Molten Ventures Ord Stock

[Audio Gap] There's now 400 unicorns in the market. And when we talk about secondaries, that's quite an important point because illiquid parts of the market clearly need liquidity. And as companies stay private for longer, that's very much a trend that we feel we can benefit from and support.

Globally, we're in the midst of this generational shift in technology and Europe has been for many years, a key generator of IP. And so the opportunity for us to invest in these businesses is very profound. The main theme that we're going to be talking to is these structural shifts that are occurring. And I think that's a very important point because these aren't cyclical, they're structural. And it's led to the recognition of the need for European sovereignty and resilience in its defense, but also in the technology assets that it owned. So the underpinning assets, be that cloud computing or be that payment infrastructure, there's a lot more focus on this and a lot more capital coming into this ecosystem.

There still exists a structural gap to capital in the market, and this is exactly in the space where Molten is investing at the growth stage. We're thinking sort of GBP 20 million-plus tickets. So our strategy of growing the plc balance sheet, but also growing our third-party assets is really to ensure we can consistently address this part of the market.

So how do we take advantage of those opportunities? We've built a platform at Molten. We have 3 strategies for investing. The direct strategy has always been the core of what we do. And that's Series A investing, but most of our capital going to Series B companies and the opportunities where the go-to-market strategies have been proven. Again, that scaling gap where deeper tickets of investment are required.

We believe that venture is a distinct asset class. So even if it's a pure portfolio approach for investment managers, we think that owning some access to private companies that are behaving in a differentiated way to other parts of the listed portfolio is an important factor. And there's clearly some resilience, which is applied to that. And Venture has outperformed other asset classes over the long term. As we know with venture, there's a big dispersion amongst managers. So putting your capital with a manager that has a 20-year track record through these cycles, I think is a compelling conversation.

We also have our secondary funds, which, as I mentioned, we have a deep experience here of investing in this part of the market. We have invested in funds -- entire funds and bought out those positions. We've done that with Seedcamp in their Fund I and II back in 2017, 2018, same with Earlybird in 2019 on their Fund IV and the Digital East fund. And those deals were really to give us access to key assets that we thought were attractive in the Seedcamp portfolio, the main one was TransferWise.

And then in the Earlybird portfolio, there were Peak Games and smava and UiPath. So it gives you a sense of how we look at the portfolios and then we fundamentally value those underlying businesses, and that's how we price these deals. But it's providing liquidity to an illiquid part of the market that is the key factor here. And to do that well, you need the ability to price the assets, but you also need the network to be able to access the deal flow, and that's something that we've had consistently.

We've also done the same with individual assets, Trustpilot being a great example where in 2016, we own 4% of Trustpilot, and we built that up to 14% by the time of their own IPO, and then we subsequently sold down as it was a public vehicle. So the ability to get access to later-stage, very strong businesses that have a financial profile, which should deliver returns in a shorter period of time is something that's compelling. We think now with 400-plus unicorns in the market is a very deep opportunity. So that's why we've added more strength to the team with the secondaries team we brought in this year. And that team is going to raise third-party capital for that strategy as well. And you'll see moreof that team in the market going after these opportunities. So that should generate for us more deal flow.

There's a network effect that occurs between these 3 strategies of Fund of Funds investing where we invest at the earlier stages as an LP into funds and we get visibility of the underlying companies, and we have proprietary deal flow and access, but also the technical expertise to call upon of those GPs feeding into our direct strategy and that augments the secondary strategy. So I think it's important that when we use the word platform, we think about these 3 component parts being greater than the sum of their individual parts.

So just touching on those strategic priorities that we outlined slightly more than a year ago. And what I'm proud to say is that as we go through the presentation today, you'll see the significant demonstration of progress that we've had, the execution we've had against these priorities. So driving the NAV growth clearly has been an important factor. We've seen that in the results today, but also in the announcement this morning with ICEYE. Scaling our third-party capital, we've been very pleased to announce a cornerstone investor for our growth fund, but also progress with the Molten East fund. And as I mentioned, the secondary team will be expanding that capital base with their strategy and then redeploying our capital into NAV accretive uses of capital.

I think that's critical for us is that we really think around all those different opportunities that we're creating across the strategies as well as having buybacks for our own shares, which ultimately allow us to narrow the share price discount to NAV. So with that, I'm going to pass you over to the main event. I'm going to leave you to Andy to go through the financial highlights.

The main event is not often I get called that, which is good. Okay. So welcome, everyone. I'm Andrew Zimmermann. I'm the CFO of Molten. This is my second of these annual results now. And this has been an even more interesting and active year than the first one. So without any further ado on to that. too quick. So 3 main themes that I really wanted to cover. The first one is obviously accelerating portfolio fair value growth. So that's 13% for the year, starting to pick up a bit after '23 and '24, so -- and '25 to a degree where it started to recover, accelerating much more back towards venture type returns, which is what we want to see in the portfolio as well as a long track record. We start -- need to start achieving that in discrete years. And then obviously, the ICEYE news today is a really good start for FY '27.

We've also maintained strong realizations, which Ben alluded to there in terms of the cycle and being able to recycle into NAV accretive opportunities. So that has been really important to keep that going. And again, we've also announced this year, there have been some partial realizations in Revolut and then also ICEYE today as part of that deal. So again, we're on track already for this year, which is important.

And then finally, that point about narrowing the share price discount to NAV. Obviously, a year ago, I think our share price was GBP 2.57. So it's recovered a lot from there. It obviously still has a long way to go. We've pushed the bar a little bit higher by pushing the NAV per share a bit higher, but I think that's a great thing. So obviously, we'd like to see more share price growth continue and start to compress that NAV again.

So I'll call out individual points as we go along. So 13% gross portfolio net fair value movement, obviously, well up on the 5% previously, really starting to see that traction start to build, mainly driven by the core, and I'll come on to that in a bit more detail. GBP 16 million of FX benefit, which obviously helped there as well this year, comprised of nearly GBP 300 million of write-ups and about GBP 120 million of valuation reduction. So there's always that net movement, but obviously, really positive that's substantially up.

So that's meant our gross portfolio value and net asset value is well up again on the 31st of March last year, GBP 1.5 billion and just over GBP 1.3 billion. The cash proceeds from realization, again, building on the previous year where we had GBP 135 million. We had exits -- full exits in List and Freetrade and then partial realizations in Revolut and ICEYE and then some other miscellaneous smaller ones. So that's obviously driven that forward. Important point to note is that they were all at or above the holding value. So that again just proves out that our valuations are robust.

We invested GBP 89 million of that cash in the year. So we welcomed Duel, General Index, Polymodels Hub and MAIA to the portfolio. We also did follow-ons into some of our exciting existing portfolio companies like Modo and Manna, and they're up in the core now. So again, we'll come on to that. But Modo, for example, we led the Series B in that round, which is exactly the space that we want to be playing in, in direct investment. And we also did a secondary in the SpeedInvest continuation fund. So again, mentioning that earlier in terms of the secondary strategy and investing in the things that we think are the most NAV accretive opportunities.

