Company report on financials out 14th June for this one. some pre release info from the company gives an indication of good things to come I think for this company.
A strong pipeline of deals £50m already approved by invenstment committee and a further £75m sitting in the pipeline being looked at.
The companies focus is to continue to upscale in terms of investment into the portfolio and into the people, systems and processes around the investment team. great to see positive moves in this, confidence in their own abilities to invest and grow.
Revolut is now valued at $33 billion (~£24 billion). Based on the valuation implied by the fundraising, the Company’s gross fair value holding (before carry deductions) is approximately £119 million. This is an uplift of £99 million to the March 2021 gross fair value of £20 million. The Company first invested in Revolut in 2018 as part of its Series C round.
Absolutely love Draper Esprit. Seems they have a fantastic ability to pick winners. Moving up to the FTSE250 next week should be very beneficial in both the short and long run.
On Revolut, and as much as I like them, £24b does seem somewhat of a high valuation especially being 6x higher than last year and with a £207m loss.
Cant find anything concrete on this, but is £GROW considered a VCT for tax purposes? And if not, are there any VCT’s that you can get via freetrade/retail investing without the need to use a proprietary platform?
A lot of people ask me how we got to Molten Venture’s first name, Esprit Capital. And that all goes back to the very beginning. We started the firms through two transactions. The first was taking over the management of the Cazenove Fund. The second, on the same day, we acquired an investment trust manager called Prelude. If you ever wondered how the Esprit name came about, it’s because we couldn’t be called Symphony because someone else had it. And then we couldn’t be called Rhapsody, because no one really loved it. We were searching through musical terms and came to one through a PowerPoint presentation that one of the brilliant guys in the team had given to a French corporate using the word Esprit, and so that was the musical term that we latched on to.
Brands have got to represent something, signal something to the business that there’s more than one strategy coming together. With Esprit, we were trying to show Prelude, through musical analogies, that there was more than one reason bringing them in house. It wasn’t just their fund, it was their people, expertise and passion.
With Molten, I constantly talk about how when we are looking at the early stage where you have market, tech risk and people risk. And through the growth stage where you have execution risk. The more and more we talked about it, the more and more we understand that our true role is helping companies through this journey, offering our energy, helping them transform from a solid state to a molten state and beyond. But if you also know a bit of physics, you know that if you stop offering energy, things return to a solid state. So you need to keep giving our energy. That’s something that we actually do; that we believe in, and it’s right there in our brand.