Business Wire

DN Capital, Early Backer of Auto1, Shazam and OLX, Launches New $350m Fund to Shape Post-pandemic World

Share

DN Capital, one of Europe’s most established Venture Capital firms, today announces the launch of its latest $350m (£220m, €300m) fund. In a year which has already seen four of the DN Capital portfolio reach billion dollar-plus valuations, the firm’s Fund V will back the most ambitious early stage entrepreneurs across Europe, the UK and the US, who are creating businesses built on the pandemic-accelerated surge in digital adoption, and developing technologies critical to the global recovery.

Under the leadership of private equity and VC stalwarts Nenad Marovac and Steve Schlenker - who head up a senior team with a combined 100 years-plus of investment experience - DN’s predominantly young and ambitious team has a consistent track record of partnering with some of Europe’s most promising startups, long before they became market leaders.

‘Think Big and Global”

Known for their ‘Think Big and Global’ approach to startup investing, the firm was one of Shazam’s earliest backers in 2004, and helped guide the London-born app through to Apple’s acquisition in 2018. DN Capital led the Series A round in Auto1, which floated on the German Stock Exchange earlier this year at a valuation over $10 billion and over 150x their entry price per share. Just recently in July 2021 the online eyewear retailer MrSpex also saw a strong IPO debut, valuing the company at over $1.0bn. DN Capital’s first billion dollar exit was Endeca which was sold to Oracle for $1.1bn in 2011. In its current portfolio US remittance business Remitly, digital staffing company Jobandtalent and the online education company GoStudent are amongst the latest unicorns and have recently closed billion-dollar financing rounds.

Fund V, which was substantially oversubscribed, will double-down on DN Capital’s strategy of finding and supporting the next generation of global category leaders specifically in its core fields of software, fintech, marketplaces and the consumer internet. Roughly two thirds of the firm’s investments have been made in Europe, through its London and Berlin hubs, with the remainder originating in its Silicon Valley office in Menlo Park.

For the journey

With a proven ability to identify founders with unicorn potential at the earliest stages, a worldwide advisor network, a deep 20-year track record, and a reputation for insightful business model understanding, DN Capital has established itself as a persistent outlier in European and US venture capital. It has proven to give founders the best possible platform for their scale-up journey, while being able to introduce its portfolio teams to top tier growth-stage investors.

“We’ve always preferred to let our founders and their incredible numbers talk for us,” says Nenad Marovac DN Capital’s founder. “When we say we only partner with the best, we mean it. We spend vast amounts of time with entrepreneurs understanding the market, their team, their product and to get to the heart of what they’re trying to achieve, long before we even talk about money. Then we work together with the entrepreneurs as partners to help them where they need it.

“The launch of our fifth fund gives us further scope to uncover new entrepreneurs with the biggest, brightest global ambitions. We pride ourselves on the fact that we work as hard as founders do to help them build their businesses, and this is something that’s going to be even more crucial as we, as a society, look to come back stronger following the pandemic,” he says.

‘Post-COVID fund’

DN Capital co-founder and managing partner Steve Schlenker believes the full impact of the pandemic on society, work, and behaviours is only just being understood, and that—when it happens--the recovery around the world will be powered by innovation and technology. “There are tech founders across the globe right now on critical missions to accelerate this recovery and help address the needs, and solve the biggest problems, of the post-COVID world,” he says. “At DN Capital we are committed to supporting them to achieve these goals.”

Partner Thomas Rubens adds: “We have backed numerous category defining businesses and we know what it takes to scale global companies. We have the youth and ambition in our team, as well as the huge global network, to be right at the cutting-edge of the next important trends. Especially those trends born out of the drastic, era-defining change we are witnessing today.”

“From the very start of our journey, Nenad, who was on our Board throughout, and the wider DN Capital team, supported us not just with strategic advice but helped us launch in the US, hire senior executives—including myself—and also introduced Apple,” says Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s former CEO and executive chairman. “The founder-investor relationship can be make-or-break for early stage entrepreneurs.”

Hakan Koc, co-founder and CEO at Auto1, said: ““ Since DN led the Series A in Auto1 we always enjoyed working with Nenad, Steve and the team. From the outset they saw the potential in us and Auto1 Group and understood how best to support us.”

Felix Ohswald, co-founder and CEO of GoStudent, said: “Expanding into 18 markets in just over two years is never easy but with DN Capital on our side we knew we could do it and in forging the connection with our next investors - DST, Softbank and Tencent - they helped us to take that next big leap.”

--ENDS--

To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.

