Sure Valley Ventures completes £85M First Close for Fund 2
Ready to back the best UK founders building game changing technology companies in the Metaverse, AI/ML and Cybersecurity/Infosec Space
We’re excited to announce the first close of Sure Valley Ventures Fund 2 at £85 million targeting a total fund size of £95 million. This includes a cornerstone £50m investment from the British Business Bank through its Enterprise Capital Funds (ECF) programme, which aims to increase the supply of equity capital to high-potential, early-stage UK companies.
With this new fund we will be expanding our team to help us source and back founders building truly disruptive tech companies in the areas we know and love — Immersive Tech, Web 3, Metaverse, AI/ML, Cybersecurity & Infosec. We are a seed investor and love being the first institutional in, investing between £750k to £1.5 million into the first round of funding.
We plan to invest into 25 software companies from across the UK with this fund and build on our existing UK presence. We currently have offices in London, Dublin, and Cambridge but will also be opening an office in Manchester to help access deals in the significant and exciting innovation clusters that have developed around creative technologies in the North of England and in the Metaverse and AI opportunities in cities such as Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle.
History
Sure Valley Ventures Fund 1 was started in 2017 by Barry Downes and Brian Kinane with support from James Lewis and Shard Capital with a mission of being a founder first VC firm focused on entrepreneurs building truly disruptive tech companies and partnering with them on their journey. Since then, we’ve partnered with 16 amazing founders in the areas we are most interested in — Metaverse, AI/ML, Cybersecurity, InfoSec and IoT.
We have been successful in helping these investee companies grow and scale from Seed to Series A, and beyond with 93% of its investee companies raising follow-on Series A or B rounds within 24 months of the initial seed investment. This is a notable result, considering that on average 48% of companies fail to rise a follow-on investment round at all, according to CBInsights. In addition, many of Sure Valley’s current portfolio have gone on to further successes, including to IPO, e.g. Engage XR — a leading corporate metaverse company and Smarttech 247 — an AI-based cybersecurity company that plans to IPO in Q2 2022
Sectors of Interest
The sectors we invest in have significant growth potential over the next few years, for example Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are predicting that the Metaverse could be an $8 trillion opportunity. In addition, the Cybersecurity market is due to grow to $203 billion by 2027 according to Market Watch.
Sure Valley has established a strong track record in these sectors, having invested into them since the firm’s inception in 2017 through portfolio companies including Getvisibility, Smarttech247, Nova Leah and Precog Systems in the security space, Engage XR, War Ducks, Admix, Volograms, VividQ and Virtex in the Metaverse sector and Cameramatics, Artomatix and Ambisense in the AI sector.
Supporting our founders
Alongside the equity invested, we support entrepreneurs via our value-adding Platform, which draws on the team’s knowledge and experience as founders to create a programme which is tailored to each portfolio company’s individual needs.
Our platform also features a global network of advisors, based in leading innovation hubs across the globe, including San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, LA, Austin and Seattle in the USA as well as leading European and Asian hubs.
UK Tech news has more here: https://www.uktech.news/funding/vc-funding/sure-valley-ventures-fund-metaverse-ai-cyber-20220302.
Full press release can be found here BBB: https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/press-release/sure-valley-ventures-launches-95m-uk-software-venture-capital-fund-with-50m-investment-from-the-british-business-banks-enterprise-capital-funds-programme/
