from Molten Ventures Plc (isin : GB00BY7QYJ50)
Final Results
Molten Ventures Plc (GROW) Molten Ventures plc (“Molten Ventures”, “Molten”, the “Group” or the “Company”) FINAL RESULTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 MARCH 2025
An Exceptional Year of Realisations; Clear Strategic Priorities and Good Momentum
Molten Ventures (LSE: GROW), a leading venture capital firm investing in and developing disruptive, high-growth technology companies, today announces its final results for the year ended 31 March 2025.
Financial highlights
* The above figures contain alternative performance measures (“APMs”) – see Note 35 in the Annual Report and Accounts for reconciliation of APMs to IFRS measures. ** EIS and VCT funds are managed by Molten Ventures plc Group but are not consolidated. See accounting policies on pages 132 to 142 and Glossary on page 179 to 180 of the Annual Report and Accounts for defined terms.
Portfolio and operational highlights
Post period-end
Our Sustainability Report will be published on 24 June 2025 and will be available on our website: investors.moltenventures.com/sustainability
Ben Wilkinson, Chief Executive Officer, Molten Ventures, commented: "FY25 was an exceptional year of realisations for Molten with exits delivering on average a 1.8x multiple on invested capital. Our exciting, diversified portfolio remains resilient despite market headwinds, and we continued deploying capital while maintaining strong capital allocation discipline and our capital base. We are already making good progress against the clear strategic priorities I set out as Molten’s new CEO in February 2025 and have started FY26 with positive momentum for generating further shareholder value. "The rise of AI presents the opportunity to fund the next generation of category leaders during one of the most significant generational shifts in technology since the internet. At the same time, the Mansion House reforms could unlock a vital new source of capital for UK innovation. We stand ready to help bridge that gap and ensure UK savers benefit from the growth of Europe’s most ambitious companies." In addition, Molten will be hosting a presentation for all investors via the Investor Meet Company platform at 10.30am BST on Friday, 13 June 2025. Existing and potential investors can sign up to Investor Meet Company for free via the link below. https://www.investormeetcompany.com/molten-ventures-plc/register-investor
About Molten Ventures Molten Ventures is a leading venture capital firm in Europe, developing and investing in high growth technology companies. It invests across four sectors: Enterprise & SaaS; AI, Deeptech & Hardware; Consumer Technology; and Digital Health with highly experienced partners constantly looking for new opportunities in each. Listed on the London Stock Exchange, Molten Ventures provides a unique opportunity for public market investors to access these fast-growing tech businesses, without having to commit to long term investments with limited liquidity. Since its IPO in June 2016, Molten has deployed over £1bn capital into fast growing tech companies and has realised £660m to 31 March 2025. For more information, go to https://investors.moltenventures.com/investor-relations/plc
Chairman’s introduction FY25 was my first full financial year as Chairman and I am pleased that we remained focused on our long-term goals and the value creation potential of our portfolio. Even against a backdrop of continued volatility in the macroeconomic and Venture Capital landscape, Molten Ventures maintained its disciplined approach to capital deployment, portfolio management and strategic positioning. The broader venture ecosystem continued to adjust to higher interest rates, valuation pressure and subdued exit activity. These conditions undeniably presented challenges, but they also reinforced the need for our selective investment strategy and active support of portfolio companies. While exit activity at an industry level might have been subdued, Molten had a strong year of realisations delivering four high-value exits through the sales of M-Files, Graphcore, Endomag and Perkbox for an aggregate total deal value of over £1 billion, establishing Molten as a leader in European Venture Capital exits. This, in addition to the partial realisation of Revolut at a headline valuation of $45 billion, has significantly enhanced our liquidity position. The portfolio demonstrated resilience, with several companies making material operational progress. Notably ICEYE, part of Molten’s Core Portfolio, made significant inroads during the period - securing satellite data agreements with NATO and Greece, earning recognition from TIME as a top greentech company, and being selected by NASA for Earth science research support. Meanwhile, PocDoc - for whom Molten led a £10 million Seed round in November 2024 – is revolutionising access to treatment for cardio, metabolic, and renal diseases by enabling patients to use smartphone-based technology to undertake screenings - with almost instant results. This has been a year of thoughtful and carefully executed Board succession planning. As previously announced, Ben Wilkinson succeeded Martin Davis as CEO, with Andrew Zimmermann stepping into Ben’s former role as CFO. On behalf of the Board, I want to thank Martin for his dedicated service and valuable contributions over the years. I would also like to extend a sincere thank you to Grahame Cook, who has served as our Senior Independent Director and Chair of the Audit, Risk & Valuation Committee (“ARV”) since 2016. He also stepped in as interim Chair during Karen Slatford’s period of ill health, exemplifying his deep commitment to the Board. We are pleased that Grahame has agreed to stand for reappointment at the 2025 AGM for one additional year. Following the AGM, Lara Naqushbandi will succeed him as Chair of ARV, and Sarah Gentleman will take on the role of Senior Independent Director. Grahame and Lara have already been working closely this financial year to ensure a smooth and effective handover, and Grahame’s continued guidance will be invaluable as we move into FY26. We note the updated Financial Reporting Council (FRC) Code, effective from 1 January 2025, and for our Company from 1 April 2025. I am pleased to report that we anticipate full compliance