To that end, we also did GBP 38 million of share buybacks in the year, and our share price was a little bit lower and the discount was wider. We still have about GBP 4 million of the most recent announced buyback tranche left to run. But at the moment, the discount has been compressed and the price has been higher. So we see other investment opportunities as being more NAV accretive ones, and we've been deploying into that.

And then OpEx, we reduced that year-on-year. So our general and admin expenses were just over GBP 24 million, which is down 14% on the previous year. That cost efficiency is important. We would want that to not be a drag on the return but we're still maintaining investment in quality. So the secondaries team are a good example. We're being very efficient on our platform, but making sure we've got the right people in place to help us scale and build that sort of third-party AUM business. And you can see at 0.5%, we're well below our 1% target.

And then finally, we ended the year GBP 52 million of cash. Obviously, post year-end proceeds of Revolut are not included in that. So there's another GBP 70 million or so of exit proceeds that have been added to that since. In addition, there's about GBP 24 million of EIS and VCT cash that's not been deployed and an undrawn RCF of GBP 60 million. So we're in a really good solid cash position able to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. And that means we ended the financial year with a NAV per share of 760p, which is at 13% up. Obviously, ICEYE news today adds another nearly 120p per share to that, not this financial year, obviously, but substantial.

So this is just starting to show that our fair value growth is starting to pick up. So we target 20% return through the cycle and our record is 26% return. But obviously, we can't keep standing up year after year and not be hitting the 20% and just talk about the long track record. So that is really good to see that starting to spike up. Again, ICEYE news today on its own is probably about 15% in terms of obviously, in FY '27.

So with the rest of the portfolio traction, that should start to be accelerating up, which is obviously really important, obviously, driven by macro tailwinds as well as the performance of the company. So some of the sectors like space, AI, quantum are really benefiting from that sort of theme of European sovereignty and resilience. So that is those comps are helping to drive the valuations as well as the commercial traction of those companies.

So it's the core that's really driven the fair value returns. And you can see that nearly $1 billion of the $1.5 billion gross portfolio value is those core companies. It's about 16 companies, nearly 65% of the portfolio valuating. They are obviously the more mature companies, the ones that are really the winners, if you like, the Revolut, Ledger, ICEYE, and they're really driving returns and accelerating. That 26% is much more what you would expect again for venture returns.

So that's really pleasing to see that come back by the biggest companies in the portfolio, obviously driving that. And a multiple on invested capital of 3.3x. And again, if you add in the ICEYE news from today, that's more like a 4x. So again, really positive. And then the remaining part of the portfolio are what we call the emerging, which are the ones that are growing up and to be the next version of the core and smaller investments, some legacy ones and then the fund investments, which is part of the pipeline, which Ben alluded to.

So the performance in that was a little bit more mixed. The emerging portfolio are obviously the smaller holdings. Quite often, they're not as old. The venture model is high risk, high return. So there will be some valuation write-downs as we go along. There was about GBP 50 million of that written down in that emerging portfolio, which is over 80 companies, but really driven by 3 companies with specific events, Robin AI and Schüttflix, which is a German sort of working capital logistics business, which again is just not quite taken off. The German government have kind of pivoted their spending from construction to defense. So that one wasn't quite in the right place.

But overall, the traction is good, and there are some positive companies there, which I'll come on to. The Fund of Funds, which is our early stage, our seed stage pipeline, really positive return in the year, which is pleasing to see because those are the ones that are going to drive some of the graduation, if you like, into our emerging portfolio. We use those relationships with the Fund of Funds managers to build and look for the next opportunities for those Series A and Bs. And then the rest of the portfolio was positive as well.

So a good overall return, slightly negative overall, but obviously well outweighed by the core. And just a pleasing point to note is that Manna and Modo Energy graduated, if that's the right term, from the emerging into the core in the year. So that's really positive. Modo Energy, we led the Series B. We've got a really strong conviction in that company. Manna, we've backed for a long time, as you probably heard me gone about it many times. So that's really pleasing to see them start to hit their inflection points and grow and us put capital into them that enables them to elevate into the core.

Realizations, again, now that's more than GBP 250 million since March 2024. If you add on the Revolut one, that's another $70 million or so and then a nice secondary, which will happen later in the year, which we talked about. Again, our average return over the cycle, 15%, well above our target of 10%, but same point as the fair value growth. You want to be achieving that target in the discrete years now. So really pleasing to see where we're at for '25 and '26 and then a really good start already in '27. So we're confident with the progress for that. And that obviously really drives our evergreen model in terms of generating cash back to the balance sheet to invest in NAV accretive opportunities for shareholders.

And then finally, the [ fan ], I still think this is the best way to present this, but the scale on the right is obviously slightly different to the left because the companies on the left are particularly large in terms of the share of the core. Revolut, obviously, great commercial traction. Customer keeps growing. Customers are over 70 million now. Revenue is growing still really fast. It's profitable. So that one has been valued off commercial marks, but also supported by GBP 75 billion secondary. So happy with that. Again, lots of good news flow about that one if you read in the press, it sounds like they're maybe building towards another secondary.

Ledger, which is the crypto hardware, wallet software business, really good tailwinds in that sector. So their comps were helped a lot by that. Ledger itself has been performing really well, revenue growing well, probably a little bit quieter with the war in the Middle East now and people not doing as much Bitcoin trading as they were, but still on a really good growth trajectory.

ICEYE, I don't really need to say too much about that. It's obviously exceptional commercial traction, really good, very happy with that one. That green one will now obviously accelerate massively.

Aircall is an interesting one because that's voice telephony customer relationship software, the kind of thing that you think might be eaten up by AI, but actually, they've been buying AI companies and building it into their product, really sort of embedding themselves with customers. And they specialize in sort of smaller, medium businesses. So more than 26,000 clients growing 25% a year revenue-wise. So actually a good example of how AI can be an opportunity for these companies. So that one we're really pleased with.

CoachHub was our only sort of write-down really in the core portfolio. That's obviously enterprise software. Coaching maybe isn't the top priority for some businesses when they come to the crunch. So their growth had really slowed down a bit. They've done a bit of a reorg and a restructure and they're building back to growth. So we'd hopefully see that one start to climb back up.

Isar Aerospace, there was an announcement today about the new round investment in which Molten are one of the participants. Again, space, really a hot topic. So they are benefiting from good comps in that sector as well as well as great technical progress. They actually have their next launch scheduled for next week. I think they have their launch window. So keep an eye on that. That's a huge technical milestone for them.

And then finally, I would just call out Riverlane, I think -- which is our quantum error correction software one, again, describes how we play across the sector where we're in that middle layer rather than the actual quantum computers, the error correction software that plays across all of them. It's making really good technical progress and again, really benefiting from benchmarks and public comp multiples and lots of M&A in that space.

