Molten Ventures Plc

There's now 400 unicorns in the market and when we talk about secondaries that's quite an important point because illiquid parts in the market clearly need liquidity and as companies stay private for longer that's very much a trend that we feel we can benefit from and support. Globally we're in the midst of this generational shifting technology and Europe has been for many years a key generator of IP and so the opportunity for us to invest in these businesses is very profound. The main theme that we're going to be talking to is these structural shifts that are occurring. And I think that's a very important point because these aren't cyclical, they're structural. And it's led to the recognition of the need for European sovereignty and resilience in its defense, but also in the technology assets. So the underpinning assets, be that cloud computing or be that payment infrastructure, there's a lot more focus on this and a lot more capital coming into this ecosystem. There still exists a structural gap to capital in the market and this is exactly in the space where Moulton is investing at the growth stage. We're thinking sort of 20 million plus tickets. So our strategy of growing the PLC balance sheet but also growing our third party assets is really to ensure we can consistently address this part of the market. So how do we take advantage of those opportunities? We built a platform at Moulton. We have three strategies for investing. The direct strategy has always been the core of what we do. That's series A investing, but most of our capital going to series B companies and the opportunities where the go-to-market strategies have been proven. Again, that scaling gap where deeper tickets of investment are required. We believe that Venture is a distinct asset class so even if it's a pure portfolio approach for investment managers we think that owning some access to private companies that are behaving in a differentiated way to other parts of the listed portfolio is an important factor and there's clearly some resilience which is applied to that and Venture has outperformed other asset classes over the long term as we know with Venture there's a big dispersion amongst managers so putting your capital with a manager that has a 20 year track record through these cycles we think is a compelling conversation We also have our secondary funds which, as I mentioned, we have a deep experience here of investing in this part of the market. We have invested in funds, entire funds, and bought out those positions. We've done that with Seacamp in their Fund 1 and 2 back in 2017, 2018. Same with Early Bird in 2019 on their Fund 4 and the Digital East Fund. and those deals were really to give us access to key assets that we thought were attractive in the Seacamp portfolio the main one was transfer wise and then in the early bird portfolio there were Peak Games and Smava and UiPath so it gives you a sense of how we look at the portfolios and then we fundamentally value the underlying businesses and that's how we price these deals but it's providing liquidity to an illiquid part of the market that is the key factor here and to do that well you need the ability to price the assets but you also need the network to be able to access the deal flow and that's something that we've had consistently. We've also done the same with individual assets, Trustpilot being a great example where in 2016 we owned 4% of Trustpilot and we built that up to 14% by the time of their own IPO and then we subsequently sold down as it was a public vehicle. so our ability to get access to later stage very strong businesses that have a financial profile which should deliver returns in a shorter period of time is something that's compelling we think now with 400 plus unicorns in the market is a very deep opportunity so that's why we've added more strength to the team with the secondaries team we brought in this year and that team is going to raise third party capital for that strategy as well and we'll see more of that team in the market going after these opportunities so that should generate for us more deal flow there's a network effect that occurs between these three strategies of funder funds investing where we invest at the earliest stages as an LP into funds and we get visibility of the underlying companies and we have proprietary deal flow and access but also the technical expertise to call upon of those GPs feeding into our direct strategy and that augments the secondary strategy so I think it's important that when we use the word platform we think about these three component parts being greater than the sum of their individual parts So just touching on those strategic priorities that we outlined slightly more than a year ago, what I'm proud to say is that as we go through the presentation today, you'll see the significant demonstration of progress that we've had, the execution we've had against these priorities. So driving the NAV growth clearly has been an important factor. We've seen that in the results today, but also in the announcement this morning with ISAI. Scaling our third party capital, we've been very pleased to announce a cornerstone investor, for our growth fund but also progress with the Malton East fund and as I mentioned the secondary team will be expanding that capital base with their strategy and then redeploying our capital into navigative uses of capital I think that's critical for us is that we really think around all those different opportunities that we're creating across the strategies as well as having buybacks for our own shares which ultimately allow us to narrow the share price discount to NAV So with that, I'm going to pass you over to the main event. I'm going to leave you to Andy to go through the financial highlights.

The main event's not often I get called that, which is good.

Okay.