Venture Capital House of the Year
DN Capital
DN successfully wrapped up the fundraising of Fund V with €300 million which was substantially oversubscribed. Mister Spex, and Hometogo went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and Remitly on NASDAQ respectively. After the successful IPO at Frankfurt Stock Exchange, representing the largest tech IPO in Germany to date, DN Capital exited 95% of its holding in Auto1 at an average €6.9 billion valuation; this investment has returned 24.8x MOIC (3x DN Fund III) and a 82% IRR. In total, the 4 IPOs generated over €400 million in total proceeds to DN investors.
In 2022, DN sold Robin.io to Rakuten Symphony (2.7x MOIC and 19% IRR returned for DN Fund III, 1.8x MOIC and 37% IRR for DN Fund IV) and Yottaa to PSG resulting in 3.1x MOIC and 37% IRR together with other 3 portfolio companies realizing a total of €40 million. DN continued to strongly support its portfolio companies and brought DST and Prosus as lead investors in the Series C and D rounds to GoStudent, Softbank to Incode and Insight Partners to Cognigy.
In terms of recent team developments, Ian Marsh made partner and Guy Ward Thomas and Teemu Mattila got promoted to Principal in summer 2021, all being with DN for over 4 years. Finally, Nenad Marovac, Founder and Managing Partner, was featured on the Midas list Europe 2021 and DN was recognized as VC House of the Year at the Private Equity Awards 2022.
Foresight Group
At Foresight, we partner with promising smaller companies to create high-quality, local jobs and sustainable long-term growth. We know smaller companies can mean big things and, with the right support and guidance, can have an enormous impact.
In the period, we invested over £45m across our venture and private equity funds. We launched three new funds supporting SMEs across the island of Ireland, West Yorkshire and the North East. To enhance our ventures offering, we acquired the technology ventures division of Downing LLP, including management of the Venture Capital Trust and Ventures Enterprise Investment Scheme businesses of Downing. As a result of this, our Private Equity AUM surpassed the billion milestone, increasing to £1.2 billion.
For close to four decades, we have supported SMEs through various economic cycles. Our 50 strong investment team, working from offices across the UK, uses their cross-sector experience, international reach and deep local connections to help our portfolio maximise its potential. This is evidenced by both of the Foresight listed VCTs seeing an increase in NAV by 20.0% and 13.8% respectively, between April 2021 and March 2022. We also completed seven exits; selling Codeplay and TFC Europe which generated 15.9x and 12.6x respectively.
Octopus Ventures
The past 12 months were the best on record for Octopus Ventures. In fund-raising our largest fund, Titan VCT, raised £200m in only 28 days; we launched Octopus Future Generations, our £32 million VCT fund focused on building a more sustainable planet, empowering people and revitalising healthcare; and we created our first pre-seed focused fund, an over-subscribed £10m fund designed to be the first cheque high potential European businesses receive.
From a portfolio point of view, 11 of our portfolio companies successfully exited, including two of the UK's biggest exits last year - the acquisition of Depop by Etsy for $1.6bn and the $8.1bn listing of Cazoo on NYSE. At the same time, ManyPets (formerly BoughtByMany), a business we first backed in 2016 at its series A reached a $2 billion valuation and we distributed more capital than ever before, investing over £250m across the year.
Finally, we underscored our core value of investing in a better world by earning B Corp certification - verifying that our business is meeting the highest standards of performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials.
Voting is now closed
To find out who won book a table at the British Private Equity Awards on 04 October 2022 by contacting Chris Coe.