So pleasing overall, you can see a lot of green in the chart, which is what we want. The yellow at the end is Modo and Manna, which is our investment into them. So again, really pleasing to see them come up into the core. So I think overall, really just a really strong year for FY '26. Good portfolio growth, NAV per share growth, disciplined realizations, again, some progress on narrowing the discount, which obviously we're still going to work on, obviously, to this higher NAV now. And then the focus on the current year, which Ben is going to come on to in a lot more detail is about building this third-party platform and really continuing to execute on all the things that we said we would do.

So I'm going to go through a bit on the portfolio. And one of the points I want to reiterate is how we approach our investment thesis. As people know, we invest across 4 broad sectors of tech, consumer enterprise, hardware, deep tech and digital health. But they also cover these broad subsectors.

And so we have domain expertise within the group for each of these sectors, fintech, cyber, quantum, energy transition, space, crypto and blockchain and health tech. And these are all of the structural drivers of growth that are globally disrupting markets. And we feel that our investors should get exposure to these. And it's almost impossible for them to get that exposure through the public markets, certainly to the same degree. And it's very pleasing today when we have news of a company like an ICEYE, where we've been investing since 2018 and people can start to see that growth coming through as those structural shifts emerge as key drivers for growth in those sectors.

Balance of the portfolio, we believe, is very important. When we're investing in these companies, it's for the long term. So the average hold of our investments is going to be 8 to 10 years, let's say. And therefore, balancing your investments across those subsectors is going to be an important feature. And I think that it allows us to be more consistent about how we can realize assets, more consistent about where those returns are going to come from, effectively providing a portfolio of more shots on goal. So that kind of structural growth themes that are reshaping our economies is really where we're trying to invest as a venture investor, investing for the upside.

The other factor that's relevant to that is, of course, AI. We've seen a huge amount of disruption in the public markets from AI taking market share from SaaS businesses or the perceived threat certainly. And we've done an analysis of our own portfolio to see where that might be disrupted. And the work that we've done identifies actually a majority of our portfolio will have opportunities from AI. We think that the public markets have clearly had a moment where the pendulum swings too far one way and everything gets tied with the same brush.

But when you actually look at these underlying companies where they have enterprise SaaS models, quite a few of those businesses will still have resilience in the events where they have critical client relationships, critical infrastructure for those enterprises that they're servicing, but also where they are bringing proprietary data sets. And so we provided that lens to our own portfolio. And once we've had that investment across those subsectors and particularly where we like to invest in the enabling layers of technology, you can see that the majority of our portfolio is a net beneficiary. So that's 75% we anticipate. This is where AI compounds an existing data or distribution or workflow advantage.

We have 15% of the portfolio that we have categorized as manageable headwinds. This is where there's opportunities and threats. Andy outlined Aircall is a good example of that. And if the companies react well, then we believe that, that can embed their existing customer relationships. And then the final we see as neutral is the 8%. Why do the winners keep winning? What is it that compounds in this area? So for us, those infrastructure layers, for example, a Thought Machine for core banking systems or Form3, which is payment systems or even something like a Riverlane, which is software across all of the quantum layers, these aren't going to be disrupted by AI. They can add AI into their development.

And so the kind of 0 to 1 is what we see as being accelerated with AI, but the 1 to 10 is those governance relationships, those customer relationships. And I think the ownership of that customer and relationship, all that critical infrastructure is what is going to be a point of differentiation, both in private markets, but also in public markets and we see that across our portfolio.

So I actually believe that our portfolio is well positioned to benefit from this. I think that strategy of investing across subsectors and having infrastructure layers and enabling layers of technology is proving to be very critical at this point in time, and that favors our portfolio that we've built.

So just touching on some of the drivers of that core growth that Andy spoke to over GBP 1 billion in value in the core or just under GBP 1 billion of value, sorry, in the core, but 2/3 of the portfolio value occurring there. These companies are more mature, and therefore, we're seeing the growth slowing to some extent, but that growth of forecast 30% is still well above what you would see in public markets. This is underpinned by strong gross margins at over 70% and 7 of the 17 companies in the core are profitable. So it's very pleasing to see that resilience in that group and the continued growth and that is driving those gross portfolio value and NAV returns.

Andy has touched on the emerging in some detail, so I won't spend too much time, but we've given a bit more clarity on the GBP 200 million of direct investments, how they break down in terms of their revenue maturity and also seeing the consistency of how we invest across each of these subsector themes. It's a longer tail of companies, but over GBP 200 million of value and then another GBP 150 million of value in the Fund of Funds. So it gives people clarity on what's below the core. And much of these companies support that occurs here is where the team will spend a lot of their time. These are the earlier-stage businesses where the active management will make a significant difference. And so we're working with those companies to try and grow them, but also working with them if they're not going to be companies that move into the core to recycle capital and ensure that all investors and founders come out with a good outcome.

So I think we can all agree that space is having a bit of a moment in the technology arena. And if you think about what's driving that, our investment thesis with ICEYE was based on the need for commercial constellations of satellites that can improve the intelligence that comes from optical imaging and synthetic aperture radar imaging in this case, the key benefit of their technology is that they can take images of the earth through cloud cover and at night. And now ICEYE is expanding that sensor suite to include things like optical and also the ground data stations that interpret the data.

And what they've proved is that they're able to be the provider of choice to governments, and that's been the key driver of what's changing their profile of revenue growth. So in the '24 period, they had around GBP 130 million of revenue that expanded to over GBP 250 million last year. This year, '26 forecast over GBP 500 million and expanding to over GBP 1 billion next year. So those are the financial profiles that's driving the uplift in their valuations as well as, of course, the supporting multiples from other SpaceTech businesses. Their announcement today, a financing round at a EUR 10 billion valuation has obviously uplifted our own NAV per share. It's not very often in the public markets, you put out results that are already stale, but there we go. It's a good news story. So an NAV of GBP 7.60 has risen to GBP 8.77 implied at the valuation of that round. So we'll obviously work through our normal processes in September, but very much a strong increase for us.

But ICEYE is not the only business that we've invested in. Isar Aerospace is the German rocket launch business. That point on European sovereignty and NATO sovereignty really feeds through to these companies. So ICEYE will be the company we believe that can get to orbit launch and give the ability for NATO countries to launch their own satellites.

There's clearly a bottleneck. We're seeing that in the SpaceX valuations. SpaceX is now booked up for launch for about 3 years, and there's a fairly active secondary market for those slots as well. So if we can get Isar to have success with their subsequent launches and be able to prove repeatable access to orbit, then they will clearly have a strong valuation tailwind that goes with them.

And then the other company that we've also been investing for many years is a British business, SatVu. Again, it's a satellite business, low earth orbit satellites, but their technology is distinct because it's thermal imaging. And if you're a nation state or a defense organization or even a commercial organization, having the images of the earth and then being able to see what's happening with the thermal images, you almost need to be able to align those 2 component parts. So we think that this ecosystem will start to consolidate into different sensors that allow for the data to be acted on in real time.

