Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Community Updates July '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
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: We hit our target of £5 million in commitments! We are now wrapping up the legals for fund. See more info on where we go from here on the GP Personal Update at the end of the newsletter.
Note: Francesco will email all the existing fund LPs directly to finalise commitments before the fund is fully closed. Some LPs have indicated they would like to increase the total commitment now that the target has been hit and now that markups are coming in ─which won’t be possible after the final closing is officially ended. [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Fund Rundown: Overview of our current portfolio, performance metrics, and upcoming pipeline
New Addition: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Upcoming Events: Join us at the LP & FO Dinner during Italian Tech Week on September 25th, and stay tuned for Deeptech Demo Day 2024 in November.
Market Update: Highlights from Meta’s Llama 3.1 release, semiconductor scaling challenges, defence-tech news from the Ukrainian battlefield, and battery recycling innovations.
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
LP & FO Dinner at the Italian Tech Week
Strictly for LPs and FOs upon invitation by Silicon Roundabout Ventures and Exceptional Ventures.
If you are an active Family Office or LP not in the fund, but would like to join: please drop us an email.
Deeptech Demo Day 2024
We’re going to be running another Deeptech Demo Day in November this year. With our first sponsor already confirmed, we are now busy working out timing and set-up. Stay tuned for more info!
Fund rundown
New investments since last update: 1
Total Portfolio Companies: 9
Fund: 1
Vintage: 2023
Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 4
Key Deeptech Areas: Computing, Climate, and National Security Infrastructure
Markups
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]: 2.5X on our investment price.
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] 3X+ MOIC [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
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: 9
Target Pipeline Closing soon: 4
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.
➕ New Additions
In July we added a new portfolio company to our mix. This is still confidential, so don’t disclose it outside of the fund LPs:
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
Co-investment Opportunities
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] co-investment SPV is now being set up.
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
🚀 Portfolio Updates
Greenjets
Greenjets receives [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (so far!) as they showcase their Interceptor drone in partnership with Streakair. They were the only drone company to fly live at Farnborough International and demonstrating the fastest electric drone in the world.
Irrespective of the final composition, their next round is already oversubscribed and not all the VCs and investors now fighting to get in will have space. This is a nice validation for our co-investment strategy, whereby the LPs who entered the SPV [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] not only secured that allocation, but will enjoy a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] discount on the final valuation once the note converts.
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] has applied for several grants to accelerate the development of their first commercial paid trial. With a recent [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] markup on our investment, the founder and CEO is driving the company to become Europe's fastest [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].
The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)
Meta's Llama 3.1: A Leap Forward in Open Source AI
Meta's latest release, Llama 3.1 405B, marks a significant milestone in open-source AI. With a 128K context length and multilingual capabilities, it rivals top proprietary models. Why does this matter? Open-source LLMs like Llama 3.1 pave the way for creative innovation, enabling breakthroughs in areas such as synthetic data generation, model distillation, multi-lingual agents, the list goes on…
Minister Patrick Vallance highlights the importance of helping semiconductor startups to scale, to prevent innovative firms from being acquired too early. Recent government efforts aim to unlock pension fund investments, but more is needed to compete globally.
Deep tech funds like ours have a unique opportunity to back UK startups and reshape the semiconductor landscape.
As demand for lithium-ion batteries skyrockets, we need to pioneer more efficient ways to recycle them. Discover how a direct recycling approach preserves valuable materials, reduces carbon emissions, and offers a sustainable path forward for the industry.
Ukrainian forces have begun using explosive first-person-view (FPV) drones in new ways. This article explains the first confirmed shoot-down of a helicopter using these drones, highlighting their growing impact in conflicts. As these technologies evolve, they demonstrate the critical role of deep tech in enhancing military capabilities.
Asks 🙏
Archangel Lightworks are hiring for a Cloud Software Engineer and Embedded Software Engineer
GP Personal Updates
Catalina started walking, tentatively… and climbing. And so has the fund!
£5m closed and the fund target has now been hit. We will proceed to wrap up documents and legals shortly.
Thank you, dear LPs, some of whom I now consider business partners and friends: believers in the same dream that we build a leading firm to scout, partner with, and empower European founders to build the most titanic deeptech companies of this generation.
Thanks for all your support, without which this fundraise would have not been possible.
This fund, like Catalina, is now taking its real stand-up steps.
And just like my little one we are now enjoying the view after a arduous climb.
But as I said to the first LPAC after first closing, the end of one climb is just the beginning of another.
We’ve made two new commitments already, one as you saw has converted and one where we are awaiting legals. I will continue to work day and night in pursue of the best deeptech gems across the continent, whilst we sketch out early ideas on what a fund 2 will need to look like.
Meanwhile, besides enjoying Catalina’s future steps, I’ll be focusing the rest of the summer on reviewing our activities and optimising our work. From a proper push with Ralph on our tech, to the community work where I aim to strengthen the work initiated with Frontier Deep Tech, and just from an operational point of view, to make the best of our limited resources but still behave a bit more like a world-beating machine and a bit less like a crazy GP running around like a headless chicken.
In the meantime: cheers and a toast to us all.
Fund 1 ✅
PS: I will follow up individually with all the LPs to finalise the final commitment as this can’t be changed after final closing, and I know some of you have expressed the interest to increase the overall commitment and therefore exposure to both existing and future portfolio companies.