Balderton Capital is a

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...

firm based in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

, UK, that invests in early-stage, technology and internet

startup companies A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English capital. Founded in 2000 as

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mil ...

Europe, Balderton Capital became fully independent in 2007. The company made over 100 early-stage investments between 2000 and 2020, including Revolut,

Betfair Betfair is a British gambling company which operates the world's largest online betting exchange. Its product offering also includes sports betting, online casino, online poker, and online bingo. Founded in 2000, the business is split int ...

, The Hut Group,

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

Yoox YOOX Net-a-Porter Group S.p.A. is an Italian online fashion retailer created on 5 October 2015 after the merger between Yoox Group and Net-a-porter Group (NAP). Yoox was originally founded by Federico Marchetti in Milan in 2000, and Net-a-Por ...

, Depop, Talend, Recorded Future, NaturalMotion, Kobalt Music Group, GoCardless,

CityMapper Citymapper is a public transit app and mapping service which displays transport options, usually with live timing, between any two locations in a supported city. It integrates data for all urban modes of transport, including walking, cycling a ...

, and Sophia Genetics. In November 2019, Balderton announced Balderton VII, a new $400m fund to invest in European companies at Series A. The new fund will reportedly make approximately 12 investments annually. In 2018, Balderton announced the first fund dedicated to buying equity from existing shareholders of European technology startups. 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.

Partners

The partners of the firm are

Bernard Liautaud Business Objects (BO, BOBJ, or BObjects) was an enterprise software company, specializing in business intelligence (BI). Business Objects was acquired in 2007 by German company SAP AG. The company claimed more than 46,000 customers in its final ea ...

, Tim Bunting, Suranga Chandratillake, Rob Moffat, Daniel Waterhouse, James Wise, David Thevenon, and Rana Yared.

Investments

Notable investments have included: * 3D Hubs *Aircall * Appear Here *

Bebo Bebo ( ) was an American social networking website that originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013 and relaunched in February 2021. The site relaunched several times after its bankruptcy with a number of short-lived offerings, ...

(sold to

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...

for $850M) *

(Went public and now merged as Paddy Power Betfair) * Big Fish Games (sold to

Churchill Downs Churchill Downs is a horse racing complex located on Central Avenue in south Louisville, Kentucky, United States, famed for hosting the annual Kentucky Derby. It officially opened in 1875 and was named for Samuel Churchill, whose family was p ...

for $885m) * Carwow *

Circle (healthcare partnership) Circle Health Group is a private healthcare provider in the United Kingdom, co-founded in 2004 by former investment banker Ali Parsa and consultant ophthalmologist Massoud Fouladi. The company is currently led by former lastminute.com Finance D ...

Citymapper Citymapper is a public transit app and mapping service which displays transport options, usually with live timing, between any two locations in a supported city. It integrates data for all urban modes of transport, including walking, cycling a ...

Funnel A funnel is a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, used for guiding liquid or powder into a small opening. Funnels are usually made of stainless steel, aluminium, glass, or plastic. The material used in its construct ...

* Globoforce * Kobalt Music Group * Lovefilm *

(sold to

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

for $1B) * NaturalMotion (sold to Zynga) *

Prodigy Finance Prodigy Finance is a fintech platform that enables financing for international postgraduate students who attend a participating business school or postgraduate institution. Prodigy Finance's loans are collectively funded by a community of alumn ...

* Rebtel * Revolut *McMakler *

Setanta Sports Setanta Sports is a sports television company based in Dublin, Ireland broadcasting throughout select Eurasian. The company was formed in 1990 to facilitate the broadcasting of Irish sporting events to international audiences. The company previ ...

(liquidated) * Sophia Genetics *

Sunrise Calendar Sunrise is a discontinued electronic calendar application for mobile and desktop. The service was launched in 2013 by designers Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van. In October 2015, Microsoft announced that they had merged the Sunrise Calendar team in ...

*Talend (public on NASDAQ) * The Hut Group *

Tictail Tictail was a social shopping website for shoppers to discover emerging designers around the world. For brands, the platform was a DIY e-commerce tool focused on strong community integration, simplicity of use, and attractive, customizable desi ...

Vivino Vivino is an online wine marketplace and wine app, which has been downloaded more than 60 million times. The Vivino app is available for download on Android and Apple devices. Vivino was founded in 2010 by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaa ...

* Wooga *

Exits

Since 2008, Balderton has had many prominent exits, including

($2bn IPO of which they owned 3.95%),

($850m sale to AOL), Depop ( sale to Etsy for $1.65B ),

Scansafe ScanSafe was a privately held company backed by investors Benchmark Capital and Scale Venture Partners, until its 2009 acquisition by Cisco Systems. The company provided Web-based "Software as a service" (SaaS) to organizations. History Co-fou ...

(sale to

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

, 30% stake), Lovefilm (sale to Amazon.com, 5% stake),

($700m IPO),

($1bn sale to

, 15% stake), Big Fish Games (sold to

for $885m), Recorded Future ($780m sale to

Insight Partners Insight Partners (previously Insight Venture Partners) is an American venture capital and private equity firm based in New York City. The firm invests in growth-stage technology, software and Internet businesses. History Insight Partners w ...

Sunrise Sunrise (or sunup) is the moment when the upper rim of the Sun appears on the horizon in the morning. The term can also refer to the entire process of the solar disk crossing the horizon and its accompanying atmospheric effects. Terminology A ...

(sold to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

), 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), and Magic Pony Technologies (sold to

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

References

External links

* {{Private equity and venture capital Venture capital firms of the United Kingdom Financial services companies based in London Companies based in San Francisco Financial services companies established in 2000 2000 establishments in England