Molten Ventures Plc

I'm Martin Davis and I'm the Chief Executive of Malton Ventures PLC. We invest in high growth companies across Europe, particularly companies that are either disrupting markets or that are creating new markets. So we invest in companies like Graphcore, UiPath, Thought Machine, Revolut and Ledger. Over the last 12 months, we've made some significant developments operationally. We've continued to scale the investment team and also the other teams that support our investments across the board, which help us to really manage the whole portfolio. We also listed in the main market here in London and went straight into the FTSE 250, the same time we listed in Dublin on the official list of Euronext. Part of becoming a FTSE 250 company enabled us to strengthen the board and we're very pleased that we recruited last year two new non-executive directors, Gervais Slowey and Sarah Gentleman. We also moved from Draper Esprit to Moulton and rebranding was a really important part of the development and the journey of our business. We're operating in a new environment and it's a very exciting time for the business and we felt that this was the right time for us to become Moulton Ventures.

This year was a very strong year in terms of our performance. We actually delivered 37% fair value growth, which is above our 20% target per annum of fair value growth. In addition to that, we've deployed 311 million of capital into new portfolio companies, but also into our existing portfolio with a balance of around 50% in each. We've also found with our thematic approach to investing and continuing to have our Our discipline with the quality bar we've had throughout the year has been very high even though we've invested more capital. It was a strong year for returns through realisations. We had £126 million coming back to the balance sheet. This is an important part of our model because it allows us to recycle that capital into new investments. Traditionally we'll see the majority of our realisations coming through trade sales and we had those with Bright Computing and Sports Pursuit being sold to new owners. but also in the past year we saw IPOs into the public market with UiPath and also Kazoo being IPO'd and that's in addition to the previous year's IPO of Trustpilot. As part of developing our model we're looking to expand what we do on the EIS and VCT parts of our business where we have 400 million of assets under management already We're going to expand that by taking co-investment capital from third parties and this supplements the balance sheet funds. We'll do this in the funder fund programme which we're looking to syndicate but also to expand over the next three years and then we're also looking to close out a growth fund which will target later stage series B plus growth companies and that allows us to consistently lead rounds with more capital to deploy but also has the benefit of income coming into the group which allows us to offset our cost base.

The environment for tech investing in Europe remains robust. The technological advances that have been made over the last few years are unaffected by interest rates and inflation. So the environment for tech investing is as good now as it ever was, and it's probably one of the most exciting times to be involved in investing in technology across Europe. However, the VC world does need to respond to the changing investment climate. We are expecting to see greater caution, We're expecting to see more capital preservation. But also those with the flexibility inherent in their models will be able to take advantage of the opportunities as they arise. Our model is particularly designed to be able to operate whatever the market throws at us. And we do believe that there will be opportunities to make good investments. So our model and our strategy is very much to keep doing what we're doing, to show caution, but absolutely take advantage of the opportunities as they arise.