The first panel on search funds at South Summit…and we were on it!
Last week in Madrid, Ibrahim Abdel Rahim took the stage at South Summit — the global innovation event, born in Spain over a decade ago, that now draws thousands of startups, funds and entrepreneurs from around the world — for what organizers billed as the first panel dedicated entirely to search funds in the event’s history. It’s a small but telling milestone: an asset class that spent years operating below the radar of the mainstream startup and VC world finally got a stage of its own.
Ibrahim shared the panel with Ivona Butcher, Mafalda Almeida Carvalho and Newton M. Campos. Mafalda is a partner at CCSL Advogados and a regular moderator on the Iberian search fund circuit through the firm’s dedicated Search Fund desk, while Newton is one of the field’s most published academics — a professor of entrepreneurship at both FGV EAESP in Brazil and IE University in Spain, whose research has helped define how the search fund model is studied and taught across Latin America and Europe.
Placing Moonbase Capital’s own investor perspective alongside a leading academic voice and a lawyer specializing in search fund transactions gave the South Summit audience a fuller picture than any single speaker could: how the model actually gets funded and structured, what the research says about where it’s growing, and what it looks like from an investor who lives the day-to-day of backing searchers.
Key takeaways
- Search funds earned their own stage. Being the first-ever dedicated search fund panel at a summit of South Summit’s scale signals the model is graduating from niche curiosity to a recognized part of the broader entrepreneurship conversation.
- Legal and academic perspectives sharpen the investor view. Sharing the panel with a transactions lawyer and a leading search fund academic meant the conversation covered deal structuring and industry research, not just Moonbase’s own experience.
- The model is genuinely cross-border. With panelists spanning Spain, Portugal and Brazil’s search fund ecosystems, the discussion reflected how quickly the asset class has spread beyond its original US and Western European base.
- Visibility begets deal flow. For Moonbase, a mainstream stage like South Summit is also a chance to reach searchers and co-investors who haven’t yet found their way into the tighter-knit search fund community.