Say hello to LocalGlobe 8

Since 1999, we’ve made over 175 pre-seed and seed investments with over 115 from our base in London & the UK.

• We’ve been founders (Lovefilm, Seedcamp, Kano), operators (Arcadia, Skype), board members (Farfetch, MoneySupermarket, Transferwise, Zoopla) and investors (Index, Social Finance)
• We’ve seen the full journey from inception and seed through to $bn exits and IPOs

Since May 2015, we’ve built a team of 8, which has made over 45 investments

• We’ve invested £27m in 38 companies in London & the UK
• They sell to consumers (13); enterprises (13); small businesses (8) as well as Zebras (4)
• We’re comfortable investing across multiple sectors including Creative Industries; Education; Energy; Fashion; Finance; Food; Health; Insurance; Property; Travel & Transport
• Digging into waves where we currently have most conviction including AI; Autonomy; Data Science; On-Demand; Robotics; Supply Chain; Security; Talent; Video & VR
• We’ve been lucky to co-invest with some great funds:

London — Accel, ADV, Atomico, BGF, DN, EF, Eight Roads, Felix, Index, Initial, Mosaic, Notion, Octopus, Passion, Seedcamp, Techstars and Wayra

Berlin — Cavalry, Cherry, GFC, Point 9,

Tel Aviv — BVP, Entree, Stage One,

Europe — EQT, Jaan Tallinn, Kima, Lifeline, Mangrove, Sunstone

East Coast — Founder Collective, IA, Spark, USV

West Coast — Lightspeed, Ribbit, Upfront

Plus some great angels like Alex, Brent, Errol, Jason & Taavet

• We’ve also co-founded two new businesses — Platoon & Zinc

PLATOON — a platform for fearless creatives & ZINC — the innovation system to build commercially successful businesses which solve chronic social problems

During the last few years, we’ve also seen our existing funds continue to develop nicely

• 2 IPOs and 3 great exits — FreeAgent (AIM); Zoopla (LSE); MyBuilder (IAC); Capitaine Train (Trainline); MyOptique (Essilor)
• Some emerging market leaders: Adzuna; Citymapper; Graze; Improbable; Kano; Moo; Robinhood; Roli; Secret Escapes; Skimlinks; Sofar Sounds; Swoon Editions; Transferwise; Trouva

We’ve started investing our 8th LocalGlobe seed fund

• Our last fund was £45m, which we started investing in May 2015 — we’ve now made our initial investments and have been selectively deploying follow-on capital
• We raised our new fund in late 2016 — it was oversubscribed but capped at £75m. We started investing from May 2017
• 90% of our investors are institutions with a 20 year or more track record of backing in emerging early stage funds in US,UK, Europe & Israel — we have mix of US, European, Israel & Asian fund of funds, endowments and family offices with significant venture portfolios

We have a very simple proposition for founders at pre-seed and seed stage

“The capital, time and support you need to get to a great Series A and build the most ambitious business possible”

Why we hope founders want to work with us

• We develop strong conviction and are comfortable taking risks
• We understand that path to series A now requires meaningful capital — there are often 3 rounds before a Series A — accelerators; pre-seed of £1m; seed of £1–2.5m and then Series A of £5–10m
• Our track record of successfully supporting companies on their journey from seed to an excellent Series A — 86% graduation rate vs 40% EU average
• We offer active and collaborative support but in a highly structured way — strategy & metrics, impactful introductions in key business areas (team, customers and investors), in-depth analysis to optimise operations and key supplier relationships, active community of workshops
• We love what we do…. why not ask some of the founders that we work with

How we work together as a team and with founders

• Total football — we have fully integrated our investment & operations team, discarding conventional notions of investment attribution, letting the full team contribute to investment decisions and company support
• We are lean and data-driven so we can be fast and highly responsive to the teams we support
• We are open, collaborative & available — we use collaboration tools such as Trello & WhatsApp more than e-mail

What we look for — mixed metaphors

• Surfers capable of riding society’s most important waves — amazing founders in huge and important markets
• Black swans capable of being fund returners — founders capable of building the kind of companies able to exit at over $750m and return our fund

We have a tight local focus

• We believe London is one of the world’s best cities now for starting and scaling global tech businesses
• We believe in the next 10 years the UK will develop at least 2 other world-class technology hubs

We believe that London’s unique environment means we don’t need to pick sectors at seed stage

• Combination of scale, economic value and digital sophistication makes London one of the best markets to test consumer propositions in the world
• Access to large customers in financial services, insurance, creative industries, retail, healthcare, food, fashion, transport, professional services, technology as well as the charity and public sectors makes it one of the best markets to test enterprise and infrastructure propositions

We also believe that the UK has deep academic talent, engineering and deep tech strengths

• Top universities — Cambridge, Central St Martins, Crick & Turing Institutes, Edinburgh, Imperial, Kings, LBS, LSE, Manchester, Oxford, RCA, UCL etc
• Engineering — Airbus, Dyson, European Space Agency (ESA), McLaren, Rolls Royce
• Deep Tech — ARM, CSR, Deep Mind, Improbable

We also believe that the UK has a supportive regulatory framework for tech & digital economy

• Only country with a Minister and a published national Digital Strategy
• Generous tax relief on R&D
• Tech Nation Visa Scheme makes it possible for tech talent from around the world to come and work in the UK
• Only country with coding in curriculum to train for future skills

But we believe in having a global perspective by selectively investing with founders and known investors in key markets

• We believe that investors still significantly underestimate the significance of scale and growth of the African Internet in the next 10 years — we have 3 investments operating in East Africa
• We believe Europe & Israel are now repeatedly able to create and scale global tech leaders — we continue to selectively co-invest with best local founders and funds
• We know that with 5bn smartphones by 2020, great companies will have to develop customer bases in China, India and other major high growth markets not just in the US & Western Europe

We couldn’t be more excited to start investing from our newest seed fund. You can read more about it in Steve O’Hear’s TechCrunch article and if you’re interested in joining us — we’re hiring.

The LocalGlobe team

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