UK – Entrepreneur First, a London, UK-based early stage investor, raised a $158m Series C funding round.
Backers included: Patrick and John Collison (co-founders of Stripe), Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of Wise), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn), Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress), Tom Blomfield (co-founder of Monzo and GoCardless), Nat Friedman (former CEO of Github), Sara Clemens (former COO of Twitch and Pandora), Matt Robinson (co-founder of Nested and GoCardless), Patrick O’Shaughnessy (Positive Sum), Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman (co-founders of Deepmind), Sten Tamkivi, Elad Gil and Lachy Groom. Founded in 2011 by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck in London, Entrepreneur First will target a direct investment of $100m over the next three years in hundreds of entrepreneurs, and will continue building out its talent product suite. The company now employs more than 120 around the world to help find and support the next generation of tech founders. EF is also announcing today that the aggregate value of companies created through its platform now exceeds $10bn. Notable alumni include Tractable (the computer vision unicorn focused on the insurance industry, funded by Insight and Georgian Partners); Omnipresent (the employment platform for remote work, funded by Tencent and Kinnevik); Aztec Protocol (the private transaction protocol, funded by Paradigm); Cleo (the financial management app, funded by Balderton and EQT Ventures); and Permutive (the privacy-compliant advertising infrastructure platform, funded by Softbank).It has offices in London, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, Bangalore and Singapore. 29/06/2022