Eileen Burbidge, one of the best-known figures in UK venture capital, is back with NFG, a new early-stage, Solo GP, fund targeting around £20m to make the first institutional cheques into startups.
Burbidge has already held a first close for NFG, backed by UK venture firm Thema and a Singapore-based family office, and has begun signing term sheets and writing cheques. The fund is targeting £20m ($26.7m), although she says it could ultimately reach around £30m ($40.2m).
At that level of course, the fund is bound to be targeting the early stage, and going as ‘early’ as it gets.
“The thesis is therefore being the first check, being very early,” Burbidge told the Pathfounders podcast. “I just want to work really, really early with founding teams as they’re getting off the ground and as they’re getting started.”
That could, she said, mean investing alongside friends, family and angels, and ideally before larger institutional investors arrive.
In some ways, NFG takes Burbidge back to where she started with Passion Capital in 2011 (a story I wrote for TechCrunch), when even the term “pre-seed” barely existed. Only four years later, she was being talked about as the ‘queen of British VCs’.
“When we started Passion, ‘pre-seed’ didn’t exist as a term,” she said. Referring to the new trend in VC: “I’ve heard some people talk about inception checks or inception rounds,” she added.
Burbidge says NFG will be a generalist fund rather than chasing a particular sector or investment theme. The emphasis will be firmly on the founder.
“I am going to be a generalist, sort of no sector-specific thesis, and I’m going to be 100% founder-led,” she said. “If I meet a compelling founder, I’ll go and follow one of them, whatever they’re doing.”
Speaking to the Sunday Times last week, Burbidge also said this amounted to “No Jerks” or, in a British parlance, “No F*cking Gits” as I suggested on the podcast.
And Burbidge clearly sees an opportunity created by the current AI investment frenzy.
While she admitted that foundational AI remains important, she argues that the application layer in various verticals remains a rich seam to mine.
“This rush to invest in foundational AI and this rush to invest in language models and everything else, which is extremely important, don’t get me wrong, but requires a lot more capital, I think does mean that there might be great businesses, fantastic founders doing other things,” she said.
Those businesses will inevitably use AI, she added, but may still be “overlooked because everyone else is trying to chase or go after the foundational pieces of AI.”
AI lowers the barrier to starting up
Burbidge also thinks AI is changing who can become a founder, and how quickly they can get started.
“It’s definitely faster and quicker to get something spun up,” she said. Prototyping, putting products in front of users and testing demand can now happen far faster, even if building something secure and sustainable still requires capital and time.
This means the founder pool is going to get broader.
“We’re seeing younger founders come through,” she said, including people skipping or leaving academia. But the effect is also going in the other direction.
“I also think it’s bringing in older founders as well, or it’s just bringing greater diversity across the board.”
In other words, people who previously thought they lacked the technical expertise to launch a company can now build early products using AI tools, she said.
“You’re seeing younger, you’re seeing older, you’re seeing repeat [entrepreneurs].”
From Passion to NFG
Burbidge’s track record gives NFG considerably more weight than any ‘fresh’ first-time £20m fund started by rookies.
She co-founded Passion Capital in 2011 with Robert Dighero and Stefan Glaenzer, helping establish the firm as one of London’s best-known seed investors. Its portfolio has included Monzo, GoCardless, Marshmallow and Butternut Box.
Passion also managed to deal with the huge fallout, after it had to fire Glaenzer, following a sexual assault charge in 2012. Although found guilty and spared jail, he was registered on the Sex Offenders Register for 7 years. In March 2023 he was cleared of a separate incident of alleged sexual assault.
After weathering that storm, and according to Passion Capital itself, the fund generated a 23% net IRR and 2.5x DPI since 2011, backing more than 100 companies and producing five fintech unicorns. The firm also returned €72m to investors during 2025.
Burbidge remains involved with Passion’s historical funds and portfolio even as she starts NFG.
“As one of the co-founding partners of Passion, it was my baby as well, and so I feel really protective of it,” she said. “And I’m proud of what we did.”
She still holds her existing Passion board seats, including at Monzo, and continues working with companies from its previous funds.
“I am still part of Passion, by the way, in terms of the historical funds and the sort of trailing commitments or the legacy investments,” she said.
Rather than seeing NFG as competing with her former firm, Burbidge argues that the European ecosystem simply needs more early-stage capital.
“I think it’s just better for the ecosystem for there to be even more choices and more opportunities and more early-stage funds for founders to choose from.”
NFG will also be structured differently to Passion.
Burbidge intends to run it as a solo GP fund, allowing her to operate more like an angel investor but with greater firepower.
“I am looking to be a solo GP,” she said. “I do want to be able to therefore behave like an angel would.”
Between leaving active investing at Passion and starting NFG, Burbidge had already returned to making angel investments. NFG, she said, allows her to continue that style of investing “but with a bit more of a meaningful cheque.”
She is also well aware that claiming to be “founder-friendly” has become something of a venture cliché.
“Of course everyone’s going to say they’re founder-friendly. Why would they not?” she said.
For Burbidge, the term is less about giving founders free rein and more about knowing when an investor should get out of the way.
“That doesn’t mean, by the way, just letting them do whatever they want,” she said. “It does mean hopefully being aligned from the start, supporting them with their ambition and potentially just not adding overhead if that’s not needed.”
“If in the early stages my value can be to leave them alone, to maybe run screen or a filter from other people, or to help them be heads down and focus, I’ll do that.”
The aim, she says, is to remain aligned when the bigger decisions arrive on things like governance and and further investment.
“I understand what it takes to start and run a business, and hopefully I therefore don’t add the sort of net-negative things.”
A changed startup landscape
Burbidge enters the market at a very different moment from the launch of Passion 15 years ago.
“The ecosystem is far richer, deeper and broader than it was in 2011,” she said.
Europe now has founders emerging from previous generations of scale-ups, experienced operators, and serial entrepreneurs. It also has a much larger pool of domestic and US capital hunting European deals.
“You’re seeing cohorts that were with companies that had become unicorns, you’re seeing founders do it again, go back and be serial entrepreneurs,” she said.
“It’s to everyone’s benefit that we have more fantastic talent starting businesses.”
It’s a long way from 2011, and the heady days of Passion Capital’s $69m fund raise during the Web 2.0 boom.
But one thing is for certain: Burbidge being ‘back in the game’ as a ‘wild-card’ Solo GP, and as someone who spotted so many unicorns incredibly early, she is sure to make things more interesting in the UK and wider European venture and startup scene.