Molten Ventures Share Discussion Threads

[steve3sandal] 21/2/2017 07:22

Thank you for posting rambutan2. I'm a happy holder and I might have a look at the crowdfunding if I can understand the revenue model.

[rambutan2] 21/2/2017 03:15

Invests £5m:

[rambutan2] 21/1/2017 19:04

Various pieces on Brian Caulfield, head honcho in Ireland:

[rambutan2] 21/1/2017 18:42

Upped stake in TrustPilot:





And more from Ireland:

[rambutan2] 31/12/2016 03:54

Dec 15:
Draper Esprit (AIM: GROW, ESM: GRW), a leading venture capital firm involved in the creation, funding and development of high-growth digital technology businesses, today announces that it has acquired a significant minority stake in Clavis Insight ('Clavis'), the leading eCommerce insights company, for £8 million.

Following the investment Brian Caulfield, Managing Director of Draper Esprit, will join the Board of Clavis.

Clavis Insight is the established global industry leader of digital shelf analysis, insights and analytics enabling manufacturers to track and optimise their online channel presence and performance.

The company has offices in Dublin, London, Shanghai and Boston, USA and is a strategic partner to hundreds of the world's largest manufacturers and brands in CPG/FMCG, Beverages, Consumer Health care, Nutrition, Electronics, Toy and Business to Business industries. Their clients include nine of the top ten such as: Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly Clark Corporation and Nestlé. Their solutions provide comprehensive insights across desktop, mobile web and mobile app platforms to the leading online retailers in over 30 countries.

Simon Cook, CEO Draper Esprit commented:

"One of the reasons we listed Draper Esprit was to make larger scale investments. The Clavis investment is a great example of this. It is a fast-growing company with global reach and founded in Ireland. We are really pleased to be working with the Clavis management team to help them navigate their next phase of growth and development."

[rambutan2] 29/11/2016 01:53

Interims out, nav 352p including £54m cash:



And accompanying presentation:

[rambutan2] 24/11/2016 18:37

24/11: Simon Cook, CEO Draper Esprit commented: "We have acquired a stake in a leading VCT manager in the UK, who share our core investment philosophy and we are delighted to be working with the experienced Elderstreet team. We can now offer to investors access to high growth technology companies through a range of vehicles from EIS funds, to VCTs and an ISA qualifying listed evergreen patient capital vehicle with combined assets of over GBP350m. Draper Esprit is now firmly on the map as one of the major European managers of technology venture capital and growth capital with a long history of successful acquisitions such as 3i's European VC portfolio, Prelude Investment Trust, Top Technology fund and Cazenove's VC fund."

[rambutan2] 11/11/2016 03:42

Announced last month and noteworthy due to the mammoth size, but also, with regard to GROW, the fact that it will be based in London:

[rambutan2] 10/11/2016 02:41

GROW very busy recently, both exits and investments. I think Datahug was held at £2.8m, if so then this adds approx £2m to nav:

DUBLIN, IRELAND- (November 8, 2016)- Draper Esprit (“the Company”), a leading venture capital firm involved in the creation, funding and development of high-growth digital technology businesses, announces that NASDAQ listed Callidus Software Inc. (NASDAQ: CALD), a global leader in cloud-based sales, marketing, learning and customer experience solutions, has acquired portfolio company, Datahug for a total consideration of $13 million cash.

The deal values Draper Esprit’s total stake in Datahug at $6 million. The investment in Datahug was held across a number of vehicles managed by the Company. Datahug, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland is a SaaS predictive forecasting and sales analytics company.

[rambutan2] 10/11/2016 02:34

24 Oct: Perkbox was recently listed no. 2 in the Startups 100 Index for being one of the most innovative emerging ventures in the country.

Simon Cook, CEO, Draper Esprit, comments: “We are excited to be leading this growth round in Perkbox alongside a great angel group and the crowd. Employee motivation is a fundamental issue for today‘s best companies, small and large, and the Perkbox digital platform is the best we have seen. Perkbox sits alongside other investments we have made in the customer satisfaction space, such as Trustpilot and Conversocial, while its growing focus on employee well being exists with companies such as Graze, Push Doctor and Lifesum.“

[rambutan2] 08/11/2016 03:24

Talk with Brian Caulfield, partner:

[rambutan2] 03/11/2016 03:07

As it happens, James Walker, boss of Resolver, was on Radio 4's Money Box yesterday talking about dispute resolution.



31/10/16: Resolver.co.uk – the free and independent website dedicated to making it easier for consumers to make complaints or raise issues with brands, companies and organisations to get redress or money back – has secured a funding round of £2.8 million.

By the end of 2016, the UK’s key resolution website for complaints expects to have helped resolve issues worth £100m+ for consumers and businesses. The site is projected to reach one million visitors a month by March 2017.

Consistently rated 5* by users, many contact the site with their success stories showing how they’ve got back hundreds of pounds using a process that takes just a few minutes. Some have reported receiving thousands of pounds owed to them.

And in its first institutional investment round, parent company Resolving Limited has now secured funding from Draper Esprit and Imperial Innovations to allow it to double its team and invest in new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

[rambutan2] 01/11/2016 13:38

Does GROW own anything HOT!?

[rambutan2] 01/11/2016 03:27

Below are a few useful pointers from the admission doc:

Following Admission, the Group’s cost base is expected to increase to approximately £4 million per annum, these operating costs will be partially offset by the income which the Company expects to receive from the Encore Funds and also through carried interest generated upon the realisation of certain investments held within Esprit Fund 2 and Esprit Fund 3(i) and also the realisation of certain co-investments.

