Fundraising across Europe in 2025 was the worst on record, yet a single London growth shop has closed a vehicle almost 40% bigger than the one before it.
Sprints stopped taking commitments at a hard cap of EUR 725M. The prior vehicle, Fund IV, finished at EUR 525M. Henrik Persson, a co-founder and managing partner, said the money came from pension funds, foundations, endowments and family offices, with over half of it already committed to deals. Marketplaces, financial services and software are the three areas absorbing it.
Two 2018 calls supply the track record. Sprints led the August round for Vinted worth EUR 50M and took part in Revolut’s $250M Series C. Since then both companies have repriced dramatically, with Revolut cited at $115B in a July secondary versus $75B in November 2025, and Vinted hitting EUR 8B in April after an EQT-led EUR 880M secondary. Flightradar24, where the firm holds 35%, adds another holding.
The exit that made the raise easy
Fin, once known as Intercom, is the cleanest evidence. Sprints wrote its check in February 2021, and Salesforce struck a deal in June for the AI customer-service business at roughly $3.6B, wrapping it on September 10.
Foundational model developers have been left alone on purpose, Persson said, since most still lack a proven business model. Application layer is where the AI bet lives: Fin’s support agent, credited by Salesforce with resolving 76% of interactions end to end, plus Planhat, an agentic customer platform.
Concentration is the method. Persson has put to investors that among roughly 35,000 European venture-backed startups only some 1% became unicorns, which is why Sprints keeps a short quality-checked list. PitchBook logged just EUR 12B spread over 148 European funds last year, none clearing EUR 1B, so that discipline is the product.
