Draper Esprit cuts the legacy identify apron strings to rebrand as Molten Ventures – TechCrunch

Draper Esprit, Europe’s solely stock-market listed tech VC agency, is altering its identify to Molten Ventures after a change in senior personnel and an more and more distant relationship with the US VC community from which is inherited its identify.

With former cofounder and CEO Simon Prepare dinner amicably departed to pastures new and the European itemizing powering to the fund in new instructions, Molten is pretty much as good a brand new identify as any with which to plow a brand new furlough.

Molten’s staff says the identify conjures up photographs of transformation, “matter being remodeled through the injection of vitality – the primary transformation is from stable to molten type.” OK… However behind the advertising and marketing speaks is a stable VC fund with a really skilled staff, so there aren’t any issues there.

When it comes to an replace on the fund, Molten Ventures now has a portfolio of investments boasting 67 firms, together with early-stage firms like Irish drone supply firm Manna Aero, Cambridge-based quantum computing software program firm, Riverlane, London-based local weather intelligence firm, Cervest and Finnish satellite tv for pc firm ICEYE.

Its portfolio additionally consists of European unicorns similar to Trustpilot, UiPath, Graphcore, Revolut, Cazoo, Ledger and Aircall. Between them, Molten’s portfolio firms have a mixed valuation of properly over £1.4bn.
 
It’s additionally an investor in seed enterprise capital funds. Its Fund of Funds program includes 42 European funds, together with Seedcamp, Earlybird, IcebreakerVC and Future Optimistic Capital. Funds invested within the final 3 years complete £75m, with the identical quantity dedicated for the following three years.
 
Simply over 5 years in the past, the agency first listed its shares on AIM and the Euronext Development Market in Dublin. It’s nonetheless the one massive, tech-focused VC agency listed on the inventory market.

Since 2016, Molten has raised £619m (~$860m) and seen money realisations of over £300 million (~$420m) with £206m (~$290m) within the final full 12 months, deploying over £550m (~$760m). Its annual fee of deployment is about £200m ($270m).

Its preliminary portfolio totaled 24 European expertise firms at a valuation of £74.8 million.
 
Martin Davis, CEO at Molten Ventures stated: “Our rebrand to Molten Ventures is rooted within the staff’s lengthy expertise of transformation – each our personal, and our profitable efforts to assist our portfolio do the identical It encapsulates that second when VCs give their vitality to assist firms succeed.”
 
Stuart Chapman, Co-founder at Molten Ventures stated: “All our vitality is dedicated to figuring out and supporting Europe’s most visionary entrepreneurs. We acknowledge that constructing the following era of firms requires versatile, affected person and supportive capital and we’re uniquely positioned to supply this – making extra potential for all of us.”