So we're very excited about this area. It's already 9% as of the year-end of our portfolio, and it's important for us to be able to demonstrate that all of those subsector themes that we've been investing in are giving our shareholders a great look through to exciting trends.

One of the other trends that we've been investing in for quite some time is Fintech is maybe not getting spoken about quite as much as it was, but still very much a powerful driver of growth in our portfolio. The largest asset being Revolut, of course. They've come out with their own news over the weekend or at least Bloomberg have come out with some news referencing them over the weekend rather than the company. Largest component of this 25% is Revolut with GBP 175 million of fair value, and then we sold down a GBP 63 million post the period end, but still remains one of our largest assets and continues to grow well.

In the retail consumer side, we invested in a few assets. We didn't think this was a winner takes all market. It's such a deep market opportunity. And so we did invest in N26, Zopa through the forward transaction we have exposure to and also not just thinking about the neobank exposure, but how we can have financial inclusion through entities like Crowdcube that we've been an investor for many years and on the board of and also smawa in Germany, which is a consumer financing company.

We then had a look at how would the incumbent banks need to react. The key differentiation of competition here was the neobanks had a much cheaper technology stack, which allowed them to engage customers with a better user experience, but also a lower cost per customer. And so we invested in Thought Machine, which is a core banking system servicing Tier 1 banks, and we also invested in Form3, which is a payment architecture. This is great examples of those payment and core banking infrastructure layers where we like to invest in those tech-enabling themes.

FintechOS is another example, low-code, no-code banking for other financial institutions, nonbank financial institutions that want to spin up their own financial products. So there is a lot of the architecture that allows some of these consumer-facing products to be driven.

So finally, I'm going to touch on the outlook for the coming year. It's been quite a fast start to the year. I don't think we can underestimate that European sovereignty tailwind in the portfolio. As I mentioned, I think AI is a tailwind in the portfolio. There was clearly a period where everybody wanted exposure to pure enterprise SaaS themes. I think now these infrastructure themes, this investment across sub thematics, which are being supported by this move for government to spend more on defense and resilience is really supporting what we already have exposure to.

Post the period end, we've mentioned it already, the realization in Revolut that drives more capital that allows us to make new investments. Some people have already mentioned that they've seen Isar Aerospace announcing a new funding round today that we've participated in. This is exactly where we want to be supporting those core companies as they inflect their growth and put meaningful investment tickets to work with this capital.

We have a cornerstone investor for our Series B fund. We think it's very important to grow that third-party capital. So having that cornerstone in place is something that we'll announce more detail on in the coming weeks. But clearly, getting that third-party capital strategy moving, I think, differentiates us as a business, one, for our ability to consistently deliver on high-quality companies because we have the depth of capital to do that, also to drive fees back into the plc vehicle, which offsets our cost base. But also, I think it endorses us as an investment team having that read across with more capital coming in.

ICEYE funding round this morning, clearly, a fantastic uplift in the valuation. This is borne out of their execution as a business. So it's really a plaudit to them as a company and how they've executed, but also how they've been led by Rafal and had that leadership, which has driven their ambition. And I think they're very much now the #1 player in that ecosystem globally and can expand that even further with those defense budgets increasing.

And that NAV accretive use of capital point, this is our guiding star for how we think about realizations, how we think about reinvestment, how we think about share buybacks. We're very much trying to drive that NAV. So announcing today that we've had a further uplift of 15% on the NAV is clearly something we're very happy about.

And as I mentioned, tailwinds. The capital that will come into this ecosystem will be driven by governments but it will also be driven by pension funds. And we haven't touched on it too much today, but the NAV -- sorry, the Mansion House Accord pensions bill that came through parliament a few weeks ago and the general kind of momentum that's been there has been very slow to come, but there is momentum. And we feel that as an entity that has a public market listing, we have the governance, we have a level of relative scale, and we've proven that we can manage co-investment pools of capital. We think that our growth fund is very attractive for pension capital and giving exposure into pan-European investments. So we're hopeful that we can build out our AUM and our asset base even further.

So I think with that, we will move to questions from the floor. Thank you, everybody, for attending and for listening and for following us it's clearly a great moment of pride for us to be able to come and speak to you with great delivery and execution.

Thank you very much, Ben and Andrew. We'll start with questions in the room and then switch to those online. For those joining us virtually, please submit your questions through the platform.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. A couple from me. Obviously, benefiting from the space exposure this morning. Just how are you thinking about that sector going forward, in particular, sort of thinking about valuations with more capital sort of in that sector? And then second part of that, obviously, you mentioned the 3 areas that you're exposed at the moment. Are there any other areas that you're thinking within the space theme that you're looking at?

And then second question, just in terms of the exits that you've done in terms of Revolut and ICEYE, GBP 85 million. What can we expect for realizations in FY '27? And then second part of that is most of your realizations so far have been secondaries rather than sort of M&A type trade sales. Can you give us a little bit more indication on how the exit market is evolving outside of secondaries?

Sure. So maybe do them in order. I'll do the space one first. We'll touch a bit more on the realizations. So I think initially, when you have such a very rapid shift as we've seen over literally probably a year for governments changing their behavior and the capital flowing into a certain subsector of technology, it's the incumbent players that are going to benefit most, and I think we've seen that occur. The incumbent players like an ICEYE or an Isar will then look to how they can capture market value. And so their models will evolve over time as well.

And I was in Finland last week with the ICEYE team seeing some of their production plants, but also hearing the strategic updates from the management team. And they will add additional sensors onto their capability, and they will also manage that customer relationship to provide them with the intelligence that they need to service their own defense and resilience. And so we'll see those companies adapting. So I think that kind of sense of what can their market share be, how can their financials move alongside that is really how we think about it from a valuation perspective.

And yes, the multiples of comparable public peers have moved, and that's been supportive. You could argue they've moved from a very low base. So which really then us having a look at the recurring nature of revenues and trying to anticipate how far these companies can grow and scale.

If we think about new investments in that ecosystem, there are a lot of companies coming through. I mean the U.K. is very strong in space. It has laboratories across Oxford, for example, where it's got labs focused on space. There's a lot of companies at the Hartwell campus there. Southampton has already had quite a lot of space technology coming out. So it's one of those areas that when you shine a light, you realize actually the U.K. is very strong at these areas already. And as we've seen coming out of different laboratories across, in this case, for ICEYE, Finland, the technology is there.

So those companies will create or new companies will create new opportunities as well. And if you get into the space ecosystem, there's all of those adjacent supply chain components. I think in the public markets, Filtronic has been a great success as part of the SpaceX supply chain. So we'll continue to monitor that and think about how they can capture market share very much in the same way we do for any new investment.

