Molten Ventures Plc (GROW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning and welcome to the Molten Ventures Plc Fund of Funds Insights Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Ben Wilkinson, CFO of Molten Ventures. Good morning, sir.

Good morning. Thank you very much. And welcome, everybody, to this IMC session. I'm Ben Wilkinson, CFO of Molten Ventures, and it gives me great pleasure to introduce this latest session which we use the IMC platform to shine a light on various components of the venture capital investment platform that we have at Molten Ventures. Previous sessions have covered fintech, health, AI and our recent acquisition of Forward Partners. Those sessions are available on the website. And today, we're diving into our seed Fund of Funds program. This is a program which supports an integral part of the venture capital ecosystem in Europe, funding nascent businesses at their earliest stage. And as you will hear today, this Fund of Funds program that we have built is unique in Europe in both its scale and its breadth. I'm excited to introduce you to our team led by Jonathan Sibilia who heads the Fund of Funds program for us and has built this over the last 5 years alongside Moh and Dave. And as I said, this is a distinct program that we've curated over more than 7 years now. Jonathan will provide an overview of the fund investments and Dave will present his insights that we've gleaned from the rich information that we're able to collect from each of those underlying funds. And then finally, Moh will lead a panel discussion from a select few of our fund investments to give you a sense of the journey that we go on with these underlying seed funds and also the perspective from those fund managers. Before we go into the main event, I thought I'd just take a few minutes to provide some context on how the seed Fund of Funds fits within our platform and our model. This program at the seed stage, if you look at the chart here in the green box, this is the Fund of Funds. As I described, that's the earlier stage of investment into these businesses. And this program allows us to support those best seed managers in the European ecosystem. That has the added benefit for us at Molten, providing good economic investment returns, but also providing an early look into the most innovative next generation of businesses. It's the most promising of those businesses and those also that we source through our own proprietary deal flow, which Molten will look to invest in directly and the direct investments come from our Molten Ventures balance sheet, which is at the early stage as you can see on the chart here. That is also supported by co-investment capital that comes from our EIS and VCT programs. As we move then into the growth stage, which we consider to be Series B onwards, we have Molten Ventures balance sheet capital and then we can match multiple capital pools alongside this strategy with additional third-party capital coming alongside the balance sheet. And it's really this multi-capital pull model, which is able to be invested into our proprietary deal flow and we feel that gives investors a unique access into venture capital as an asset class. And it's an asset class which is diversified from other investment classes, but also provides strong returns for our investors. And we feel that by having this unique model, which goes in the very earlier stage all the way through to the later stages in the company's life where they may exit or subsequently IPO as they gain more scale, provides our investors with something which is differentiated to anything else in the market, particularly when you consider that we're doing this through a listed liquid balance sheet. The deep expertise that we're bringing back to our shareholders provides value. One of the sources of that expertise, as you will see today, is the very early stages of the investments. Looking at the innovation that's coming through those companies, which we are likely to invest in directly in maybe 3, 4 years' time beyond the time when these seed funds have invested in those businesses. I know we have a packed agenda this morning so I'm not going to spend too much time on this. And I'll pass over to Jonathan, Moh and Dave to provide you with some insights. And so, therefore, I will leave you in the capable hands of Jonathan now. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Jonathan Sibilia and I'm in charge of the Fund of Funds program here at Molten. So you'll hear from me today, you'll hear from Dave Neumann on data and you'll hear from Mohadeseh Abdullahi on the great seed fund that we're backing and we organized a little panel. I want to start this session by talking about the initial mission and the objectives of the program. And when I think about our mission and our objectives, I think first about the why and the reason why we started this program in the first place. And this really takes us back to 2017 when we were about a year after our IPO and clearly we saw the market changing. Not only the VC asset class was developing and we saw many more rounds, we saw rounds increasing in size, more Series B, more Series A and more seed rounds at a higher valuation. And we could almost say that the Series A of yesterday became the seed round of today back in 2017. Another thing that we observed was that it became pretty obvious that not only companies were raising more money, but they were raising more money more rapidly. And the velocity of those rounds meaning the time it takes from a business to go from seed to Series A or Series A to Series B had accelerated. And what this meant for us as a late-stage investor for Series A, it meant that getting exposure to the early stage was becoming more and more important for access as things