with the provisions and will report on this next year. Over the course of the last 18 months, I have met all major active shareholders and remain available and very open to meetings. Please feel free to get in touch on chair@molten.vc. Looking ahead, 2025 will be an important year for policy approvals, with active engagement planned for FY26 on the Remuneration Policy. While we signposted an intention to begin this engagement during the current financial year, the Remuneration Committee decided to postpone this exercise while Ben Wilkinson and Andrew Zimmermann settled into new roles. We remain committed to ensuring that stakeholder consultation is meaningful and will take place ahead of key decisions next year. Further detail on our approach and related governance matters can be found in the Remuneration Report. Our corporate purpose is to advance society through technological innovation – by identifying and empowering the best innovators and providing them with the tools they need to transform the way the world works. We want that future to be sustainable, fair and accessible to all. As a reminder, our sustainability commitments and progress are outlined in full in our separate Sustainability Report, which will be published on our website on 24 June 2025. The market environment remains uncertain, but we are cautiously optimistic. The long-term case for Venture Capital – particularly in deep tech, AI and climate-focused innovation – is compelling. Molten is well placed to navigate current conditions and deliver long-term value to shareholders. I would like to thank our shareholders for their continued support and our entire team at Molten for their tenacity and hard work during a demanding year and through continued evolution in the business. We enter FY26 with focus, resilience and confidence in our strategic direction.
Laurence Hollingworth Chairman
CEO’s statement At Molten Ventures, our strategy is deep rooted in long-term conviction about the power and value of European technology innovation. Our model of investment and active management is proven over market cycles and, while our business is influenced by macroeconomic and geopolitical events, we are driven by consistent execution with a focus on the areas we can control. During the year, we leveraged our long-standing expertise to deliver a series of successful exits, all completed at or above holding values; continued to invest in world-class companies; and maintained strong capital allocation discipline focused on generating shareholder value. We have demonstrated our capacity for strategic innovation in our approach to structure and capital pools. This is the spirit which moved us to undertake our IPO and to develop our growing track record of strategic secondary acquisitions, which we further built on this year with our Connect Ventures Fund I acquisition. In sharpening our investment focus on Series A and B, we are reflecting our areas of greatest strength and expertise. In addition, we look to continue building scale and enhancing shareholder value as part of our new strategic priorities. Performance and achievements The year’s performance was underpinned by discipline, sustained momentum and continuing innovation. The overall Gross Portfolio Value is modestly down as we delivered realisations ahead of the invested capital in the period, and the growth in the portfolio was reduced by adverse foreign currency movements. Despite this, the portfolio delivered an increase in fair value of £72 million in FY25, with notable gains driven by strong performers such as Revolut, Ledger, and Aircall. We continue to follow a consistent valuation process that reflects growth in portfolio companies as well as taking down the values of assets where the performance has not delivered. Realisations are crucial to our value delivery and FY25 was an exceptionally productive year for Molten, with total proceeds of £135 million, exceeding our original guidance of £100 million. These exits delivered on average a 1.8x multiple on invested capital and were all completed at or above holding value, validating not only the quality of our portfolio but also the diligent approach to our valuation methodology. They include:
These achievements significantly increased our liquidity position, a key feature of our model, to fund the next generation of category leaders. It also allows us to effectively follow our capital allocation approach, which remains balanced: focusing on growing assets while delivering shareholder returns—underpinned by a strong financial position. Reflecting this, we commenced a share buyback programme in August 2024, which was enlarged in January and in March 2025 to a £30 million committed total, going significantly beyond our stated capital allocation policy. The year marks further stabilisation since the major market change from the end of our FY22 onwards. It has been a challenging three years in which we have made difficult decisions and helped our portfolio companies to do the same. In doing so, we have demonstrated our ability to preserve value and have come through with the portfolio in good condition. Strategic refocus After becoming CEO in October 2024, I led a comprehensive review to ensure that Molten’s capital, team, and operations are fully aligned with the most compelling value creation opportunities. Our focus and priorities, as announced at February’s Investor Day, are clear: • Refocus on our core investing strength of Series A and B investments: Where we bring differentiated deal flow, a strong brand, and the opportunity to lead. • Build scale and ongoing portfolio development: Facilitate institutional co-investment alongside Molten at Series B+, increasing our access to capital and high-quality dealflow, and consistency of deployment. This aligns with the clear gap in funding for growth stage companies we see across Europe. • Maintain a disciplined Fund of Funds programme: Concentrate future commitments on a select group of managers who provide the best insights and opportunity across the breadth of the European ecosystem. • Preserve balance sheet strength: Sustain robust capital allocation, drive realisations, and continue disciplined investment. • Focus on narrowing share price discount to NAV: Including through strategic share buyback programmes.