In terms of realizations, we have been trimming where we can get access to capital and secondaries. We think that, that's just a prudent portfolio management approach. Most of our realizations, I would say, 85% are through trade sales, and you will see that with single asset sales. We do get interest on our assets on a regular basis. Some of it transacts, some of it doesn't, price is wrong or for whatever reason. So we just continue on that same approach of managing actively the portfolio. And certainly, in the core, you can see almost GBP 1 billion of value, quite mature companies. We would expect some of those to transact.

When exactly it happens, what's the perfect timing, we don't know. We had ledger saying that they wouldn't go to public markets for an IPO. It was rumored that they would, but some of those IPO windows, of course, you understand better than me, but some of those IPO windows have to be favorable to make those transactions happen. But if it's a pure M&A scenario, it's more about the acquirer where they are in their own technology stack, what they're trying to achieve with the company's technology that they're bringing in.

It's Conor Finn from Barclays. A couple from me as well. Firstly, on the capital raising. So how much should we expect maybe over the next 12 months across, say, Molten East, the growth fund and the secondaries? And then secondly, in relation to portfolio construction, obviously, you've quite a diversified approach. Would you be happier given, say, recent developments running a more concentrated book, say, in future?

Yes, I might touch on those in reverse order. If you'll see with Isar as an example and then Modo Energy Series B investing, this is us putting more capital in at the point where we've got confidence in they're growing and scaling their operations. So more investment into those core companies at the right time is certainly what we focus on, and that's where I'm directing the team. So more Series B investing, but also doubling down on our winners. That's certainly the strategy.

I would like to narrow the portfolio a bit further. We've been working on that over the last 2 years. So it's coming down. But kind of conceptually a portfolio of around, say, 60 companies, of which 20 are the most valuable, and we keep doubling down on those assets as they scale is the way I would like to do that. So I think we've made some progress in that area through this year, and you'll see more of that coming together.

In terms of the third-party capital, for the growth fund, we think about that where an average Series B investment in Europe is around GBP 20 million, I'm talking. And to put a portfolio together, you want 10-plus assets. So let's say it's 10, 12, 15. At the 10 to 12 level, you want to have a portfolio that can -- a portfolio size that can manage across that kind of portfolio construction point of different assets, but you also want to have the depth of capital. So at GBP 20 million each, you're probably talking at least GBP 200 million to get the fund going. And we would then want to have roughly 30% of follow-on capital into those companies. And so the way I think about the fund is GBP 200 million to get it going as a first close, ideally getting it to GBP 300 million plus thereafter. And I think for a first fund, clearly, you could go beyond for growth funds, but for a first private fund, that would be a great success.

In terms of the Molten East strategy, I think they will close probably sub EUR 100 million in the first instance, but then that will grow on second closing to take them over EUR 100 million, and that might push up to say, EUR 150 million and then for the secondary strategy, they're targeting EUR 150 million in the first fund, but the depth of that opportunity is significant. And I think that, that can grow substantially beyond there over time.

The one thing I'll always reiterate on private funds, the time horizons are extended. It just takes a long time to raise them. So I don't want anybody to be asking me in September where is that GBP 450 million we talked about. It does take time, but we'll update on progress as we travel, and we're certainly seeing great momentum there.

I believe that's all the questions we have in the room. [ Sam ], over to you online.

Yes, several online. Hopefully, you can hear me okay. First one is from Matthew Lloyd at BNP. He says, when would you expect to see U.K. pension fund money deployed into UK VC? Do you have a view on the magnitude of flows from pension for money into venture capital over the next 5 years?

So just to give a bit of context, U.K. pension funds on the DC side, so this is defined contribution side, when the Mansion House Accord came out, they were talking about sort of GBP 500 billion of assets growing to GBP 1 trillion by 2030. So this is kind of the magnitude of the pool. But then you have to look at how much of that will go into private markets. The first signatures, we're talking about 5%, and then that grew to 10% across private markets, so not just into the equity side.

Interventure will be a smaller component. But already, you can see that it's kind of tens of billions of opportunity to come in, and these funds have next to no exposure so far. So the ABI, the Association of British Insurers have polled their members and that percentage went from 0.36% to up to 0.6%. So when you're talking about a target of getting to 5%, there's a long way to go, clearly.

There is momentum there. The pension bill has moved through parliament and the local government pension funds are being amalgamated. They're trying to create pools of capital that can support the teams that have the experience to invest in private markets. So the processes are underway. What could that look like if they're going to hit their targets by 2030, there's clearly a lot of work to be done. And I think we are starting to see some movement there, but it's still incredibly slow. When the U.K. private capital pulled their members, there was a lot of saying we're not actually seeing great traction at all.

So it's still to come, but I believe it will, and I believe it has to. And it's really providing exposure to those pension fund members to this growth that we're seeing in the private markets that -- and also balancing of portfolios across different asset classes. So I think there's enough momentum that it will happen.

Next one from Milosz Papst at Edison Group. Can you provide some additional detail on how ICEYE develops its data platform and analytical insights for its customers?

Yes, good question. So obviously, with the 70 satellites in orbit, you have the synthetic aperture radar technology so they can take images of the earth. ICEYE are then providing a technology on the ground that allows that data to be interpreted. So they can see on one screen where the satellites are in geostationary orbit and then they're working out -- sorry, low earth orbit and then they're working out which of those satellites is best able to take the images that the customer wants to take.

They then will take those images and they will use AI to interpret those images. So if it's a military buildup, which is a very obvious case, in Finland, they ran some NATO military exercises, and it was able to show exactly on the battlefield to the generals, the military hardware was building up, what was moving, what wasn't moving, and it was able to identify what type of equipment they were looking at. And some of those generals are feeding back saying we've never had anything this capability. So warfare is moving much more into the visual on-screen aspects and decision-making in real time, but you can only do that with this technology. So the ICEYE technology that allows the customer to interpret the data is as important as getting the data itself.

Another one from Matthew Lloyd at BNP. He says, given the rapid commercialization of ICEYE and the fact it owns the data, are you beginning to see investment opportunities in new companies and business models that use that data?

It was interesting that the first use case for ICEYE that we're investing in was a commercial use case that continues, and there's a huge amount that they can go after here. So in the flooding and fire scenario, they were taking images of the earth, looking at impacted buildings and selling that data to insurers so they could pay out and quantify their losses. The Brazilian government were using it for deforestation in the Amazon, for example, as well. And then you could use it for a whole different swath of use cases that they're looking at.

So actually, ICEYE themselves are creating those products that the customers can use to interpret the data. But yes, I think as more data becomes available, just as we're seeing with AI, the interpretation of that data is becoming more advanced, and that's leading to new company creation of products that are available for enterprises.

Two from Tintin Stormont, Deutsche Numis. First one is, are there subsectors that you want to particularly double down on? And can you talk about the investment opportunity set available in these subsectors/new follow-on question mark?