accelerated. The last thing that we noticed was that despite the obvious success of the early backers of the unicorns of yesterday and that was evidenced by TVPI and DPI actually were very disciplined on track record when it comes to analyzing a fund. What we observed was it was actually very hard for those guys to raise capital and if it wasn't for government support and the great job that our friends at British Business Bank or the BPI in France or [ DAIF ] are doing. Without those guys, the early-stage world would not be sufficiently funded. It was also a time where we completed another transaction, a secondary transaction. We acquired Seedcamp Fund I and Fund II, which was at the time already increasing our focus to the early stage. But the exam question was how can we do it differently? And that was really the cornerstone of the thinking behind the strategy, which I think we could articulate in 3 main buckets. The first one is ecosystem building. What we're trying to do here is to back the best European seed fund manager and by doing this, creating an index and really an ecosystem making sure that the grassroots of seed investing are properly served. And we do that, and we'll go back to that a bit later, from a regional coverage perspective and a thematic perspective. The other thing was insight and signaling for coinvest. Dave will talk a bit more about that. But we now have data from more than 2,300 unique companies in the program, which allows us to slice and dice and really analyze the data to identify the most attractive European tech businesses at a later stage. But as I said, those rounds increased in speed. So it's very important to have this kind of signaling. And the last time -- the last thing, which is equally important and I think if you look at the evolution of the program, it's clear that the initial drivers for the ecosystem building have effectively now been achieved and now we're really focusing on creating value for Molten and for our shareholders in the program. So the next question really is where are we after 7 years? And I think here again the picture is pretty clear. We've committed about GBP 153 million to the early-stage ecosystem into 81 funds and 66 unique fund managers. But really the idea here is to continue backing our funds as they go to their next fund. So it's about GBP 1.9 million per fund. So we are by no means a majority LP, but we are a very significant one in -- for our fund partners. As I said, about 2,300 companies where we have an average 0.3% of indirect equity stake. So the way we compute this is just by looking at the average stake from our GP partners and we compute that with our LP stake in those funds and it's about 0.3% out of 2,300 companies. If we look at the amount of money invested in those companies, it's between GBP 40,000 and GBP 45,000. So really the seed strategy of Molten is indirect through partners where we have exposure to more than 2,300 companies where we have on average 0.3% of equity and GBP 40,000 to GBP 50,000 placed. We've deployed GBP 91 million out of this GBP 153 million total commitment so it's about 60%. So the fund is almost more than halfway there. And what it has created, and we will go back to that a bit later, is a deployment opportunity of an additional GBP 130 million in the champions that are coming from the program. So that's it for the big picture. Now I would like to talk to you a bit more about the strategy and how we run that fund. The program is truly European. So our ambition is to cover the European market maps from the Nordics to the Iberian Peninsula. And what we're doing here is really a good underground kind of approach because we believe seed is highly localized and that there is real edge to be on the ground, to speak the language, to share the cultural fit and be part of the local ecosystem to really unlock the best transactions. And so here it's really picking the best fund managers in their own region. I will not go through all of them because there are 66 fund managers, but I can give you a few examples. I mean the very good people that we have on the panel today. For instance if you take the U.K., obviously Episode 1 was one of our first investments, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, you will hear from Tom a bit later today as well. In France, we have backed Partech, we have backed Headline and Frst. If you look at the Nordics for instance, you might recognize a few of those names. Norrsken obviously, which is a more thematic fund, will go back to that; SNÖ who is covering Norway, Icebreaker and Inventure are collectively covering Finland and Sweden. Change Ventures is a Baltic fund. And we also have a very good coverage of the DACH or German-speaking market between Earlybird, between La Famiglia who actually recently has been sold, SpeedInvest or Join Capital. The last thing that I would like to mention although the program is truly European, we have a few U.S. funds in this and we don't mind investing in U.S. funds as long as more than 40% to 50% of the focus is European and that's exactly what those 3 partners, LDV and Atelier and Boost are doing. The other pillar of the strategy is really thematic. So here we're almost looking at this as a periscope on innovation. We know disruption happens very fast with technology and we are just here basically trying to identify the trends, the sectors that will produce category-defining companies in 4 or 5 years. And when we started for instance to back the first impact funds at a time where impact was not really a thing, FTC Capital for instance, when Sofia was raising her first fund, she was telling me how weird it was the fact that the market didn't believe that impact investments could be also profitable and nobody was really interesting in backing that asset class