By Oliver Smith on Monday 29 June 2020
While Freetrade and ThoughtMachine both joined Draper's investment portfolio.
Listed venture capital firm Draper Esprit has seen the value of its portfolio rise by 18 per cent in the year to 31 March, now worth £703m.
While its profits were just £40m (down from £111m in 2019), its net asset value (NAV) grew by 6 per cent to 555p as a result of rising tech valuations.
Looking to this year CEO Martin Davies said he believes Draper’s portfolio will perform well despite Covid-19, he said:
“Our portfolio companies are likely to be at the vanguard of this recovery given the likely acceleration of trends such as cloud infrastructure, online gaming and entertainment, digital healthcare, remote financial services and automation as a result of the changes made by countries, corporations and individuals.”
In the space of FY2020 Draper added 9 companies to its portfolio including ThoughtMachine which it invested £16.5m in as part of the cloud banking player’s Series B round in March 2020 and Freetrade which it invested £4m in October 2019.
Draper Esprit partner Vinoth Jayakumar told AltFi: “The biggest fintech uplift has obviously come from Revolut, which is a driver of NAV for us as they’ve gone from a valuation of £1.7bn to £5.5bn in the space of 24 months, so that’s been key on the B2C side.”
In total Draper has now invested £7.4m in Revolut, a stake that was worth £21.7m during the fintech's latest funding round.
Looking ahead Jayakumar believes that Draper now has in place a “symbiotic” fintech portfolio spanning from investment platforms (Seedrs/Crowdcube), to "world class propositions for consumers” (N26/Revolut) and B2B technology providers like ThoughtMachine which are enabling and benefitting from the growing fintech industry.
Draper’s portfolio companies went on to raise an additional $1.8bn during the course of the year, up from the $1.6bn they raised in 2019.
21 March 2023
Daniel Lanyon