Subsectors, yes. So the team are very much focused on -- I think we had a slide at our Investor Day in February on AI infrastructure. So the middle layer that enables the data coming from large language models to be interpreted with the right levels of governance and the right kind of speed and accuracy, but also thinking about the kind of incredible cost that's occurring with the data usage on AI. So there's some middleware areas, AI infrastructure that they're very excited about.

We're also looking into the fintech space at the kind of next iteration, so things like Stablecoins, obviously, but also disruption in the wealth management space. We're seeing quite a lot of activity there. And then this kind of theme of critical infrastructure, everything is AI-enabled, but critical infrastructure in digital health, for example, companies like Deciphex that we've invested in a few years ago, whether it's creating an AI platform for pathology or even more recently with [indiscernible], where it's interpreting the data for immunology and layering on that AI capability. So there's a lot more to go in those areas.

Tintin's second question is, could you chat through how you think about the ideal amount to sell down in assets you clearly still believe in and back? Would this change much once you have more third-party AUM?

Yes, it's a great question because I think it really unlocks the breadth of opportunity that we have with the platform we've built. So if we think about in the scenario of portfolio management, first of all, when do we sell down assets? We're thinking about, one, what is the value that's been offered today? Is it tomorrow's price today? Can the company go a 2, 3x return from there? So thinking about it in the context of our cost of capital.

And then the second layer is thinking about the shape of the portfolio and ensuring it remains balanced. We're not outsized to one individual asset. And so we become a look through. So we've always managed positions like Revolut in that context. And the other lens that we're looking at is kind of where is our discount to our NAV, so the share price discount to NAV. Clearly, if we're going to drive capital to buybacks, it's the opportunity cost of that capital, where can we use it. So there's kind of a few component parts to any of those decisions.

As we build out the third-party capital, I think that broadens the opportunity for selling from EG to Plc to create the liquidity to a third party, and we remain the manager of that asset. And so then you're creating more AUM through your own ecosystem. And I think that's something that will change over the next few years. Similarly, with follow-on into assets, it might be Plc capital if that's the right thing for the plc shareholder, but it might be third-party capital that comes into those companies. So we can manage the stages and opportunities in a different way.

Thank you. The final 2 questions on the webcast come from Alex Trett at Winterflood. Firstly, he asks, can you provide further details or a breakdown on what the valuation uplifts were upon realizations beyond at or above holding value?

It sounds like an Andy question to me.

The -- I think we put them all in our RNSs in terms of what they were. So I'd have to go back and check them. I don't have them to hand. But List was a smaller one, just above 1x, I think. Free trade was higher, I can't remember what it was now. And then Revolut 20x, for example, 21x so.

I think what the important point here is that when we're valuing the assets, we're clearly fair valuing them. So we'll move them up to the balance sheet date to an appropriate value. We always try to be slow to move them up, basically ensuring that you see them in line with the commercial traction and then we're quite quick to move them down. That's been demonstrated over time. So as we sell those assets, we're selling them for an uplift.

In each individual asset case, it depends clearly where we were holding it at the time and whether we're getting a strategic premium for that asset. Today, we've seen ICEYE moving up 200% because it's moved very rapidly. And so we'll see that in different scenarios. We don't tend to put out an average uplift on the assets because arguably, especially according to our auditors, if you're fair valuing, then you should have them pretty close to that anyway. But of course, you get upside surprises in technology like we've had this morning.

Thank you. Very final question from Alex is, can you provide any guidance on what today's Isar Series D announcement will have on the portfolio in terms of GPV and uplift?

So we'll put our own statements out on that probably tomorrow. There's a lot of news flow today. And obviously, Isar's announcement has gone slightly later in the morning. For us, it's an investment round. So we're putting capital into the business. So that's really just new capital, so reducing the cash and increasing the portfolio value. So we'll talk to that in more detail, but it's more about us doubling down to Conor's original question, doubling down on companies we believe in, putting more capital to work where we can see that upsize opportunity.

Thank you. That's it for your questions.

Super well, thank you, everybody. I appreciate your time this morning. Lots going on. We'd like to sequence our news flow better, but it's not always in our choice -- in our gift rather, but it's clearly very positive and gives us a great deal of momentum as we come into the new financial year. Thank you.

I want to touch on the theme of 20 years since 2006, Molten Ventures has seen a lot of technological changes, seen a lot of market changes in that time as well, a lot of geopolitical changes in that dynamic. But one thing to stay true is that we've always looked to support the innovation ecosystem. We've always looked to put capital to work into great founders, great teams and companies that are trying to disrupt significantly large markets and create new markets as well. And with over GBP 1.5 billion invested into that ecosystem, that just demonstrates the commitment that we've made over that period of time. Throughout that time, what has also remained consistent is our focus on portfolio management and disciplined portfolio delivery. So with GBP 770 million of returns coming back through, that just shows you the focus that we put on to making sure we're driving returns for our investors in addition to supporting that ecosystem.

We have 85 companies existing within the portfolio now, but there's over 200 investments made throughout that period. So it gives you a sense of the breadth of what we've been able to put together. And we always feel like we're innovative as a firm, and we always feel like having a platform approach to venture capital has been important. And so you'll see that we have pools of capital across the listed plc balance sheet, but also the listed VCT and EIS funds, and we're continuing to expand the third-party capital that we invest. So if we touch on a bit more of that platform, how does it work? The pools of capital have always been important. It allows us to have a deeper breadth of capital to co-invest with -- we've always managed this from a governance perspective. So the ability to manage differentiated pools, differentiated investment approaches has been important from a governance perspective, but also to ensure that capital can go into the ecosystem at the right levels, but crucially at the right scale as well.

One thing that I think we can accept and what Per will touch on in a bit more detail is that Europe can drive great innovation, can drive great IP, can drive the company creation, but we haven't really solved the capital problem yet. I'm saying yet because there's reasons to be optimistic about that. So we invest across the whole venture capital ecosystem. And we think the ecosystem is deep enough to warrant differentiated ways of investing. So direct investments is the core of what we do. That's why we have a strong team with an investment thesis-led approach. But we also like to invest across secondaries, understanding the time horizons of companies' developments and how they're distinct from GPLP 10-year structures. Quite often value accrues in the years 10 to 15 onwards. So we'll look to invest in secondaries in direct companies, but also in portfolios of assets that get to that later stage. And that provides liquidity to an ecosystem in addition to the returns that we can drive to our investors.

And fund of funds has been a crucial part of that. Investing in as an LP into seed funds, in particular, has been critical in terms of driving that ecosystem, but also making sure that we see the opportunities that come through. This is very much still a people-led business, and I think it will continue to be so. Relationships continue to be important in terms of supporting founders being on their boards, but also supporting the ecosystem and making sure that we see the best companies coming through for the next generation. And that portfolio management point I touched on growing the portfolio, supporting the companies, adding additional value beyond just the capital. That's something that we've embedded into our structure and our ecosystem. And eventually realizing returns, cash on cash, DPI has become the important word for when you're fundraising, the important phrase. But you can see embedded within our system, we've done that for many years. We've always focused on those cash returns, not just at the top winning companies, but making sure as we go through the portfolio, returns are delivered for us, for our investors, but crucially for the founders that have spent many years building those companies.