back then in 2018. So obviously today it's becoming a real trend. And we're trying to be at the forefront of those trends. I could say the same thing about food tech and agri tech. We backed Five Seasons Ventures based in Paris, which is a highly specialized fund in everything that is food and agri tech. Obviously if you take the impact bucket, Norrsken was the recent addition to our fund. And Agate will talk a bit about the fund later. But we have other cases. For instance, Ledger Cathay is a fund focusing only on blockchain and cryptos technologies. Deep tech way back to Boost, Adara and IQ Capital really looking at companies -- frontier technology companies that are changing the world. So this gives you a bit of a context of the ecosystem. Strategy is really twofold. One, it's local capital; two, its thematic approach and really trying to get this periscope on innovation as I mentioned. When you look at what we see in the deal flow, I think after 7 years building the brand, it's fair to say that we have good exposure to the overall fund of fund deal flow and we receive and review every quarter between 25 and 40 projects. Our conversion rate is about 17%. So we're still very much in the business of saying no. But we say yes a bit more often than on the direct side of things and I think that trend will continue going forward as many more new fund managers are coming to the market. When it comes to companies because this is about entrepreneurs first and foremost of course, it's about our GP partners, but it's mainly about the people that will need the capital. You can see here the evolution of the number of companies in the program, which are today in excess of 2,300 that I mentioned, unique companies. We will see later that we have about 150 cross holdings so companies that are sitting between different funds. And those companies since 2017 have raised about GBP 60 billion of capital and GBP 3 billion from the fund in our program. This is another interesting analysis. This is about the typology of those funds. And the first thing that I would like to say here is that we are clearly and obviously building an early-stage program focusing mainly on pre-Series A. But as I said on some occasions, we could go off this especially with the thematic funds who may have a strategy to invest in occasional Series A or B. But the bottom line is that 2/3 of the companies in the program are pre-seed and seed. When it comes to geo, I think we can see a pretty similar picture in the broader market with more than 50% of the investments are France, U.K. and Germany and the rest is equally spread and balanced between the rest of Europe, the Nordics, Spain and the Benelux. I think what is more interesting is the sector deployment. So clearly what we're seeing here is that software innovation is continuing to shape the way we live and work and 2/3 of our funds have a software exposure. And despite funding challenges over the last few years and Dave will talk about that, I think it's pretty clear that technology developments especially in AI are continuing to drive automation and cost savings. And the other thing that is happening is that we have an amazing pool of engineering talent right now ready to tackle the big issue. So this coupled with AI is really offering, in my opinion, a great opportunity to create the next global leaders actually in quite a record time. Mainly software, consumer tech and impact are making the rest. And we're not shying away from doing those sectors which are usually underlooked by venture capitalists such as hardware for instance and you can see that also in that category AI, deep tech and hardware. The last thing that I want to talk to you about is I mentioned that at the very beginning, this program has created almost a ratio of 1:1 between capital committed to the funds and deployment opportunities in the companies that are coming from the fund and I would like to give you a few examples. I think you had the pleasure to see Fintech OS presenting at the last IMC. Fintech OS is a low-code banking and financial service platform and what they're trying to do, their mission is to make fintech innovation available to basically every company. This is a deal that was sourced from our partner, Earlybird Digital East that we completed in March 2021 and here we raised the Series B. I'm not going to go through all of them. There are a few very interesting names here, but perhaps speak on causaLens, causaLens is a very interesting example because we actually saw the company early on. It was way too early for us. We sent it to our fund partners IQ Capital and we did the Series A when the company came back to us because at that point it had the scale and the shape that we needed to consider investment. It's a very interesting company in the field of Causal AI. Causal AI basically understands the cause and FX relationships. It empowers AI systems to reason about why certain events occur and how they impact other variables. Material Exchange is another very interesting example here because it came from 3 different funds so the signaling here was very strong. And what the company is doing is basically transforming the way the fashion industry sources materials and product and making the process more efficient, more transparent and more sustainable. And lastly, 2 recent deals we did Oliva Health and Binalyze, which were the 2 recent additions to the program. So the last slide that I want to talk about is sometimes it's very tricky to get access to rounds which are oversubscribed where access is very restricted usually led by large U.S. firms. So here we use our access and our GP's access to participate in those rounds and there are a few companies here that I think are worth mentioning. The first is Sorare. It's a global fantasy