Molten Ventures has banked £175M toward a £350M growth fund, with the British Business Bank putting up a £75M cornerstone that lets the listed UK investor start deploying while it courts the rest.
The fund is targeting £350M in total and will invest from Series B onward across the UK and Europe in sectors including space, AI, fintech, quantum, deeptech and hardware. Molten frames the vehicle as a bridge for founders who currently look overseas to scale, plugging what it calls the scale-up gap.
Wilkinson argued the state bank’s commitment validates Molten’s approach and the wider case for routing more long-lived institutional money into venture and growth vehicles, so that ambitious UK and European technology companies have the backing they need to scale.
Molten, a listed investor that backs Finnish satellite startup ICEYE and UK digital bank Zopa, manages £2B across its funds. The first close comes as the firm is reportedly in line to manage the £1B government-backed Scale Up Fund focused on Britain’s most promising scale-ups, with M&G Investments and Schroders also among those vying for the mandate, according to Sky News.
The British Business Bank has acted as principal investor in at least six VC funds over the past two years, making cornerstone commitments a recurring feature of the UK venture landscape as pension-linked capital flows into the asset class.
