Frontline’s 2023 Year in Review
As 2023 comes to a close and we are met with the startling realisation that our music taste is far worse than we thought, we’re also reflecting on the year we’ve had at Frontline.
Over the course of the last 12 months, we are proud to have backed four incredible new teams, including Climate Aligned and three as of yet unannounced deals. Two of these four companies are female-founded.
We have also participated in 12 follow-on rounds for our existing portfolio, including Shackle, Cloudsmith, Insify and Kota, as we continue to be strong believers in their ability to build globally successful businesses.
Two of our portfolio companies have had successful exits — Workvivo was acquired by Zoom in April, and MosaicML was bought by Databricks in July.
But let’s not sugarcoat things — 2023 has been a tough year for the high-growth ecosystem, especially for those companies that aren’t building an AI-related product.
Our portfolio companies raising later funding rounds (Series A and beyond) have had much longer funding processes than in previous years, with our longest Series A round taking 11 months from first investor meeting to round close. Still, we were delighted to be named as one of Europe’s top five Seed investors by Dealroom, based on Seed to Series A conversion rates.
With that said, Frontline is steadfast in our mission to back globally ambitious founders on both sides of the Atlantic and support them to make the intercontinental leap, and will continue to do so for the long term.
We’ve welcomed four new faces to the team this year (Eimear Cahalin as COO, George Radford as Principal, Aoife Kane as Office Manager, and Brian Shortall as Finance Manager), and will be opening up applications for two new Associate roles on our Seed investment team in January (watch this space).
Our US Growth team has published new proprietary data on how US companies are expanding to Europe, and has continued to cultivate a community of over 200 EMEA VPs of US companies to facilitate knowledge sharing and networking.
And because of the importance of the US to our overall fund strategy, we’ve opened our first full-time presence in New York, led by Jamie Bristow on our Growth investment team.
The last quarter of 2023 has been an incredibly busy one, with plenty of early-stage entrepreneurs proving great traction through a tough period, and the US growth market starting to thaw. So we’re optimistic that the venture market will be a more stable one in the new year.
We’re looking forward to a productive 2024, and all of the new and old faces we’ll meet along the way — although we’ll be sad to return to our regular Slack names.
If you’re building a B2B software company in Europe with a vision to launch State-side, or building in the US with ambitions for European expansion, then please do get in touch.
See you soon,
Will, Stephen, William, Brennan, Zoë and all the Frontline team
