Ten highlights from 2020
By: Chris Smith
Tags: Investing, Top 10, 2020, Founders, Venture Capital

TL;DR 2020 😱 What a strange year. Despite the challenges, I am overwhelmed with a sense of feeling incredibly fortunate that we have been able to continue investing, supporting our founders and building the firm. It’s tricky to sum up the past 12 months into just ten highlights, but here they are!

#1 Growing the team

To continue finding and backing the best founders in the world, we bolstered our team with three fantastic hires who all started with us in September:

Jeevan Sunner

Jeevan Sunner joined as an Associate. She wrote an excellent piece about her first three months at Playfair here and has had an incredible impact already, not least with FFOH. She also co-hosts a podcast — When Unicorns Fly— which had a successful debut season and is shortly recording Season 2.

Elise Congram

Elise Congram joined as Office Manager and was promoted to Founders Studio & Office Manager last month to reflect her new broader role. Elise has been overseeing a refurbishment of Warner Yard, taking care of our founders and the team, and making sure we all stay Covid-secure in the office.

Jeremy Luzinda

Jeremy Luzinda took over from Alexandra Baranowski as our next Off-Cycle Analyst. We really appreciate Alie’s hard work and support — particularly during lockdown 1.0 — and are delighted to have Jeremy onboard. He wrote a thoughtful post about why he joined Playfair here.

As ever, we’re incredibly grateful to Federico-Pirzio Biroli for his constant support and encouragement that has allowed us to continue investing in the firm 😍

#2 Working with our founders

We would not be here if it wasn’t for our founders.

This year it has been a real privilege to work with such a brilliant group of people to navigate through a unique challenge together.

I’m proud of the way every single founder in every company has reacted and I hope that as investors — as coaches — our support has helped make this year just a little bit easier.

I particularly want to thank Melissa Morris and Ishani Patel at Lantum, Rayna Patel and Georgina Kirby at Vinehealth, and Matt Wilson at uMed for doing huge amounts of work, both through their companies and volunteering outside of work, to support the NHS.

Legends.

#3 Closing deals

Since my highlights post in 2019, we have closed a further 10 deals, taking us to a total of 14 out of Fund II. We’re extremely proud and excited to be working with such a talented group of world class founders:

❤️ #playfairfamily ❤️

#4 Closing follow-on rounds

We were delighted to support:

Thought Machine in their $125m Series B alongside Eurazeo Growth, Draper Esprit, IQ Capital, Backed, Lloyds Banking Group, SEB and British Patient Capital

uMed in their $4.8m seed round alongside Albion VC, Delin Ventures, Silicon Valley’s 11.2 Capital and several leading angel investors

We also saw our Fund I portfolio companies close some significant rounds in challenging market conditions:

Chronext raised $65m of financing led by Slingshot Ventures with participation from existing investors Partech, Endeit Capital, Tengelmann Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Capnamic and NRW.Bank

Onfleet raised a $14m Series A led by Kennet Partners

Ravelin raised a $20m Series C led by Draper Esprit with participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, BlackFin Tech and Passion Capital

with participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, BlackFin Tech and Passion Capital Seldon raised a £7.1m Series A round co-led by AlbionVC and Cambridge Innovation Capital with participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners and Global Brain

Stripe raised a $600m round as part of their Series G from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Alphabet’s GV and Sequoia Capital which valued the company at $36bn

#5 Celebrating an exit

We were also delighted for Jan Erik, Johan, Peter and Yubin to sell their company to Facebook and to celebrate our 4th exit from Fund I.

#6 Taking FFOH virtual

Our Female Founder Office Hours started small at Warner Yard. With the switch to a virtual event and a partnership with Tech Nation and Microsoft for Startups, things went a bit crazy! I’m so grateful to everybody involved 🙏

Jeevan wrote a great blog post covering the story and our plans, but so far FFOH has delivered:

2,000 pitching/mentoring sessions

pitching/mentoring sessions For 490 founders

founders With 105 investors

And we are just getting started…

#7 Supporting global events

We learned so much from moving our FFOH event online that we decided to open source our playbook for funds who want to hold similar events around the world.

It has been amazing to see female founder events take off in the US, Israel and SE Asia, as well as expanding to include other underrepresented founders.

I’d encourage funds to contact us if they wish to access this playbook and launch events in their ecosystems.

#8 Receiving industry recognition

We were thrilled to be recognised as Europe’s Hottest Seed Fund 2020 at The Europas.

#9 Working on our Founders Studio

Elise has been working non-stop these past few months to get our Founders Studio ready for the first few ‘beta team days’ this side of the New Year.

We’re excited to make this Covid-secure space available to our founders and their teams, particularly at a time when it makes little sense for startups to have long term lease commitments, but when getting the team together for a day can be a much needed boost to morale and productivity.

Sneak preview

Elise and Joe will have much more on our plans for this space next year.

#10 Enjoying two offsites

Kenya: Before Covid-19, when we had not heard the term ‘social distancing’