So we thought we'd do a little bit of a time horizon of the 20 years. A lot happens in 20 years, as we know, a lot happens in a week at the moment, particularly in public markets. Stu Chapman, who's going to talk to you later, will give you a bit more of the history of the firm that founded back in 2006 with Simon Cook. Through that time, we're seeing a lot of technological changes. Obviously, cloud became the incumbent technology over maybe the last 10 years alongside SaaS and enterprise. Finance, London being a great hub for that. Digital assets have also been a really strong theme. But you'll see as we come into talking about portfolio and how we construct the portfolio, that breadth across technology has been an important feature to Molten. But our core approaches remain consistent in how we invest, whether that's direct, whether that's into secondaries or even into looking at the fund of funds. We want to understand the long-term structural market dynamics, where does the value accrue? How are the customers buying this product? Why is it going to be 10x better than anything that's in existence already? And technology moves at pace through this period. So we've adapted what we've invested into, and we've adapted to the themes of the market as well.

But I think that breadth of the portfolio has been an important factor. We are investing for 8 to 10 years in these companies as an average. And therefore, which of those subsectors are going to be performing well at any one given moment in time is something that you need to balance out across the portfolio. And the slide we have up on the screen highlights a few of the companies that we invested in through that period to give some examples. M-Files that we first invested in, in 2013, is an intelligent information management platform that then subsequently used AI to augment its offering to its clients. And you'll see that theme with quite a lot of the companies. They may be software as a beginning or data at the beginning, but the AI being embedded within their product offering is an important part of the defensibility and additional products that they can drive with their existing customer base. We sold M-Files just over the past year. So it was a long journey for us, 10, 11 years of holding that investment. And in a similar way, we invested in Trustpilot. Trustpilot is now known by millions and is a review platform that's scaled over the time that we held that business. And we use secondary to acquire additional stakes in Trustpilot. So by the time it went through its own IPO, we had about a 14% stake and we sold that down. So it just shows you the ways of creating value along the journeys of these companies is important. And many of these companies are the future as well, and not just the past.

So companies like Ledger, which has been the standard now for digital assets and security and companies like Aircall, which is a communication platform, which is embedded and has grown substantially in the U.S., the CEO putting out just in the last week that they crossed over the GBP 200 million ARR mark. So it just shows you that European companies can grow at scale. This isn't a new theme. This has been occurring for the last 20 years, but I think it's becoming more dominant, more repeatable and you see with the ambition of the teams and the capital that can be recycled that this is becoming a scaled ecosystem. Some of those technology trends that we touched on. We talk about being in the sixth wave of technology now, but this is all opportunity for us. If you're investing in disruptive markets as that pace of disruption increases, that gives us greater opportunity. We are, of course, mindful of a lot of the AI trends, and we'll talk about those in more detail, particularly on the panel later. But it's shifting the way that we think about defensibility and it's shifting the way that we think about how we invest in technologies. But some of those themes we talked about remain true, creating that value, looking at where value accrues, looking at how it's defensible and then looking at the technologies that can disrupt your existing incumbent technologies. So this is an ever-moving picture, but it creates a substantial opportunity. And I think when we talk about Molten and what it offers, it's that insight into those opportunities, that exposure to that growth that's completely distinct to anything else that's in the market.

So one of the themes that we've invested in throughout and has been an area where Europe has a real strength, and this is another feature. Where does Europe have a right to win. But in deep tech, and that's covering across semiconductors and some of the companies we've listed here, like Paragraph, which is material sciences, and it's looking at graphene for Hall effect sensors, that's a Cambridge-based business. ESI we'll hear from later on, low earth orbit satellites and SAViewmal imaging with low earth orbit satellites. These are all deep tech areas, companies like River Lane, which has an error correction for quantum computing. These are all themes that we invested in maybe 8 years ago, maybe 5 years ago, but these are themes that are now coming to prominence in the markets. And as we're seeing with Europe and the change in the geopolitical systems, that shift to sovereignty of technology, that shift to thinking about dual-use technology, that's become an important feature, and George will touch on that in a bit more detail this afternoon.

And if you look to go thematic on health tech, this is an area where huge markets are playing out. We have aging populations. We have budgets that are overstretched. We need to drive productivity into these areas. And so if you look at AI-enabled productivity work streams, looking at things like Deciphex, looking at animals, good examples, these are absolutely crucial. And what we need to have is the adoption within our own health care systems of these tools to create those efficiencies, to create that user experience that we've all become familiar with in our consumer lives. You're going to hear from Clue later on and from IMU as well, great businesses that we've tracked again for some time, and we've put more capital to work in those companies over that period of time. So it's good for you to get updates on where they are and get updates on how they're changing their own ecosystems. And Ingo is going to talk you through her investment thesis in this part of the market and looking ahead, how that's going to evolve for the next iterations and again, how AI is inferring some of the thought processes on where we'd like to put capital to work.

So I probably said AI about 54 times already, but you can't get away from it. So the structure of AI that I think we all know and accept is the foundational models at the base layer, if you like, that are driving models of Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Llama, everyone is becoming more familiar with these, and they all are improving at a rate of not. We like to look at the middle layer. The middleware layer is the enabling layer. This is the connective tissue, if you like, between the models and the end user application layer, the end-user application layer being the utility that drives that user experience. That middle way becomes the enabling factors. So we start to look at authentic aging agents. We're looking at how -- and to decide where compute runs, it's the governance that goes alongside the compute. It's monitoring behavior amongst your teams as an example. So we put here a few of the areas that we're looking at, at the moment that we're excited about. This goes alongside our own thematics of how we like to invest in technology themes. We like to play those enabling layers. We've done that with things like River Lane. I touched on the error correction for quantum, not picking a hardware layer that we think is going to win, but looking at that enabling layer. In a similar way with ledger, we touched on this the security layer for cryptocurrency and blockchain. And we'll hear later from settlement, which will touch on how they're embedding blockchain in the ecosystem and driving value through their technology.

So AI native security and governance workload intelligence, agentic commerce infrastructure, data infrastructure for AI memory. These are all subsectors of that middle layer that we think are interesting and exciting to explore over the next coming years. I touched on the importance of a diversified portfolio. I think we can all accept that we don't have the magic looking glass that enables us to focus on one area and double down on that. I think the importance here is breadth of opportunity, but understanding that investment thesis going back to that very core investment thesis of value disruption, defensibility and having founding teams that can drive that forward. We've always talked about 4 broad sectors: consumer, enterprise, hardware, deep tech and health tech. But there's the subsectors below that, that we really focus on. And the team has domain expertise in these areas. And then we call ourselves a generalist investor because we'll invest across them. But as you'll see today, it's the team that have that expertise in each of their own subsectors that really drives the knowledge, the understanding, the network that allows us to get into quality companies and invest in great founding teams.

