Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Community Updates Nov '24
Our Community & Fund update, with fresh fund highlights, community events, and deeptech market insights. Written by our AI. Edited by our humans.
In this edition
Upcoming Events: Join us in Milan for our LP dinner in February, and catch highlights from Slush 2024 in Helsinki.
Deeptech Demo Day 2024: Meet the winner, runner-ups, and finalists driving innovation in HPC, cell therapy, and oncology.
The Deeptech Lowdown: Lessons from Europe’s faltering unicorns and the question of scaling abroad.
Personal GP Reflections: A dinner with Hippos Exoskeleton’s founders and the magic of underdog stories.
A reminder of what we are about
Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.
The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.
📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates
LP Dinner - Milan 🍽️
We’re working to organise an LP dinner in the 1st week of February in Milan. If you’re interested, or in the area, let us know!
Slush
Ralph and Francesco attended Slush in Helsinki, joining over 13,000 founders and investors at one of Europe's best startup events.
Key Highlights:
Supporting Our Portfolio: Secured numerous leads to benefit our portfolio companies.
Community Growth: Laid the groundwork for expanding our deeptech community in 2025.
Side Events: Hosted a private breakfast with leading tech and data-driven VC funds and LPs.
We Have a Winner: Deeptech Demo Day 2024 🎉
The competition was fierce, with two runner-ups tying for second place, and VCs already making 40+ intro requests to finalists within hours of the event!
🥇 Winner: Finchetto (Mark Rushworth)
Developing the world’s first fully-optical, passive network switch for extreme performance in HPC and AI.
🥈 Runners-up:
Sarcura (Daniela Buchmayr): Revolutionizing cell therapy manufacturing with silicon chip technology, making treatments 100x more scalable and 10x cheaper.
Glyconix (Marcos Burger Ramos, Sophie James): Using ML to transform Nobel-winning tools into immunotherapy-enabling oncology drugs.
👏 Finalists (in no particular order):
Xterna (Jessica Corry), TissueLabs (Felipe chippari, Gabriel Liguori, MD, PhD), Stars Edge (Sara Alão), HHC medical (Niels Clausen), SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH (Christian Eichhorn), Energy Robotics (Marc Dassler), Nanusens (Pau Fernandez Guirao, Dr. Josep Montanyà i Silvestre) , Allos AI (Aditya Varna Iyer)
Markups
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Performance Snapshot
Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.
Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.
Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1
Vintage: 2023
New investments since last update: 1
Total Portfolio Companies: 11
Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 3
Key Deeptech Areas: Computing, Climate, and National Security Infrastructure
Status: closed
Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)
Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
First closing: Dec 2022
TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs
Vintage: 2020 (H2)
Investments: 15
TVPI: 1.5X
DPI: n/a
Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai
Status: closed
Community “Virtual” Portfolio
Vintage: 2016
Companies considered: 26
Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity
Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on
Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X
Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X
Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ
Portfolio
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]* is a snapshot of the current portfolio.
*Link to a private Airtable base with a list of all portfolio companies and include the company’s name, short description, why we invested, URL, and category.
Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.
➕ New Additions
No new additions in November, but we are screening through at least 8 good opportunities that may turn into at least 2-4 cheques, while we are finally closing on one that we committed to a few months back and was very slow at going through legals.
💸 Co-Investment Opportunities
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
🚀 Portfolio Updates
Anaphite
Anaphite was awarded "Most Promising Start-up" at the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK TDAP Wave 7 Demo Day, recognising their progress in scaling Dry Coating Precursor technology over the past 18 months.
Nu Quantum
Nu Quantum attended the Optica Quantum Industry Summit 2024 in Bristol, with Senior Quantum Theorist Alex Moylett and Senior Photonics Engineer Alberto Santamato representing the team. Discussions centered on scaling quantum computing through networks, the necessity of cross-industry collaboration, and the ongoing climb towards quantum utility.
Finchetto
Fresh off winning Deeptech Demo Day, Finchetto was also named ‘Hottest European Pre-Seed Start-up’ at The Europas Awards in Lisbon, selected from 100 finalists.
Panakeia
Panakeia celebrates six years of innovation, with key milestones including a platform for multi-omic biomarker identification across 30+ cancer types, deployment of approved clinical products in UK hospitals, and the growth of a world-class research team driving precision healthcare.
The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)
Three Deeptech Unicorns in Trouble: A Wake-Up Call for Europe
The struggles of Northvolt, Lilium, and Graphcore this year are no coincidence. Each tells a deeper story about the challenges facing European deeptech.
It’s not about government intervention. Public funding won’t solve structural issues in a capitalist market. Expecting governments to act as babysitters for deeptech scale-ups is unrealistic.
Capital isn’t always the problem. Northvolt raised $15B from global investors, yet production issues left them at just 1% of capacity. Lilium and Graphcore, backed by world-class investors like Sequoia, also faltered. The capital existed, but execution and scaling in Europe may have hit systemic roadblocks.
Founder quality isn’t to blame. These founders were proven operators with past successes. Their struggles highlight broader industry and operational challenges, not individual failures.
The Real Question: Should European deeptech founders raise seed funding here but scale operations in the US?
The answer isn’t simple, but it’s a critical question as Europe risks falling further behind in nurturing its own global tech champions. What’s next for Europe’s deeptech playbook?
Asks & Portfolio Roles 🙏
Archangel Lightworks are hiring for multiple positions in Oxford including Embedded Software Engineers, Cloud Engineers, and Optical Systems Engineers.
GP Personal Updates
I just shared a home made chinese meal with burgers on the side cooked by the founders from our most recent investment ─the angel round we led last month in Hippos Exoskeleton, now announced on TechCrunch.
Lovely dinner that casually grouped together 2 unicorn founders and various active angel investors, 1 of our LPs also an angel (big shout out to our superstar Mark!), 2 emerging managers and the never-stopping hustlers behind Hippos.
I was sitting on the very university dorm sofa where I had ultimately decided to back these guys.
The evening made me reflect on how magic of tech and VC is rooted in how they can weave together stories of craziness and passion from across the globe 🌍
All 5 continents represented somehow, either by birth, residence, or company jurisdiction.
Sometimes the best way for founders to advance is just to bring truly exceptional people together and lean on their network of supporters as it grows.
Kylin and Bhavy prove that you can do it in practice even by just by whatsapping your backers to arrange a dinner ─and folks may just as well fly in from across the world to meet up.
True, these two nutters are probably the most impressive hustlers I ever met, as I wrote on linkedin. But the most striking fact that the dinner reminded me of, with fellow investors also coming from the most disparate backgrounds, is that underdogs often win.
The Hippos duo for example met in London, Europe, coming from China and India and touching the US where they are already expanding as a business.
Amongst the investors, those that made their investment wealth through entrepreneurship also travelled across the globe or across industries to build their businesses.
When these things happen I'm really reminded of the stats uncovered by The “Unicorn Founder DNA Report” by Defiance Capital: Immigrants built 62% of U.S. and UK “unicorns”. 70% of U.S. and UK unicorns have “underdog founders” such as women and people of colour.
So while I’m not only investing in immigrant founders, the truth is that seeing how far some people go (physically or career-wise) and what big risks they take to pursue their goals is definitely a main trait I am looking for when deciding to write a cheque.
For now the payoff was lovely Asian home made food and inspiring company. Let’s see in 10 years.