London-based venture capital investor Balderton Capital has completed its fifth European fund and raised $305m (€222.6m), bringing its total funds to $2.2bn (€1.6bn), to invest in European technology start-ups.
The new fund was backed by both existing limited partners and new investor, the European Investment Fund.
Under the new fund, Balderton plans to earmark funds for the new market opportunities across the European technology sectors and the ambition is to build the investment team in Europe which would help the organisation expand internationally, it says.
Balderton has also strong links to the US and a number of co-investments with Google Ventures, Benchmark, Accel and others, it says.
“Over the last few years, we have refined our investment focus to double down on European early stage start-ups. Some of our earlier funds have been a mixture of series A and later stage investment. As with our last fund, this one is focused on Series A, where we currently see the greatest opportunities in Europe. Our goal is to be the first venture fund with an international outlook to invest in a company. The team’s strong operational experience gives us the expertise to back founders early and help build companies, which is why we are willing to take the risks and work with entrepreneurs at this earlier stage,” says Bernard Liautaud, General Partner at Balderton and founder of Business Objects.
The company first established its market presence in 2000 as Benchmark Capital Europe and was rebranded in 2007. Previous investee include Betfair, MySQL (acquired by Sun Microsystems), NaturalMotion and Yoox, among the others.
The total value of the companies backed by Balderton is worth over $10bn (€7.3bn), as it says.