The Company raised net proceeds of £69.4 million pursuant to the Placing and the Subscription, which funds are intended to be used as follows:

£40.1 million to pay the cash element of the consideration for the acquisition of, subject to certain existing carried interest arrangements, the Initial Portfolio; and

£29.3 million to make further primary investments and secondary investments (including companies in the Initial Portfolio) and to provide working capital for the Group to support its growth plans.

On Admission, the Group will own, subject to certain existing carried interest arrangements, minority interests in 24 portfolio companies* which, as at 31 December 2015, had an Aggregate Valuation of £74.8 million (including residual value relating to prior exits) (the ‘‘Initial Portfolio’R17;). The Initial Portfolio, adjusted solely for currency movements since 31 December 2015, had an unaudited aggregate valuation of £76.4 million as at 30 April 2016. *see pg 23-25 and pg 94-95 of admission doc for details

Through its ownership of Encore Ventures (an FCA authorised and regulated management vehicle), the Group manages four EIS funds, currently with a total of £19.5 million under management (approximately three quarters of which is invested). The Group receives income via management fees and performance fees from the Encore Funds and the Directors intend to continue to grow this area of the business.

The Group will also continue to manage three legacy funds, Esprit Fund 1, Esprit Fund 2 and Esprit Fund 3(i) (the ‘‘Historic Esprit Funds’’*). These funds are now in run-off, and while the Group will no longer receive management fees in respect of these funds, the Company expects them to generate carried interest for the Group depending upon the realisation of certain investments held within certain of these funds. *See pg95

The Group has a joint venture with Draper Esprit Secondaries, a separately owned and managed partnership, pursuant to which they work exclusively together on new opportunities to manage secondary investments in Europe. Further information about the team behind Draper Esprit Secondaries is set out in paragraph 2 of Part 3 of this document. The Group expects to receive a proportion of management fees and carried interest in respect of future transactions carried out by Draper Esprit Secondaries.

See pg 92-93 of ad doc for the illustrative pro forma statement of net assets ie £80.5m investments, £30.5m cash and £21m of goodwill, and £4m of liabilities.

[rambutan2] 01/11/2016 03:09

31 Oct 2016, Bristol, UK: Graphcore Ltd, a startup developing new technology to deliver massive acceleration for machine learning and AI applications, has completed a $30m Series-A funding round from a world-class line up of venture capital and strategic investors.

The funding was led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH with Samsung Catalyst Fund and other major technology firms, alongside leading venture capital funds from London, Silicon Valley and Israel: Amadeus Capital Partners, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit plc, Foundation Capital and Pitango Venture Capital.

Graphcore has spent the last two years building an experienced hardware and software team to develop a system designed from the ground up to accelerate both current and next generation machine intelligence applications such as natural language dialogue, autonomous vehicles and personalized medicines.

The company will bring its IPU (Intelligent Processing Unit) system to market in 2017 with the IPU-Appliance™ designed to lower the cost of accelerating AI applications in cloud and enterprise datacenters. The IPU-Appliance aims to increase the performance of both training and inference by between 10x and 100x compared to the fastest systems in use today.

[rambutan2] 31/10/2016 12:55

It's worth noting that the five (loosely) comparable evergreen vc / incubator vehicles listed in London all usually trade at big premiums:









Neil Woodfords investment trust actually holds a good slug of all of the above, as well as GROW, giving him early access to non public opps:

[rambutan2] 31/10/2016 03:47

It's worth noting that the £3 float price was pre Brexit vote/Sterling dive. So although the share price has risen to 340p, in Euros it is unchanged But we do know that the nav is up following the hugely profitable exit from Movidius.

[rambutan2] 31/10/2016 03:16

Draper Esprit will be announcing maiden Interim Results for the six months ended 30 September 2016 by the end of November 2016 and will give a further portfolio and NAV update at that time.

[rambutan2] 31/10/2016 03:03

Simon Cook, CEO and Co-Founder of Draper Esprit, said:

"Our motivation for evolving our Venture Capital business model was twofold. Firstly, we wanted to be able to invest for longer in our emerging companies and to be able to build bigger stakes as companies remained private for longer periods, capturing more value for shareholders. Secondly, we wanted to further democratise funding for entrepreneurs.

Traditionally the Limited Partnership model in Europe has restricted who can invest in venture capital backed companies and many growing technology companies are not accessible to institutions or public investors until they go public. Now everyone can participate in the growth of VC backed companies from their earliest stages through series A and B to their success in the later stages up to and including their IPO.

This permanent capital model is ideally suited to a listed vehicle and we are grateful for the support this approach has received from shareholders including: Woodford Investment Management, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, China Huarong International Holdings Ltd, Baillie Gifford and several other city institutions, successful entrepreneurs and family offices, many of whom have active later stage and IPO investment activities."

[rambutan2] 31/10/2016 03:02

Molten Ventures (until 10/11/21 was Draper Esprit) is one of the leading venture capital investors involved in the creation, funding and development of high-growth technology businesses with an emphasis on digital technologies in the UK, the Republic of Ireland and Europe.

This evergreen VC vehicle listed on AIM and Ireland's ESM on June 15 at £3 / Euro 3.87. On July 23 2021 it moved to the LSE main mkt and shortly thereafter became a member of the FTSE 250.

ESM:

Presentations:
Interim 30/09/21:

Finals 31/03/21:

Latest AR:

Shares: 152,999,853 ords (as at 16/06/21)

[michaelsadvfn] 11/11/2013 10:21

3. MEDIA CORPORATION (LSE: MDC) 0.17p.

Possible peak price within 3-year time frame: 1p. A five-bagger.

Not any more.....lol

[chinese investor] 18/10/2013 14:21

I Sense He Won't !

[michaelsadvfn] 18/10/2013 14:19

Update please Prof Smelgy...