Market Environment While the broader venture capital landscape has faced significant headwinds – geopolitical tensions, market volatility, and pressure on IPO and funding activity – European technology has been challenged but also proven to be resilient. European venture investment reached $66 billion (Source: PitchBook) in 2024 with investors placing increased emphasis on new technologies and capital efficiency. Europe’s core advantages – its deep science and engineering clusters; its growing base of repeat founders and operators – continue to strengthen. We are experiencing one of the most significant generational shifts in technology since the internet, with the rise of artificial intelligence. AI is no longer a future promise; it is a technology layer that is already reshaping every sector, from enterprise software and healthcare to financial services and infrastructure. For long-term investors like Molten, this transformation presents extraordinary opportunities to back the next wave of category-defining companies. Across our portfolio, CoachHub and Material Exchange are embedding AI into their product offering, while SalesAPE and Robin AI are AI native. Meanwhile, in Climate & Energy, in order to forecast, finance, and manage massive investments in green infrastructure, energy markets are increasingly relying on smarter, more granular data that businesses like Sightline and Altruistiq provide. At the same time, structural initiatives such as the Mansion House Accord are working to unlock £50 billion of UK defined contribution (DC) pension scheme capital into private markets including VC by 2030—a potentially significant source of growth funding. With the UK and Europe facing a significant scale-up funding gap, enhancing domestic institutional participation would fund our own innovation with deeper pools of capital and enable more UK and European-founded companies to scale at home, providing knock-on benefits for European economies and the retirement outcomes for pension savers. Nonetheless, market caution currently remains, with global factors such as the US tariffs contributing to stock market volatility and slower funding concerns. In the face of these challenges, we have remained disciplined, concentrating capital allocation on companies with well-identified pathways to cash generation and value creation. Our Approach Our platform spans primary and secondary investing and primarily operates across three vehicles: Molten Ventures plc balance sheet, and our managed EIS and VCT funds. This hybrid structure allows us to combine institutional and retail capital pools, investing flexibly in a risk-adjusted, and tax-efficient manner for the managed EIS/ VCT funds. Prioritising Series A and B investments is a deliberate choice reflecting both the market opportunity and where Molten is best positioned to lead. The Series B stage, in particular, is where the risk-reward of commercial traction to upside is most compelling—it aligns with a gap to capital in the market that our experience and scale are uniquely equipped to address. While we are a generalist tech investor, this should not mask the depth of our specialist expertise. Each member of our investment team contributes deep domain understanding and, by investing across interlocking technology themes, we build insight into the intersection of product sales and customer buying behaviours. Our scale as a generalist meanwhile affords us both deep domain expertise within each team and a breadth of sub-sector exposure that surpasses many specialist funds. Molten finances some of the enabling technologies that powers advancement across whole industries: SimScale’s AI-driven simulation is redefining aerospace design, while HiveMQ’s messaging platform moves IoT data swiftly and reliably. Across fintech, climate, quantum, space and digital health, our thesis remains constant — to back the infrastructure of innovation by investing in the software foundations of entire sectors: Thought Machine is rebuilding core banking; Riverlane is crafting the operating system for quantum computing; whilst Ledger safeguards the blockchain economy. Investments and portfolio development remain central to our ongoing value creation. We are focused on both core and emerging portfolio development to ensure a strong, broad, and consistent pipeline of growth and realisations. Embedded alongside this, our expertise in Secondary investments is a core pillar of our strategy, enabling us to acquire later-stage high quality portfolios with strong value-creation potential. A standout example this year was our acquisition of a 97% stake in Connect Ventures’ Fund I, a 2012 Vintage Fund containing a portfolio of eight minority positions in businesses across Europe. Our portfolio Across our portfolio, we continue to see compelling investment opportunities