Houghton Street Ventures | August 2021 Newsletter
Hello once again from the Houghton Street Ventures team!
With restrictions lifting and summer pretending to arrive, we hope everyone has had the opportunity to find time to relax and catch up with friends and family. Although summer is in full swing at the LSE, the last few months have been busy at Houghton Street Ventures as we continue to support the LSE entrepreneurial community and move towards our first close.
In future editions of the newsletter, we will surface some of the data and insights which continue to amaze us as we dig deeper into our community and demonstrate why we are so excited to be supporting the LSE entrepreneur. These past two months, we have started to track an additional 8,000 ‘historical’ entrepreneurs, bringing our entrepreneurial community to well over 20,000. More big numbers below:
What's happening at Houghton Street Ventures:
We continue to be humbled by the interest in what we are doing. After working with prospective LSE Seed and Series A companies for the last 12 months, we're excited to hopefully be in a position to start deploying soon.
Adam had a particularly busy June - shortly before joining the Houghton Street Ventures team full-time on the 1st July, Scalable Capital (of which Adam is a co-founder) announced a $180m Series E investment led by Tencent, valuing the business at $1.4bn. This investment round puts it in the top 15 largest investment rounds announced by an LSE alumni company. The operating experience we now have in the team provides our entrepreneurial community with a fantastic platform for future success.
The team continues to work remotely; however, we have been taking up residence close to the LSE campus for IRL meetings and plan to move into our on-campus office space in the coming weeks. If anyone wants a trip down memory lane, we'd be delighted to grab coffee at Wrights!
Although we have been working hard in the background on the fund setup and administration side of things, we continue to be excited about the breadth and quality of the early-stage businesses in our pipeline. Despite the fact that deployment isn’t our immediate focus, for now, we are happy to support our community however we can. Highlights from the last two months include: a55 (Brazil, Fintech), Willow (US, Fintech), Abwaab (Edtech, MENA), Company Hero (LegalTech, Brazil) and NationalMRI (HealthTech, UK).
What's happening within the LSE alumni founder world?
June and July continued to be big months for LSE alumni funding announcements, with at least three other unicorns newly minted alongside Scalable Capital, including sennder (founder: David Nothacker), ManoMano (founder: Philippe de Chanville) and Tractable (founder: Alex Dalyac).
In this timeframe, LSE alumni reported a total of 46 separate funding announcements. Highlights include $280m raised by Capchase (founder: Przemek Gotfryd), $71m raised by Homebase (founder: John Waldmann), $65m raised by Popmenu (founder: Tony S. Roy) and a reported acquisition of Stocard (founders: David Handlos, Björn Goß) by Klarna of €110m.
LSE alumni companies continue to lead the way when it comes to thinking about the bigger picture. This month, we have had planet-saving initiatives reported by KeepTruckin, who are launching a tool to help fleets save up to 10% on fuel costs and reduce their carbon footprint, as well as Allbirds' latest sustainable footwear range featuring natural hemp. Finally, it was also great to see Tessian highlighted as a top 3 workplace for women in the UK.
What's happening at LSE?
In late July, we hosted c. 50 LSE entrepreneurs, investors and others within the ecosystem for some picnic-style drinks at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, taking advantage of one of the very few warm evenings we have had over the last couple of weeks. It will be the first of many events we will be hosting over the coming months to bring the LSE entrepreneurial community closer together.
LSE student, Jack Lee, built the largest Google Developer Student Club globally, with over 1,600 students joining the community. For some, it came as quite a surprise that the LSE would be an entrepreneurial talent hotbed; for us, it was the affirmation of what we have seen in the broader LSE ecosystem.
That's all for now - enjoy the rest of the summer, and we will be back soon with more news! If you happen to be in Munich or Berlin week commencing 27th September, let us know as we will be in town meeting with both investors and entrepreneurs.
Best,
Adam, Veronika and Hannah
The Houghton Street Ventures Team