football game that basically combines the excitement of football with the power of blockchain technology. That company raised a massive EUR 400 million round at EUR 3.6 billion valuation about 2.5 years ago and we had the opportunity to invest EUR 10 million in that round. Choco is another good example because the company recently raised actually EUR 110 million round at a EUR 1.2 billion valuation. This is all public information. We invested about 2.5 years ago at a EUR 500 million valuation, a EUR 6.6 million investment check. Pigment is another one that raised around last month's $145 million. It's a Paris-based startup that is trying to replace Excel for large companies. Very, very big vision here and basically what they're doing is they offer this business platform that allows CFO and finance directors to visualize past financial performance and forecast upcoming quarter. It's a fascinating business that I think has a lot of -- will have a lot of success going forward. So that's it for me. Thank you very much for listening and I will hand it over to Dave now. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. Thank you very much, Jonathan. Appreciate the introduction. My name is Dave. I work with Jonathan and the Fund of Funds team. Apart from the privilege of getting to meet some of the best investors in European venture capital and working on some amazing deals, a big initiative that I've had in the past few years has been making sure that we're getting access to and leveraging the most of the data we receive from our Fund of Funds. And the level of insights we now possess is incredibly powerful and I'm happy to share a little bit of that with you today. So what I thought about was creating 4 main topics to cover. First topic is the valuation of quality assets are picking up. Second, larger rounds are starting to happen again after quite a slow 2022 for these growth rounds. Third, through investing in these amazing and what we consider to be amongst the best of the European early-stage investors, we are indirectly invested in some of Europe's category leaders which we're quite excited about. And lastly, the way in which we're using data and which I'll try my best to make you all very excited about is extremely unique to the market and allows us the opportunity to access these promising future European winners today. So let's see. So the first one that I wanted to share was foundations are solid. What we have here is an overall understanding on valuations. In pink, we have the median entry valuation that is the valuation in which our early-stage VC managers are acquiring a stake in the seed stage companies for. And we see across time this kind of stabilizes for a median of GBP 8 million to GBP 8.5 million. That's what we find is the seed stage. Of course this is deal by deal, sector by sector, geography differentiates. But what I wanted to show is the blue line, it just tracks companies across time and how they progress and how their valuations progress after that entry point. And we see here an overall growth and growth indeed actually at 25% CAGR. And what that means is that companies are growing valuation by creating a product or a service or IP for their clients, their customers and these quality assets are continuing to grow their valuations, right? What's interesting is that as of today, the overall median valuation of the portfolio sits at just about GBP 14.5 million, which is 1.6x that entry valuation. That has been already in only a few quarters 1.6x of value created by these companies. I just want to address the kind of dip towards the end of the blue line. It's not because valuations have gone down slightly, but it's just because a lot of the funds that we have backed are still within their investment period, which means that there are a lot of new companies in our portfolio quarter-on-quarter. And as we see from the pink line, the overall new deals are getting done at a valuation that is lower than this growth and that's why we have this dip. In terms of the second point is, as Jonathan mentioned, we have over 2,300 unique companies within our portfolio and across 2023, we have seen over 900 deals across these companies, 928 deals to be precise and GBP 7.7 billion that have been invested in our Fund of Funds companies. And on the right what we have here are a few examples of these larger rounds. What we call larger rounds are north of GBP 70 million and what we see is that there is an appetite for quality of assets. And across 2023, we have seen a few of those. I just want to make sure that we are pointing out that the number of the array of different funds that are having their portfolio companies raising these large rounds, but also a few M&A activities that happen across 2023 within our Fund of Funds portfolio. Caption Care is a company that detects early signs of heart risks. That's a company that was backed by LDV Capital. It was acquired by GE HealthCare for GBP 122 million. Not on this list, but we have yfood, which is a company that creates ready-to-drink meals. It was acquired by Nestle for GBP 318 million and it was a company back in the early stages by Five Seasons. Now before jumping on to the third point, I just want to show you this graph which gives us a very good and unique visibility of these companies across stages. Again what we've done is we put these 2,300 companies that we have and across different valuation brackets. So what we have here is a lot of companies that are still in the early stages. We have some companies that have received recently their seed round or growing after their seed round. As we mentioned, a lot of the funds that we back there still within their investment period. But we also have companies that are towards the later stage that are just going to be more