Seedcamp has raised $320 million across two new funds, giving the London-born early-stage investor fresh firepower to back European founders from day one, and continue as they sccale.
The raise is split between a $220 million Core fund, Seedcamp VII, focused on first-cheque investments, and a $100 million Select fund designed to follow on into portfolio companies through Series B and beyond.
Founded in 2007 with a $2.5 million first fund, Seedcamp now manages more than $1 billion in assets. Its original aim, and one that remains to this day, is to back European tech companies before they become obvious. Its early bets include Revolut, Wise, UiPath, Synthesia and Fluidstack.
The firm says Fund III has returned more than 13x DPI to LPs, while Fund IV is sitting at more than 5x net TVPI.
Speaking to Pathfounders for a podcast interview (see above), Seedcamp partner Tom Wilson said the new fund lands at a moment when AI is creating opportunities “at almost every single layer of the stack.”
“You’d have to be living under a rock to not see what’s happening in terms of the underlying technical landscape around AI and the opportunities that’s creating,” Wilson said.
But the point, he argued, is not simply another AI fundraise. Seedcamp sees the next cycle moving beyond software alone and into harder, messier categories where AI touches the physical world.
“There are still huge opportunities across physical AI, where that is meeting robotics and actually dealing with the real world,” Wilson said. “We’re seeing things around where AI is interacting with the sciences, very hard-to-solve problems which we haven’t actually been able to solve with current uses of technology. Think about drug discovery or finding novel materials.”
That is a shift in emphasis, but not in model. Seedcamp is not suddenly presenting itself as a specialist deeptech fund. Wilson’s argument is that the firm is a stage specialist.
“We’re not a specialist fund, you’re exactly right,” he said. “We’re very, very focused on the stage that we invest. We are specialists in the early stage. That’s what Seedcamp has always done. That’s been core to our DNA and that will remain the case.”
To handle more technical categories, Seedcamp plans to lean on the network it has built since 2007: founders, operators, angels and portfolio companies with direct experience across multiple sectors.
“We’ve got a large portfolio built since 2007, and we’ve invested across pretty much all of these themes,” Wilson said. “That means we’ve got an amazing network to draw upon, whether it’s for diligence and getting a sense of the market, or supporting those companies post-investment and helping connect them to founders who are building in similar spaces.”
That is also where Seedcamp’s “collective brain” model comes in. Rather than partners operating as lone wolves, the firm says its seven-person investment team works across deals and portfolio companies, pooling what it has learned from nearly two decades of investing across cycles.
“We operate very much like a team,” Wilson said. “We move away from this idea of a super-partner attribution model where this person only works with these companies, and that person works with those companies. We can draw upon the experience each of us has had working with different companies across different sectors.”
Wilson said Seedcamp can also bring in angels or founders with sector-specific knowledge about a company, while still keeping its core edge: identifying the right founding team early.
“Sector expertise can be incredibly valuable,” he said. “But I think also just having a handle on what great looks like at the very beginning — and we’ve seen that across so many different sectors — matters. The founder and the founding team is probably the most important factor.”
The network piece is not just about diligence. Wilson argued Seedcamp has become one of the few European funds with something approaching YC-style scale, even if it never became a programmatic accelerator in the Y Combinator mould.
“When you look at the network that we’ve built now, in terms of the number of companies that we’ve backed, it is the closest thing to a YC-scale network,” he said. “The breadth of the portfolio now, and companies like Synthesia, Fluidstack, UiPath and Revolut scaling to thousands of employees themselves, means you have a nation to tap into. It’s almost like its own economy.”
That economy, he said, can matter at the earliest stages.
“If companies are looking for their first customers or even their first hires, there is an inbuilt network they can access by being a Seedcamp company,” Wilson said.
Seedcamp is also expanding its US team, positioning itself as a transatlantic bridge for European founders who need access to American capital, customers and commercial talent earlier in their journey. The strategy is not dissimilar to that of Entrepreneur First, although Seedcamp has been doing it longer and from a different starting point.
Wilson said the US push is “an evolution of what we’ve been doing for a long time,” with Seedcamp regularly spending time in the US to help portfolio companies scale into that market.
