02 February 2022

Molten Ventures plc

("Molten", the "Group" or the "Company")

Investment update

Molten Ventures plc (LSE: GROW, Euronext Dublin: GRW), a leading venture capital firm investing in and developing high growth digital technology businesses, today provides an update on recent developments in its portfolio.

Key highlights include:

·      Continued momentum in deal activity, with £259m invested over the year to date, including 12 primary deals (41% of capital) and 15 follow-ons (59% of capital).

·      Cash proceeds from realisations of £110m realised year to date.

·      Strong revenue growth across our portfolio companies through 2021 which is forecast to continue for 2022.

·      A healthy pipeline of investment opportunities, both for new portfolio companies and follow-on rounds for our existing portfolio as the companies scale. 

·      Year end guidance of fair value growth in the region of 35% remains.

THOUGHT MACHINE

In November 2021, Molten participated with a £20m investment in a $200m Series C round in cloud native core banking technology firm Thought Machine. The round was led by Nyca Partners and was also participated in by its banking clients ING Ventures, JPMorgan Chase, and Standard Chartered Ventures, along with existing investors Lloyds Banking Group, British Patient Capital, Eurazeo, SEB, Backed, and IQ Capital. Founded in 2014, Thought Machine plays a critical role in the future of global banking technology and provides modern, cloud native core banking technology to some of the largest and most ambitious banks in the world. 

GARDIN

In December 2021, Molten led a $10.8m seed round in Gardin, a British agtech company aiming to make nutritious food production sustainable and affordable for consumers and the planet, supported by LDV Capital, MMC Ventures and Seedcamp. Gardin has developed optical sensors which obtain data at the individual plant level, allowing growers to monitor biochemical processes such as photosynthesis in real time. Using data from these sensors, Gardin's machine learning algorithms deliver actionable, real-time insights that enable crop growers to optimise yield, improve unit economics, and sell products high in nutrition.

MOSTLY AI

In January 2022, Molten led a $25m Series B funding round in MOSTLY AI, an Austrian synthetic data generation platform. Existing investors Earlybird and 42CAP also participated, alongside new investor Citi Ventures. MOSTLY AI uses AI to create synthetic data sets which closely resemble original customer data and reflect behaviours and patterns with up to 99% accuracy. In doing so, MOSTLY AI enables companies to comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR and to use sensitive data in cloud environments, while reducing time-to-data by 90% and saving larger companies $10M+ annually on data provisioning and internal overhead.

CAUSALENS

On 28 January 2022, Molten led a $45m Series A round in causaLens, alongside Dorilton Ventures. Existing investors Generation Ventures and IQ Capital also participated, supported by new backer GP Bullhound. causaLens is pioneering Causal AI, a new category of intelligent machines that can reason about the world imaginatively and in a similar way to humans, through cause-and-effect relationships. causaLens's customers and partners currently include organizations in a number of sectors, including healthcare, financial services and government, where its technology is used not just for AI-based decision making but to bring in more cause-and-effect nuance when arriving at outcomes.

BRIGHT COMPUTING

In January 2022, portfolio company Bright Computing was acquired by NVIDIA, reinforcing the company's position as the de facto choice for cluster management within High Performance Computing and its rapidly growing adoption for supercomputing machine learning applications and edge computing cases. Bright Computing is installed on over 100,000 servers, providing over 22 billion core compute hours of processing per year and its customer list includes household names such as Microsoft, NASA, Siemens, Samsung, Tesla, Johns Hopkins University and Volvo.

Molten first invested in Bright Computing in 2014, the realisation generates a 1.6x return on invested capital.

Martin Davis, Chief Executive Officer of Molten Ventures, commented:

"This latest update demonstrates our ability to continue to invest in the most promising private companies across a range of technology segments. This is testament to the hard work of our team, while NVIDIA's acquisition of Bright Computing is an example of the successful work undertaken with our portfolio companies over several years, with Bright evolving from a small team in Amsterdam to a global software company during our time supporting them. The European technology venture market continues to thrive despite the wider fluctuations in public markets and demonstrates the uncorrelated nature of public and private markets in this space.  Molten is well-positioned to take advantage of this disconnect and our year end guidance of fair value growth in the region of 35% remains, keeping up the strong momentum we evidenced so far this year."

-ENDS-

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About Molten Ventures

Molten Ventures (LSE: GROW, Euronext Dublin: GRW) is one of the most active venture capital firms in Europe, developing and investing in disruptive, high growth technology companies. We believe it is our role to support the visionary entrepreneurs who will invent the future. We fuel their growth with our 'energy' in the form of long-term capital, access to international networks and decades of experience building businesses.

As at 30 September 2021, Molten Ventures is a shareholder in a diverse portfolio of 70+ companies with 17 of those part of our core portfolio which accounts for 68% of our holdings. Our core companies include Trustpilot, Graphcore, Revolut, Ledger, and Aiven. We invest across four sectors: Consumer Technology, Enterprise Technology, Hardware and Deeptech, and Digital Health and Wellness, with highly experienced partners constantly looking for new opportunities in each. We look for high-growth companies operating in new markets, with a serious potential for global expansion, strong IP, powerful technology, and management teams to deliver success. We also look for businesses with the potential to generate strong margins to ensure rapid, sustainable growth in substantial addressable markets.

Molten Ventures provides an opportunity for public market investors to access these fast-growing tech businesses, without having to commit to long term investments with limited liquidity. Since turning public in June 2016, we have deployed over £700m capital the portfolio and have realised over £380m to 30 September 2021.

For more information, go to https://www.moltenventures.com/