mature. And as a matter of fact, 14 companies of our portfolio are already valued north of $1 billion as of today. But it just goes to show that these companies are growing and attracting capital as they represent quality European assets. And now for the third point, I just want to draw your attention to the right side of the previous graph. Through our program, we have exposure to many of the best European startups. We have 375 companies that are valued as of today more than GBP 30 million. These companies sit at a perfect position for growth rounds and it also shows that they are on path to becoming targets of M&A activity, private equity buyouts or even who knows, on the eventual journey for an IPO. And some of these companies have gone to become household names and you might be familiar with some of these later stage developed companies. A few examples include Mistral, we have here on the left-hand side. Mistral is one of the European leaders in AI. They are training large generative models based in France. Mistral raised $600 million of Series B at a $6 billion valuation, which was led by DST. Now Mistral has been a part of our portfolio since its early days. They were invested by Headline and La Famiglia since their seed round. And we have here on the right-hand side, Oyster. Oyster is a global HR tech company focusing on making cross-border hiring and scaling significantly easier. Oyster raised $150 million Series C at north of $1 billion valuation, which was led by Georgian, Salesforce Ventures, LinkedIn and other investors. Again Oyster is a very good example of a company that has been part of the Fund of Funds family since its beginning. Its seed round was led by Connect Ventures, another fund that we've backed. And for the last piece of thought is there are a handful of funds that get to see what we see through the use of data allowing us to become the benchmark of European seed. Many VC firms use data platforms to augment their market knowledge, but even this combination does not come close to what the Fund of Funds data can show us. Because of this, we are getting visibility on tomorrow's winners today. So we have 737 companies as of today that are valued between GBP 5 million to GBP 30 million. These companies are perfectly positioned for a Series A, Series B, which is precisely [indiscernible] more when sourcing investment opportunities. Now Jonathan has already touched on few examples, but we have already invested in a few companies coming out of these relationships and insights provided by the Fund of Funds. But just to highlight a few more. We have on the -- let's see if it changes. The left hand side we have Pigment, which is a planning and forecasting platform for fast growth companies. Molten has participated in the $73 million Series B led by Greenoaks. Molten invested EUR 3.9 million in the round. And lately, Pigment has raised $145 million Series D, which was led by ICONIQ Growth. Again this company was invested [indiscernible] which is a fund that we've backed in the Molten Fund of Funds since its beginning. And on the right-hand side, we have Manna. Manna is a drone delivery company providing access of food and products to more suburban areas. Molten has led Manna's last round, which was a $25 million Series A. Again Manna has been a part of Tapestry and our partner since the beginning and we have had the privilege to lead their Series A round. And now I'll pass it on to Moh to speak with our panel, which includes some of great European fund managers backed by Molten. Thank you.

Amazing. Thank you, Dave. If I could ask our panelists to join us, that would be wonderful. Great. So hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to our panel on the value of LPs in the early-stage ecosystem. Super thrilled to have you join us today. I think we have everyone on now. My name is Mohadeseh and I work with the Molten Fund of Funds team. We are very lucky to have 3 of our wonderful GPs with us today; Tom, Agate and Adrian; offering a wide perspective across the seed and pre-seed ecosystem. We would love to use this opportunity to bring to life why it's been so great for us to build the Fund of Funds strategy, but also hear it through the perspective of our GPs that we backed firsthand. So let's get right to it. I'd love to begin by asking everyone to do quick intros. Maybe we can start with Adrian. Could you please tell us who you are, which fund you're from and what you invest in?

Of course. Adrian Lloyd so Episode 1. We're a seed stage fund naturally formed in 2013. We still think of ourselves as a startup, always innovating. We've been backed by Molten twice in Fund II and Fund II. The strategy of the fund is to focus mostly on U.K. based B2B enterprise software businesses with a fairly strong kind of technical bent So we are generalists, but we tend to focus on tech, defensibility, deep tech, quite a lot of infrastructure. 2 of my partners have PhDs in AI, 1 worked at Cisco for 15 years, all operators turned investors; and we invest through 2 stages in our current fund GBP 76 million, of which Molten did GBP 2 million. We've invested in 20 companies so far. We have kind of 2 strands to our strategy. One is what we call a pre-seed and our terminology is signal check where we'll buy between 5% and 10% of the business either if it's a new sector to us or it's a deeply competitive deal where we can only get a smaller check. But our core strategy, which is called core, tends to buy 15% to 20% of a business, which will buy us 15% to 20% of that company because although we all want to back companies exit for billions, most companies exit for GBP 100 million to GBP 500 million so you want as much of that as you can get. And thrilled to be partnered with Molten who can support us through all of those stages.

