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A venture firm founded by 28-year-old British podcaster Harry Stebbings has raised a new $400mn fund for early stage start-ups, vaulting him into the ranks of Europe’s top tech investors.
The latest backers of 20VC, the London-based fund led by Stebbings, include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner and dozens of tech founders and investors.
The fundraising comes on the back of the popularity of his tech podcast, The Twenty Minute VC, which has recently featured OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Shein chair Donald Tang and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
“We leverage media to be the best investor,” Stebbings said.
20VC’s latest investment comes as a report by HSBC and market tracker Dealroom projects that UK-based VCs are “on track” to raise more than $12bn in new funds by the end of this year, surpassing even 2021’s boom-time record of $11.5bn. Index Ventures, Atomico, Accel and Balderton Capital have all raised new funds this year. The figures, however, are still dwarfed by the sums raised by VCs in Silicon Valley.
20VC is one of a new crop of European firms including Plural and Blossom Capital that is taking on the region’s more established investors, as the tech industry adapts to a more complex funding environment after the pandemic-era boom.
“$400mn at this time is a tough amount to raise,” Stebbings said. His podcast, which gets tens of millions of downloads each month, is “a huge magnet for the best founders”, he said.
Guests on the show are allowed to review interviews before they air, Stebbings said. “I think people do their best work when they feel comfortable.” He routinely employs his social-media production team to produce custom clips pitching his fund to founders, to help him win deals.
However, a successful podcast alone is “not enough” to create the “real differentiation” needed to raise such a large fund, Stebbings said.
Since raising its last $140mn fund in 2021, 20VC has expanded to include three “sub funds” run by former start-up executives and managers, focused on sales, growth and product development, to help source deals and advise portfolio companies.
New capital continues to flow into tech funds despite a generally slow pace of dealmaking among private tech companies around the world, especially in later-stage start-ups, outside of the increasingly frothy artificial intelligence market.
Meanwhile, there have been few large-scale acquisitions or stock market listings this year to allow VCs to realise their investments and return funds to their own backers.
“Determining sustainable value in this crop of AI companies is really hard,” Stebbings said. “I’ve never seen companies scale revenues as fast as these AI companies are . . . The single biggest question is: is this sugar-high revenue or is this sustainable enduring value?”
20VC has backed AI coding start-up Poolside, alongside social media profile page-maker Linktree and games developer Tripledot.
Stebbings acknowledges being caught up in the excesses of the most recent tech boom, when he invested in start-ups including virtual events start-up Hopin, which was valued at as much as $7.8bn in 2021 but sold most of its assets for tens of millions of dollars last year, as well as once-buzzy social media apps Clubhouse and BeReal.
Stebbings said he had learned investing in consumer tech was “very hard”, because users could be so fickle. The most “brilliant companies” in 20VC’s portfolio were “boring as hell”, he said.