and have made investments into Renew Risk, Sightline Climate, Deciphex, PocDoc, Concretene, One Data, and FintechOS. Our core portfolio represents approximately 61% of our Gross Portfolio Value. These are increasingly mature businesses which have achieved significant levels of recognition and success. The emerging portfolio meanwhile is the engine room of the future core. £302 million of its value comes from companies in which we have invested directly, the remainder from fund investments (including via the seed Fund of Funds programme, Earlybird, and secondaries), demonstrating our range of access across Europe to opportunities from many different sources. Opportunities We are building structures designed to enable institutional co-investment, amplifying our impact while maintaining a high-conviction portfolio. Additional capital through these structures, along with our managed EIS and VCT funds, help support our ability to access high-quality deal flow and consistent deployment in later-stage deals. Our Fund of Funds platform remains strategically important, but is becoming a smaller component part of our activities, whilst still providing critical insights into the ecosystem and access to market data and future deal opportunities in Europe’s seed ecosystem. Looking ahead We have started FY26 with good momentum, with a combined c.£30 million of proceeds from Lyst and Freetrade exits, and are making good progress in pursuit of all strategic priorities articulated in February 2025: • The Molten team has been strengthened with the addition of a new Investment Manager and further Associate to the Investment Team and the appointment of a Chief People Officer. • We are investing selectively into compelling new companies and to the development of the core and emerging portfolio. This includes four investments so far in FY26 including Hilo’s (formerly Aktiia) $42 million Series B. • We are supporting shareholder returns through our ongoing share buyback programme, with £24 million returned to date from the currently committed £30 million total; • Our focus on cost control and simplification continues, including with the Euronext Dublin delisting last month and a more concentrated Fund of Funds programme; and • We will provide further updates in relation to co-investment structures as the year progresses, including in respect of our proposed Molten East strategy. As detailed above, the share price discount to our NAV has been heavily influenced by external economic and geopolitical developments, and remains an area of acute focus. We are concentrating on execution and influencing what we are able to control. We are confident in our ability to make meaningful progress despite external impacts. Powered by clear strategic priorities, a solid capital base, and a highly experienced team with unrivalled reach across Europe’s tech landscape, Molten Ventures is ideally positioned to invest through market cycles and deliver value to our shareholders. Ben Wilkinson Chief Executive Officer
Portfolio review Disciplined portfolio management remains a key differentiator at Molten. This is seen across our investment strategy and the investment process as a whole. During the year, we deployed a total of £73 million including into new investments, like Deciphex and One Data, follow-ons in our existing portfolio, underlining our commitment to the likes of BeZero and SimScale, as well as into our acquisition of Connect Ventures Fund I. Portfolio valuations The Gross Portfolio Value as at 31 March 2025 is £1,367 million, a decrease of £12 million (1% decrease), net of investments, realisations and total fair value movement, from the 31 March 2024 value of £1,379 million. The £12 million decrease from prior year Gross Portfolio Value is the net impact of £135 million realisations offset by investments of £73 million, £72 million in fair value growth and £22 million in adverse foreign exchange movements. Our portfolio valuations process continues to follow the IPEV Guidelines and factors in the market movements in the period; we have seen movements in some of our key assets to reflect public market comparatives and increased prices in recent funding rounds. We continue to see overall revenue growth in our portfolio companies with forecast average revenue growth in the Core Portfolio of 36% (2025) and year-on-year growth of 45% (2024), reflecting the ongoing innovation and digital transition continuing across sectors. The Core Portfolio is made up of 17 companies representing 61% of the Gross Portfolio Value. The Core Portfolio constituents have been updated to reflect the realisations in the period of M-Files, Graphcore, Perkbox and Endomag. Freetrade is part of the core at 31 March 2025 and was sold after the year end. New companies
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