Thanks, Adrian. Maybe we can move to Agate.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for having me. I'm one of the founding partners at Norrsken VC and our history is that we started 7 years ago and today have become one of the biggest if not the biggest early-stage impact investor. Our fundamental belief is that it's going to be down to the entrepreneurs to solve some of the world's biggest problems and that's exactly why we want to back them. So the fund's investment thesis is really based on 2 things. One, we think we need these entrepreneurs and we need to do everything we can to enable them so that they can go and address some of the biggest challenges. But two, we also think that these are at the moment the most exciting and best investment opportunities. To us, it's very simple. We believe that impact investing today means alpha turns and outperformance very much related to what Jonathan was saying earlier today. I remember 7 years ago when we tried to raise our very, very first fund; to be very frank, it wasn't easy. People still didn't believe that you can truly combine impact and positive investment returns that have still top quartile investment returns. That's very different today. Very happy to also share that we just closed our latest fund that Molten came into and that was heavily oversubscribed by different institutional investors. So I think we've benefited. We've come a long way. We have a lot more to prove. Today have 3 unicorns in the portfolio where we have proven that you can combine sort of exciting investment themes or positive impact with returns. But also the market has grown a lot both from an LP perspective, but also from the underlying opportunities in the market. And very happy to have Molten on board. And I think the history of how we got there was that I think we kept on bumping into Molten's direct team. So we have quite a few companies where we both sit on the investor cap table. So it was sort of sooner or later, it also made sense for the Fund of Funds team to join and we've really enjoyed working with the entire team.

Amazing. Thank you. And Tom?

Good morning, everyone. I'm Tom Wilson, I'm a partner at Seedcamp. Seedcamp, we've been going almost 17 years now so we started in 2007. At the time there wasn't really much kind of investing at this earlier stage that we continue to focus on in Europe and one of my partners, Reshma, who's still a partner with the firm, co-financed Seedcamp back then. Fast forward to today, our portfolio now is over 500 companies that we've invested in. We're currently investing out of our sixth fund. The core focus has remained very, very similar. The fund has increased in size due to the fact that, and I think some of the data which was referenced earlier, the seed landscape has changed a lot since 2007. I've been with the fund for 10 years joining when we raised our first institutional fund in 2014. Funds I and II were very, very small investments like investment clubs. As I said, the strategy is that we invest pan-European. So whilst our office is in London, we invest all across Europe including Israel. We do have the ability to invest in the U.S., but the focus is very, very much on finding those European founders building global businesses. We are sector-agnostic so we invest across a wide variety of sectors. So a little bit different from how Adrian described and how Agate described their strategies, but we are incredibly focused on stage. So every single investment that we've made at Seedcamp has always been pre-Series A so majority are the kind of pre-seed or the seed stage and we are happy to lead those investments out of our current fund, which is $180 million fund that we raised a little over a year ago. Our kind of average check size is around about $700,000 and we lead generally about 60% of the investments that we make where we act as lead investor. And the slight difference with our kind of portfolio construction maybe versus some other seed funds, which we can come on to, is that we build slightly bigger portfolios. So each of the funds that we've invested is roughly around about 100 companies. So we'll make 30 to 35 new investments per year. We've been incredibly proud to have backed some amazing companies at the earlier stages, 2 of which are now public companies in UiPath, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Wise, which is listed in London and a number of the companies which have passed $1 billion private market valuations, 2 of which I think Jonathan mentioned or was also mentioned also in the deep dive on data earlier, Sorare and Synthesia. Yes, that's probably all I can say for us on that. Happy to obviously go into anything more in the panel.

That's great. Also it's so great to see how the strategies are highlighting the thematic and local perspective of sort of what we're trying to achieve with the Fund of Funds. Thank you. Just to begin with limited partners or LPs that we're going to call it through the discussion come in a variety of strategies and as Jonathan highlighted at the start, our Molten LP mission is to really tap into that and support that unaddressed underfunded early-stage ecosystem and during our journey be able to sort of back the best later stage businesses and founders. So maybe through your perspective and experiences as GPs of venture funds, how do you think about LPs? What do you look for in LP? And maybe more specifically, what quality sets apart the venture Fund of Fund LP to the traditional ones that you might be working with? Maybe we can start with Tom. I guess Tom, you've seen multiple vintages across the 6 months. How do you see it over at Seedcamp?

