Molten Ventures Plc

Draper Esprit is a leading venture capital business focusing on rapid, high growth, high tech companies across Europe. And when I joined at the end of last year, I was really impressed with the energy in the team, the capabilities of the investment process, but also in the entrepreneurs and the businesses that we invest in. At Draper Esprit, we talk about democratizing venture capital. And what that means is bringing these private markets that are normally much more controlled by a very small group of investors to a much broader investor base.

We're very much on track to deliver our 20% returns for the year, which is our target returns before the pandemic. And then after the pandemic period, we did an evaluation of the portfolio. And the ultimate results for the year is a 10% growth in the portfolio, which we're very pleased with. We think those are very strong results considering the circumstances. And that reflects a growth in the core portfolio. and also the wider portfolio up to £703 million, which is reflecting the fair value growth of 10%, £59 million, but also investments in the year of £90 million and realisations of a further £40 million. And we screen every year thousands of investments, but we keep a very disciplined approach to investing philosophy, and the £90 million of invested capital in the period reflects nine new investments into new opportunities, but also supporting 19 of our existing portfolio. We had 40 million of cash realisations in the period, which is an important part of our investment model, because we have the cash coming back to the balance sheet that we can then redeploy into new investments. In the period, we had partial realisations of TransferWise and also of UiPath, and we had a full realisation of Podpoint, which is a good case study of us being able to show that we're able to invest in companies and then move them on to a new partner for the next stage of their growth journey. In terms of cash resources at the year end we had 34 million of cash on the balance sheet and an undrawn 5 million on the debt facility. Post year end we've increased the size of the debt facility in line with the portfolio so we now have another 10 million in addition to that 5 which is undrawn. We have 50 million from our EIS and VCT funds alongside the PLC capital that co-invests into our deals and we've also announced post year end the anticipated acquisition of Peak Games which will bring another approximately £80 million onto the balance sheet. So we feel that from a financial perspective we're in a strong position and we're also in terms of the results very happy with where we've ended up coming into this period of the coming year and we feel we're in a strong position going forward.

This was a really big year for Draper Esprit. We started to build the infrastructure that enabled us to build a much more solid platform that enabled us to take on more investment and increase the cadence of our investment capability. We also took the opportunity to integrate the EIS business Encore Ventures, which again brought a much broader base for us as a business. So technology is absolutely central to how the economy recovers, both locally and globally, and a number of our portfolio companies are right at the vanguard of that recovery. Whether it's in firms such as PushDoctor, which helps the NHS, or Aircall for communications, many of our portfolio companies are delivering for the technological advances that we can see being needed. unquestionably capabilities such as cloud computing, such as SAS models are becoming more and more important and will become more important as the economy continues to recover. So the VC market has reacted very well to the current situation. Over the last decade or so, we've seen rands become bigger. We've seen companies become much hungrier for capital. And what's happened recently is that these companies are growing much more rapidly, and the VC market has had to respond. So a good example of this is Kazoo, which has gone from a startup to a unicorn, a billion valuation in 18 months. That's the fastest it's ever happened in the UK. And Draper Esprit and the VC market are very pleased to be behind that. So I think we can look forward with a great degree of optimism. I mean clearly we have to be cautious because of the current situation, but with the continued growth of technology, portfolio that we have, the strength of our people, our platform and our processes, we believe that we can make the most of the opportunities that come our way. We think we can deliver and execute for all of our stakeholders, whether those are our investors, our staff, the wider VC market or our entrepreneurs.