Balderton Capital

Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm based in London, UK, that invests in early-stage, technology and internet startup companies in Europe. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English capital.^[1]

Balderton Capital

Company type	Private
Industry	Venture capital
Founded	2000; 25 years ago (2000)
Headquarters	London, WC1 United Kingdom
Key people	Bernard Liautaud, Daniel Waterhouse, Suranga Chandratillake, James Wise, Rob Moffat, David Thevenon, Rana Yared, Colin Hanna
Total assets	$6.0 billion
Number of employees	60
Website	www.balderton.com

History

Founded in 2000 as Benchmark Capital Europe, Balderton Capital became fully independent in 2007.^[2][3] The company made over 100 early-stage investments between 2000 and 2020, including Revolut, Betfair, The Hut Group, MySQL, Yoox, Depop, Talend, Recorded Future, NaturalMotion, Kobalt Music Group, GoCardless, CityMapper, and Sophia Genetics.

Partners

The partners of the firm are: Bernard Liautaud, Tim Bunting, Suranga Chandratillake, Rob Moffat, Daniel Waterhouse, James Wise, David Thevenon, and Rana Yared.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9][excessive citations]}

Funding

In November 2019, Balderton announced Balderton VII, a new $400m fund to invest in European companies at Series A.^[10] The new fund will reportedly make approximately 12 investments annually.^[11] In 2018, Balderton announced the first fund dedicated to buying equity from existing shareholders of European technology startups.^[12] In 2021, Balderton announced the first fund dedicated to growth, with $680M under management and a further $600M for early stage investing, bringing its total assets to over $5B.^[13][14]

Balderton Capital was also a lead investor in Jolt, an Israeli edtech startup founded in 2015 that offers alternative business education programs to traditional MBAs. In early 2020, Balderton led a $14.1 million funding round for the company, bringing Jolt's total funding to $23.3 million. Other investors included Octopus Ventures and Hillsven Capital.^[15][16]

Investments

Notable investments have included:

3D Hubs[17] Aircall[18] Appear Here Bebo (sold to AOL for $850M) Betfair (Went public and now merged as Paddy Power Betfair) Big Fish Games (sold to Churchill Downs for $885m) [19] Carwow[20] Circle (healthcare partnership) Citymapper Funnel[21] Globoforce

Kobalt Music Group Lovefilm MySQL (sold to Sun Microsystems for $1B)[22] NaturalMotion (sold to Zynga)[23] Prodigy Finance Rebtel Revolut McMakler[24] Setanta Sports (liquidated)

Sophia Genetics Sunrise Calendar Talend (public on NASDAQ) The Hut Group Tictail Vivino[25] Wooga Yoox Lassie[26]

Exits

Since 2008, Balderton has had many prominent exits, including Betfair ($2bn IPO of which they owned 3.95%),^[27] Bebo ($850m sale to AOL),^[28] Depop ( sale to Etsy for $1.65B ),^[29] Scansafe (sale to Cisco, 30% stake^[30]), Lovefilm (sale to Amazon.com, 5% stake^[31]), Yoox ($700m IPO), MySQL ($1bn sale to Sun Microsystems, 15% stake^[32]), Big Fish Games (sold to Churchill Downs for $885m),^[19] Recorded Future ($780m sale to Insight Partners,^[33] Sunrise (sold to Microsoft),^[34] Talend (2016, Nasdaq IPO at $1.5B), Sophia Genetics ( 2021, Nasdaq IPO at $1.2B), Darktrace (2021, FTSE IPO at $3.5B ), Frontier Car Group (majority bought by OLX in 2019 for $700M),^[35] and Magic Pony Technologies (sold to Twitter).^[36][37]