“Traditionally, that’s been the Series A or B stage, where companies have found market fit,” he said. “But increasingly we’re also seeing some companies want to make that step earlier. So we’re well placed to serve both of those scenarios.”
The geopolitics are more complicated. In an era of sovereign AI, not every company will want, or be able, to follow the same US expansion path. Wilson said some startups may win precisely by doubling down on sovereignty as their strategic edge, while others will need to move quickly into the US to access scale.
“Our view is that the company should go wherever the company needs to go to maximise its opportunity to build, hopefully, a market-defining company,” he said. “There will be opportunities for some businesses to double down on sovereignty and actually play that as the angle for why they win. And there will be others that recognise Europe is a fantastic market, but the US is at a different scale, and they need to move there really, really quickly.”
That tension is now part of the European venture landscape. Europe wants sovereign capability, but its most ambitious founders still need global capital, global customers and, often, the US market.
Recent Seedcamp investments include BioOrbit, Sunrise Robotics and Dust, pointing to where the firm sees the next cycle: AI intersecting with science, automation and real-world infrastructure.
There is also a capital question. Some AI, hardware and compute-adjacent companies now raise seed rounds that look more like growth rounds. Wilson acknowledged that some of these rounds will be challenging for Seedcamp economically, especially when starting rounds move into the tens or even hundreds of millions.
“I’d be lying if I said it’s not a conversation we have very regularly,” he said. “When you see some of these companies come out with rounds in the $50 million to $100 million range as a starting point, some of those rounds will be challenging for us from an economics perspective.”
But he said Seedcamp is open to larger seed rounds where the potential outcome justifies it.
“For businesses at that level, it has to be something which is $100 billion potential, really,” Wilson said. “A smaller stake can still have a material impact on the fund.”
Lessons learned
The lesson from the last cycle is not lost on the firm. Seedcamp was an early investor in Hopin, one of the pandemic’s fastest-growing startups, before its market sharply deflated. Wilson said Seedcamp still sees that investment as an example of backing the kind of ambitious founder it is looking for, but also as a warning about what happens when a company is priced for a world that does not last.
“Hopin was, at the time, the fastest-growing company in Europe, maybe the world,” he said. “It captured a huge amount of investor interest and raised from the tier one of tier one investors. The founder was an exceptional entrepreneur. We backed him at the very, very earliest stage.”
But, he added, the business was “fuelled by an era that didn’t continue.”
“That was a world where people thought everyone would stay online and experience events in the way they had to during Covid,” Wilson said. “But obviously, when Covid started to clear up, that wasn’t how people wanted to necessarily experience events.”
The broader lesson, he said, is about valuation discipline and optionality.
“When everything is up here, it’s fantastic,” Wilson said. “But when things start to slow down, you can limit the opportunities you have to navigate through that period if your valuation is extremely high.”
In a statement, Carlos Espinal, managing partner at Seedcamp, said the next 20 years of European tech will create companies that “define entire industries globally from day one.”
Reshma Sohoni, managing partner, added that the firm’s US expansion is designed to put founders “in the room where it matters from the very start.”
Wilson also pointed to London as a structural advantage for the new fund. While Seedcamp invests across Europe, he said the density of AI talent in the UK capital has become difficult to ignore.
“You’ve got arguably one of the most important companies in the whole AI space in Google DeepMind, and that being such a key pillar for Alphabet’s AI strategy, based in London,” Wilson said. “You’ve got new labs spinning out from that. You’ve got large hyperscalers setting up heavy research offices in London. And you’ve got the mash-up with some of the best universities in the world.”
He said London now has a flywheel that Europe did not have when Seedcamp launched.
“You’ve got companies spinning off from early employees, world-class experience, angel investors and new sources of capital coming into that ecosystem,” Wilson said. “The density within the AI community in London now is a phenomenal example of that — probably only matched by what’s happening on the west coast of America.”
For Seedcamp, the bet is that Europe’s next breakout companies will not just be SaaS businesses with better distribution. They will be AI-native, technically deeper, more global earlier, and often built around the messy interface between software and the real world.
The question is whether Europe’s original seed fund can keep doing what it did in 2007: spot the next category before everyone else has a name for it.