Contact information

Sayula Kirby
sayula@burlington.cc
+44 7909 985 621

About Business Wire

Business Wire
Business Wire



Subscribe to releases from Business Wire

Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Latest releases from Business Wire

“Unfortunately, not a lot has changed for girls in football.”19.3.2024 10:00:00 CET | Press release

PUMA CEO Arne Freundt and Alexandra Popp, the captain of the Germany national football team, spoke about leadership and the challenges of women in football. The video interview is part of the sports company’s digital annual report, which was published on March 18 on about.puma.com. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240319731548/en/ Voted Germany’s footballer of the year three times, Alexandra is one of the most prominent ambassadors for women’s football and she is known for her skill and charismatic leadership on the pitch. She started off her career playing in a mixed team, and she distinctly recalled how girls were often belittled and treated unfairly on the pitch. “Football is still pretty tough for girls. The boys in my team were cool. But our opponents were another story. They laughed at you. They said: look, they have a girl in their team, we’ll beat them easily,” Alexandra said. “Or when you play and you

Moove secures USD $100 million Series B round19.3.2024 09:01:00 CET | Press release

Moove, the global mobility fintech that democratises access to vehicle ownership for mobility entrepreneurs, today announces that it has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, valuing the company at $750m. Uber invested in the round alongside Mubadala, who led Moove’s previous funding round in 2023. The round will enable Moove to expand its customer focused revenue-based vehicle financing offering to 16 markets around the world by the end of 2025. A considerable portion of this expansion will focus on electric vehicles (EVs), which will lay the groundwork for a more sustainable and accessible mobility ecosystem for its customers worldwide. Ladi Delano, Founder of Moove,said: “Today’s announcement marks a significant milestone for us. When we founded Moove in 2020, we were motivated to solve the acute shortage of vehicle financing that over two million African mobility entrepreneurs faced. “This validation from Uber and others stands as a testament to the fact that what was on

Cielo Debuts First Generative AI for Talent Acquisition: CLO.ai19.3.2024 08:11:00 CET | Press release

Cielo, the world’s leading Talent Acquisition Partner, today debuts the first generative AI (GenAI) for talent acquisition: CLO.ai. Based on a new set of industry principles for responsible AI use, the intelligent tool allows talent leaders to maximize the power of GenAI for better hiring outcomes fast, while protecting candidates' experiences. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240319387916/en/ “In a competitive, noisy market with many emerging, and sometimes unproven, methodologies and technologies, Cielo has established a responsible approach to artificial intelligence in human resources & talent acquisition. At Cielo, their data scientists, engineers, and talent acquisition experts collaborate to improve GenAI models, assess data for relevancy and accuracy, and operate in a secure environment, thus contributing to an enhanced experience for their clients and candidates. They are not only navigating the landsc

AMWC 2024: Galderma to Share New Data From Its Leading Injectable Aesthetic Portfolio19.3.2024 07:00:00 CET | Press release

Galderma will present the latest updates from its broad portfolio of clinically-proven and holistic range of aesthetic treatments at the 22nd Aesthetic & Anti-Aging Medicine World Congress (AMWC) on March 27-29, 2024. The diversity of Galderma’s portfolio, designed to meet the individual needs of healthcare professionals and patients, will be showcased in 16 research posters – including data from the world’s most diverse range of fillers (Restylane®), leading neuromodulator portfolio (RelabotulinumtoxinA, Alluzience® and Azzalure®) and original biostimulator (Sculptra®) – as well as two symposia and a booth, which will host an array of live demonstrations and ‘Meet the Expert’ sessions. “Galderma’s extensive activities at AMWC demonstrate our commitment to pushing the boundaries of injectable aesthetics, to anticipate and address tomorrow’s needs today. By evolving and expanding our existing treatments, developing new innovations, and conducting cutting-edge research into the groundbre

NetApp Empowers Customers to Securely “Talk to Their Data” in Collaboration with NVIDIA18.3.2024 23:00:00 CET | Press release

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced it is collaborating with NVIDIA to advance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for generative AI applications. The new collaboration directly connects the just-announced NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices—coming to the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform for development and deployment of production-grade AI applications, including generative AI—to exabytes of data on NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure. Every NetApp ONTAP® customer will now be able to seamlessly “talk to their data” to access proprietary business insights without having to compromise the security or privacy of their data. Enterprises want to leverage publicly available large language models to talk directly and securely to their corporate data with assurance that their private data will never be accessible outside the enterprise. Until now, enterprises that wanted to build internal chatbots, co-pilots, and applications that leverage corporate knowledge were faced with co

In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.

Visit our pressroom
HiddenA line styled icon from Orion Icon Library.Eye