solutions that help make the world a better (and a greener) place. We’re really excited about our investment in Peerby, a platform that helps people share tools and utilities with their neighbors.
- We want to encourage female entrepreneurship, so we seek investment opportunities in companies that are founded by women. Marieke experienced how difficult it can be to be a female entrepreneur in the tech industry. We want to help more female founded companies flourish. We’re really proud of our investment in Equalize Digital, but also in Stieglitz and Nina Care.
