This news is a day or two late, but just to keep our readers updated we should write that Balderton Capital, one of Europe’s largest venture capital investors and behind breakthrough successes such as Betfair, Lovefilm, MySQL, NaturalMotion and Yoox, has announced yesterday the closing of its fifth European fund, raising a further $305 million and bringing its total funds to $2.2 billion to invest in European technology start-ups.
The announcement follows recent additions to the partnership of investors with strong operational backgrounds: Suranga Chandratillake, the founder of blinkx (IPO in 2012), and Daniel Waterhouse, formerly of Yahoo! and board member of EyeEm, Hailo and YPlan, joined the team in late 2013.
The fund was raised principally from existing limited partners as well as including new investor, the European Investment Fund, and it will aim to seize growing opportunities in the European technology sector.
Bernard Liautaud, General Partner at Balderton and founder of Business Objects, commented:
“Over the last few years, we have refined our investment focus to double down on European early stage start-ups. Some of our earlier funds have been a mixture of series A and later stage investment. As with our last fund, this one is focused on Series A, where we currently see the greatest opportunities in Europe. Our goal is to be the first venture fund with an international outlook to invest in a company. The team’s strong operational experience gives us the expertise to back founders early and help build companies, which is why we are willing to take the risks and work with entrepreneurs at this earlier stage.”
Balderton has been investing since 2000, when it was Benchmark Capital Europe, before rebranding in 2007. It has backed some of Europe’s best known tech companies and has had more exits above $250 million than nearly any other European venture investor.
