We're very excited to welcome prop tech company Nested to the Balderton portfolio. You can read about their £120M round on Nested's site. Nested has taken on the challenge of re-inventing the estate agency by providing home sellers with up to 94% of their home’s value when they need it, and the rest when it sells, helping sellers to secure their dream home and providing certainty in an uncertain market.

We first met Matt Robinson, co-founder and CEO, when he was a founder of portfolio company GoCardless. Matt 'incubated' Nested at Balderton's HQ alongside co-founders Phil Cowans (former Songkick CTO) and trained architect, James Turford. Rob wrote about the history of our investment in the company in the article 'Believing in Nested — the story of a relationship that goes back many years. Read more about the fundraise in The Sunday Times and in Techcrunch.

Balderton welcomes new team members

Lots of terrific new team members at Balderton, so we need to catch you up! We're delighted to welcome them all to the Balderton family.

And finally, Laura Connell joined the investment team to work with Daniel on Liquidity I fund activity.

Liquidity I announcement

The last newsletter was focused on Liquidity I. In case you missed it, Daniel wrote about why we raised this fund. Here are a few of the news stories: 

• Financial Times: Balderton pioneers fund for buying stakes in European startups
• Techcrunch: Balderton’s $145m ‘secondary’ fund will give shareholders in European scale-ups the chance to exit early
• Les Echos.fr: Liquidity One, une option de sortie aux entrepreneurs européens
• Dagens Industri: Balderton miljardsatsar på köp av medarbetares techaktier
• Sueddeutsche Zeitung: Hilfe für Aussteiger

Build with Balderton

New Build with Balderton articles this month: 

• Part 1: When should your European startup expand into International markets? 
• Part 2: Where should your company expand internationally?
• Part 3: By the numbers: a look at 94 tech companies in the US and Europe, to see when and where they expanded internationally.
• Part 4 (New): How to budget for internationalisation.
• Kiana added a POV on how startups are getting the 'People' function wrong. 

A catch up on Portfolio news this month

Frontier Car Group's Sujay Tyle at NOAH London spoke about his journey from launch two years ago to today, now one of the largest emerging markets used car marketplaces.

Welcome to the new Furhat social robot, and watch their inspiring videos of how to use robots to interview, train staff and ask for help. The new Furhat is visiting our office next week, so we're all excited about that.

'Everyone I know buys vintage,' Depop in the Guardian on how their sellers are shaking up the fashion industry.

Credit Benchmark's CEO William Haney spoke to Bloomberg about how banks have to stay ahead of the curve to keep data safe.

The FT interviewed Prodigy Finance's Cameron Stevens on how the path to financing his own MBA set him on the path to founding the company.

Lyst announced the arrival of their social curation platform for fashion in the French market, expanding on their more than 70M consumers in over 120 countries worldwide. They also published their popular index of the hottest brands and products in fashion.

The team at Crowdcube celebrated an important milestone: 100 fundraises of £1M or more. (They also announced their new fundraising round this month too.)

MojiWorks not only got the nod for being a great place to work but Founder/CEO Matthew Wiggins was named Best Boss in the Games Industry's Best Places to Work, 2018 and the team received the 2018 Diversity Award.

Congratulations to SOPHiA GENETICS on opening their new Boston HQ. They are already supporting 100 hospitals in the US, so their new facility will address their rapid expansion. The team was also recognised for excellence in health tech at the Convergence in Oncology Summit in Lausanne.

Balderton in the news

Our good friend and investment team member Sam Myers left us this past month, but in a good way — to join portfolio company SimpleFeast. VA.SE covered the news. 

Bernard spoke on morning business breakfast TV in France on why now is the time that Europe will create tech giants.

Bernard also spoke on the same topic at one of the largest startup events in France: Bpifrance Inno Generation, and you can watch the the video here (in French but with subtitles).

Suranga in Wired 'Most startups fail. Here's how to successfully grow your business.'

James wrote an OpEd for the Telegraph 'Innovation will pay the price of a digital tax.' "Targeting the technology industry so bluntly, and at a time when the UK’s own software industry is seeing such strong momentum, could result in this tech tax ending up as a tax on British innovation," he wrote. 

Rob in conversation with James Hind of Carwow at NOAH London on travel, mobility and how James has tackled international expansion.

Part 4 of Rob's internationalisation playbook was in Venturebeat this month: Expanding your startup to new markets? Here's how to budget.

Part 5 of the series was a guest post from Pranav Sood of Gocardless: Before you enter new markets, create a 'geo expansion playbook.'

Caye wrote on Medium about 'Life after fundraising' — how to most effectively plan to use the funds.

Diane wrote a four-part series on the topic of HR Tech, where she and colleague Ryan Dillon trace the evolution of the HR Tech stack and analyse the current landscape.

Kiana wrote in VentureBeat 'Startups are getting people wrong, and it will cost them.'

Catch the Balderton team at the following events

Nov 14th - Bernard will be conducting a fireside chat 'Global Venture Capital: Riding the Wave" with Andreessen Horowitz at the AVCJ Forum in Hong Kong.

Nov 15th - Daniel will be attending Superinvestor in Amsterdam, speaking at 4:00PM on 'The Next Wave in Venture Capital.'

Nov 20th - Kiana will be appearing in an online event 'How to benefit from the international flow of talent.' Register here.

Nov 27th - Suranga and Balderton are hosting Tech Nation's first book launch event  — Upscale: What it takes to scale a tech giant by the people that have done it — at Balderton HQ from 8:00AM-11:30AM. If you would like to attend, register here.

Nov 28th - Isabel will be speaking at The Marketplace Conference in Berlin.

Nov 29th - Bernard will be speaking on the topic of entrepreneurship at his alma mater Centrale Supelec in Paris.

Nov 28th - Kiana will be speaking at the Women in Tech Conference in Amsterdam on 'Cultivating your unique culture and becoming a global talent magnet.'

Dec 4th/5th - Magda will be attending SLUSH in Helsinki.

Dec 5th/6th - Bernard will be at President Macron's VC Scale Up event at the Elysée Palace, Paris

Dec 6th - Isabel will be hosting an event at BaldertonHQ with Leika to support and mentor female engineers and engineering leaders. RSVP here.

Dec 17th - Laura will be hosting a holiday networking event for women in VC at Balderton's offices at 6PM. If you're interested in participating, please contact Laura directly. 

The newsletter back catalogue

We have new subscribers joining us all the time, so if this is your first newsletter, this space allows you to catch up on the previous issues (there is no August issue): | October 2018 (announcing Liquidity I fund) | September 2018 | July 2018 | June 2018 | May 2018 | April 2018 | March 2018 | February 2018 | January 2018 |