Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Community Updates May '24
Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Community Updates May '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
Fund Rundown: Overview of our current portfolio, performance metrics, and upcoming pipeline.
London Tech Week Deep Tech Showcase 2024: Join us on June 13th at 5pm for an exciting showcase of real hardware and deeptech startups, featuring investment decision makers, co-investors, and technical founders.
SRV in Berlin Recap: Highlights from our participation in TOA, Super Venture, and the Techno-VC conference! (Plus actionable tips for you to smash it at conferences like we did, right at the end)
A reminder of what we are about
Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a Super-Angel 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
London Tech Week Deep Tech Showcase 2024
📆 June 13th @ 5pm
📣 Want to meet investment decision makers, co-investors, and amazing technical founders from pre-seed to Series A?
🥱 Tired of boring main stage panels from corporations?
👩🔬 Want to see real hardware and deeptech startups bringing along physical world-changing technology in computing, climate, resilience and medicine?
RSVP HERE for the LTW edition of the Silicon Roundabout Ventures + Frontier Deep Tech meetup!
From our community this month:
✈️ SRV in Berlin - TOA, Super Venture, and Techno-VC Recap
The Silicon Roundabout team was in Berlin from the 4th-7th of June.
On June 5th, the who’s who of Tech and Data in VC gathered at the Redstone VC Office for a conference focused on integrating technology into VC practices.
The event explored data-driven investing and tech based operational enhancements with two main panels ‘Building a Product Driven VC from the ground up’, and ‘Imagining the Next Decade: Data & Tech in VC Evolution’.
Big thanks to all our guests and speakers: Dr. Andre Retterath (Earlybird Venture Capital), Mike Arpaia (Moonfire), Dave Neumann (Molten Ventures), James Heath (dara5), Anastasia Gonotskaya (Redstone), Sarah Guemouri (Atomico), Stéphane Nasser (OpenVC), Maciek Laskus (Borg), Silvian Rath and Michael Mansfield
Great takeaways here from Andre
Francesco also moderated a panel on Deeptech at TOA, and also participated in a panel titled ‘Micro VC: The heterodox funds’ at Super Venture.
LP/GP Deep Tech Dinner Highlights
Our LP/GP Funding Deep Tech dinner last Wednesday was a blast! We enjoyed an incredible evening at Quaglino's in London.
The focus was on Family Offices, FoFs, and HNW LPs interested in funding the deep tech revolution in Europe, with insights from four handpicked VCs on the high-tech startup scene. The night was filled with shared experiences, laughs, and memorable "fun facts."
If you're a Limited Partner, Family Office investor, or General Partner in deep tech and would like to join us next time, sign up here.
Fund rundown
New investments since last update: 0
Total Portfolio Companies: 8
Fund: 1
Vintage: 2023
Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 5
Key Deeptech Areas: Computing, Climate, and National Security Infrastructure
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
Status: Open for new LPs (via equalisation)
Fund Target Size: £5M
Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
First closing: Dec 2022
TVPI: n/a
DPI: n/a
Net IRR: n/a
MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Most Valuable Positions: n/a
Investments: 8
Target Pipeline Closing soon: 5
GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs
Vintage: 2020 (H2)
Investments: 15
TVPI: 1.2X
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.
➕ New Additions
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Co-investment Opportunities
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
🚀 Portfolio Updates
Greenjets
Greenjets engines are now officially deployed in Ukraine, and thanks to a recent change in the UK legislation, they are now able to deal directly with the Ukrainian forces, without going through UK based primes. The opportunity is huge for both live flight testing in critical situations and revenue potential for the upcoming years.
Archangel Lightworks
Archangel Lightworks opened their new laser communications facility in Oxford.
The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)
Deeptech is booming in Europe, even as overall startup fundraising has declined. Around half of these fastest growing startups in France are deeptech. This highlights the resilience and dynamism of deep tech in Europe - long may it continue.
This article discusses the growing interest of VC in defence technology, especially dual use - tech that serves both military and commercial purposes. Despite an enthusiasm for defence tech's potential, there's a prevailing resistance among VCs to fund technologies that could be used offensively.
Tech Updates
As we’ve focused on closing Fund 1, we’ve been pondering how to keep our conversations with prospective LPs as effective and valuable as possible.
How do we quickly ensure that there’s a match on thesis between us and the LP, before spending a lot of time? Directly asking is the obvious answer, but doesn’t always work..!
Public information on what LPs are actually looking for is disparate, but a simple way to get a bearing is to see the LPs previous investments. To that end, we’ve worked on a small ML pipeline (as part of Joi, our internal system) that:
Programatically collects LP6 forms from Companies House from a subset of interesting funds, with a relevant thesis;
Machine reads those documents, and extracts relevant entities (People, Organisations) that are LPs;
Enriches that with public information, and uses a sprinkling of LLM magic to match directly with our thesis at Silicon Roundabout Ventures.
So far, we’ve tested with just a small amount of data, but the results are interesting, and give us a great opportunity to dig out LPs that are interested in Deeptech and get in front of them.
GP Personal Updates
We delayed this edition by a week as we prepared for and then attended SuperVenture and TOA in Berlin. This was the first time our Venture Partner and CTO Ralph joined me on a full out conference and we openly talked about our tech and data driven strategy at our very own Side Event.
After “crashing” 2 editions where I felt like a biblical Moses (”thou shalt go to the promised land but shalt not enter” kind of thing), this year we jumped in to play like a main-stage protagonist…
And managed to succeed at doing so despite possibly having the smallest AUM of all managers around!
Let me tell you how we did it.
We scored 3 main wins: 1) actually closed LPs, 2) received genuine support from fellow GPs who’ve been in the industry for a long time, and 3) established ourselves as a brand to be reckoned with in our 3 key areas, i.e. deeptech, emerging VCs, and data-driven VC.
How did we do it on a non-existing budget?
We leveraged our community-building expertise!
Here 3 practical tips for you if you are interested in copying our strategy (btw you can just email back if you’d like to bounce ideas, happy to help):
Side event partnerships. We teamed up with a local (much bigger) VC and a data platform to organise our own side event and take centre stage in the week lineup. By inviting top speakers on both GP and LP side for the topic we ensured both great value for attendees (people loved it) and a massive brand return for us.
Preparation for a speaking slot. I prepared a speaker bio page on my website with past gigs and spoke to previous speakers to push it to the SV organisers. This was a long shot for a microVC but thanks to Greg from Blue Future Partners and Farhan at LTV, I managed to have our message heard on SuperVenture main stage too (and for what we gathered it also resonated well with the audience!).
Building an open community to share info. Finding and sharing the best events can be a daunting task at large conferences. Especially when you are a newcomer hustler looking to break in. I figured this would be a situation shared by many, so I launched a Whatsapp group with fellow GP Paolo Pio and made a google sheet with all the events I knew of, but also leaving it open for others to add intel as they pleased. The result? Over 200 GPs and LPs sharing info live and on the sheet, with some even managing to get into the super secretive Hedosophia and newspaper Sifted taking note of the community!
So there you have it. Greetings from London as we return home from a major win in Berlin :) I hope you get some inspiration if you are looking to maximise events attendance through some community strategies. Francesco.