Yes. So I mean it's interesting because obviously our relationship with Molten runs very deep and it's a very kind of a cherished relationship as an LP. As was I think discussed in some of the slides earlier, Molten purchased LP interest from our Funds I and II, have recently done a transaction where they've become an LP in Fund III and have been a direct LP for I think IV through VI. So it's a deep relationship and so I think that some of the things that I think really work well when it's a kind of fund of funds approach is the ability to be able to move quite flexibly and have different ways that they can support the GPs in our case through different types of structures. So obviously buying LP stakes to get access or even, which again was I think alluded to in the presentation earlier, supporting us through SPVs. So for us obviously it's very early-stage funds, particularly with Funds III and IV, which were 2014 and 2017 vintages and not huge funds. Fund III, which was the fund which had UiPath and Revolut and a number of our amazing assets in was a relatively small fund of EUR 20 million. So I think the way that we've worked with innovative LPs such as Molten is that they can step in and support us to be able to continue to invest in companies through SPVs or through other structures, which are very flexible. That's not something that every LP can do because not every LP has kind of the institutional setup to be able to do that. So that's hugely powerful as a GP because it's being able to have LPs across your LP base who you know and who you trust and who you've worked with before because those transactions come together really, really quickly. So that's been a huge value for us working with VC Fund of Funds, but particularly with Molten in that case.

Makes a lot of sense. And Agate, you guys have a very strong platform approach when it comes to Norrsken. How do you think about LPs on your side?

We generally think that it's very, very important to have a very diversified LP base. Of course large top-tier institutional investors, but at the same time we also see huge value-add in having investors like Molten even though they're on the smaller side in terms of investment checks. And it's really -- I would say that it's exactly the same for us when we invest in businesses and founders. You really want to be that investor that gets the late-night call from the founder just because you are the approachable investor in the Board or the approachable investor on the cap table. And I sort of think the same way about Molten Ventures and also the LP diversity that yes, you need the big checks on the very serious LPs. But that's probably not going to be the first call that you're going to make if you're going through some kind of dilemma or where you really, really need input. And for us, Team Molten is that one investor that very clearly knows what good looks like because of the size of the portfolio and a lot of lessons learned along the way. So we know that we can always call you and ask you like hey, you must have seen this in other funds before. How should we handle this sort of situation? And I think it's really, really important and I wouldn't ever underestimate kind of just the importance of having a couple of those friendly LPs on board that are ready to take that call when you're going through some dilemmas.

Yes, we love that. We love the idea of being able to sort of pick up the phone to each other because at the end of the day we're VCs ourselves and we're looking at deals and looking at markets the same way. So we'd love to hear that. And maybe Adrian, how about you? What are your thoughts from the Episode 1 side?

So our LP base today is about 50 entrepreneurs who've invested into us, about 50 family offices and about between half a dozen and a dozen kind of bigger institutions within which Molten falls. And as Agate said, the diversity is very helpful because everyone brings something different. With Molten, it's a very close relationship as well in a different way to Tom's. You sit on our LPAC, which is like the equivalent to our Board. For those who don't know what LPAC stands for, it's the LP Advisory Committee. So you're part of our kind of strategic thinking and because of the breadth of your knowledge and relationships with funds and as investors yourselves, you know an awful lot about what's going on. You've seen everything not once, but probably a dozen times that can happen to a fund or underlying portfolio companies and that's invaluable, it's hugely helpful. What's also important is you're all a bunch of very nice people. So we like spending time with you all and it's really meaningful. These relationships go on for a long, long time, longer than anyone wants them to. We want to invest and exit our companies in 5 to 10 years, but it rarely happens because the most valuable companies, they keep growing. And in today's market where there's so much private capital, they can continue to grow privately. So the relationship goes on for a long, long time. I mean it's like when we choose an entrepreneur to invest in, we want to know that we can manage that relationship for a long time. People use the equivalent of a marriage. It's the same with an LP. And having sophisticated LPs like Molten, who understand it's a long journey, just removes tension in the relationship which we have with some LPs who keep saying well, when's the next exit coming. We don't know when we're going to wait for the cycle to improve, when M&A improves. With you guys and more sophisticated Fund of Funds like you, there's that understanding and so it's more of a collaborative relationship rather than just a reporting one.