For the market, thinking around AI and what's disrupting and what's embedded, if you like, I think -- we've all seen in the last week, a big sell-off in software companies, but this has been happening over the last year as most things that happen with the public markets is somewhat indiscriminate and perhaps slightly ahead of the curve. If you think around software that's domain-specific, if you think around companies that are embedded within enterprises, they run critical infrastructure for those enterprises and they have the underlying data, those things don't get disrupted overnight. And actually, you can, of course, embed new tools, new AI products onto your existing suites. So I think the market isn't yet looking at it with a more nuanced lens than it needs to. But of course, AI is disruptive, and it's a great opportunity for investing in at the same time. There's a debate around how much CapEx that's going in from the hyperscalers into this AI market, how will that get recouped? How will that get recovered? What are the consumer models that will deliver a return on that capital. And I think we can all accept that it's going to play out over a period of time. And therefore, some of the indiscriminate swings that we've seen in the public markets are creating opportunities, of course, but you have to really look a lot deeper into the underlying models of those businesses to understand what is their defensibility, what is their own opportunity.

So the nice thing about standing up here every year is that we get to talk about what we did in last year, and we're very busy at Molten. You'll see that across the day. So a lot of activity. We've continued to have new direct investments. We've continued with our secondary investment strategy. And we've continued to drive returns in the portfolio. Some of those, as you'll see with Revolut and with ICEYE are partial exits as we start to portfolio manage our positions. We always think around the plc balance sheet, GBP 1.4 billion of value and things like Revolut and ICEYE and the rest of the companies in the core represent around GBP 900 million of that. So balancing that portfolio being sensible at the time to take some liquidity, but providing sufficient value for the upside is something that we've always focused on. And we think that's the right way to approach any portfolio and deliver value and proof points for our investors.

So PP is going to go into more detail on the European opportunity. You can see the market has been scaling roughly sort of 20% a year since 2016 when we first IPO-ed. We can see that the deal count numbers do move around. Some of the high peaks of value have gone into those later-stage rounds. But what we're certainly seeing is that Europe, despite having scaled in the last 10 years, is still about 3x more than the U.S. market for capital. And so with the same number of companies and the same IP, we clearly need to drive that capital coming through. But what we're also seeing with the shifts in geopolitics and the shifts in the underlying scaling that we need to see from our companies, the need for sovereignty, the need to focus on dual use, that's driving not only GP and LP capital coming into the market, but it's driving government capital coming into the market. And that institutional capital that's coming from pension funds is being driven by governments as their own agenda as well. So it's becoming a part or rather a greater part of industrial strategy. I think I would argue that post second World War, it's always been a part of industrial strategy and go into some of the history of 3 perhaps, but those are the rationales. And so this is an opportunity for us where we're seeing success in the market, we're seeing the capital get recycled. We're seeing the entrepreneurial talent start new businesses. We're seeing the investor ecosystem expand and the knowledge within that ecosystem expand. So we're starting our own flywheel effect. And you could argue the U.S. had that experience in the 1980s when they reform their own pension schemes to invest in this market. So I think the opportunity is very real, and Phebe will give us much more detail on that in a moment.

So this is the -- what we said we would do slide and focusing the business on the core areas where we've always invested, A and B investing, particularly on Series B, where there is a gap to capital. There is a need for deeper pools of capital, but that's where our expertise lies. -- scaling the portfolio, not just from a number of company perspective, but growing the assets and having third-party capital that can come alongside is absolutely critical. And then we're talking to the balance sheet strength. That's what we're here for. That's what we do. We want to make sure the balance sheet is strong. And as we recycle capital, we have that NAV accretive approach to investing and recycling that capital. So I'm pleased to say we've demonstrated a fair amount of success in those areas. The amount invested is to the half year, GBP 50 million. That's probably going to be nearer to GBP 90 million, GBP 95 million by the year-end. We continue with third-party strategies around a Series B focused fund, dedicated capital to that part of the market and also Molten East, which is a new Eastern European strategy that's coming close to getting a first close. We hope both of those will get a lot more traction within this coming year, and we're able to announce to the market that progress. And then realizations, as I say, over GBP 100 million just in this financial year coming through. And we've been thinking about NAV accretive use of that capital. Every incremental pound, what's the best use of that versus investing, be that direct or in secondaries, what's the best use of that versus buying back our own shares. And so we've committed GBP 50 million already executed to date into share buybacks. That's NAV accretive. It reduces our issued share capital and drives value to our shareholders while the public markets aren't reflecting the full value of the underlying assets. And we have an extra GBP 10 million going into that program now.

So just to finish, looking ahead, we're very ambitious as a group. We have a very strong team here. We've been adding to that team. I know some of you will get chance to meet Franco, who I think is upstairs. And he's joining us with over 20 years of experience in this market, and we have progressed our team as well, internal promotions with George and Inge both moving to partners. You'll hear more from them today, and you'll see very clearly why that was a good decision. And expanding our pools of capital is absolutely crucial. But we have a platform play. We have the governance structures. We have the institutional base to take on more capital. I always say we are not opportunity constrained, just capital constrained. And therefore, the opportunity to do more with more is absolutely there. And we continue to support that European ecosystem. Fund-to-fund relationships remain important to us. You'll see some of our fund partners on the stage later today. And crucially delivering strong returns for our investors. So we're really delighted to have you all here. I hope you enjoy the day. Do stay around. And hopefully, we all learn something as well. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. My name is Phoebe. I'm a principal here at Molten. And today, as you can see, I'm talking about the opportunity in European venture capital. As we reflect on our last decade as a listed company, I wanted to take a look at the broader European ecosystem, where we've been, where we're headed and most importantly, what's next. So a big theme of today is reflecting on Molten's journey since our IPO a decade ago. And as we look back 10 years, European venture looked markedly different, as you can see on this slide. So at the time, there were 47 unicorns, the largest being Spotify at $8.5 billion. There are now over 400 unicorns, the largest being Revolut, one of our portfolio companies at $75 billion. This has resulted in a globally leading ecosystem, where London, for instance, is now the world's fourth largest venture hub outside of -- only beaten by 4 U.S. cities. This transformation has created a critical and scaled asset class. So annual capital invested has now increased over 3x over the last decade to over $70 billion, where the tech sector now represents 15% of European GDP. As a result, venture in Europe has evolved from emerging to really institutional grade with returns continuing to be on par with what we've seen in the U.S.

So why has this been the case? So this didn't just happen by accident. Europe has several enduring structural advantages that have only compounded over time. The first is talent. So this is both structural and intentional. So Europe in and of itself is an attractive environment to build a company. We are home to a large and diverse home market with 500 million people holding great global political and economic influence. We have also long been a market where migration is actively encouraged on a government level, such as the skilled worker Visa in the U.K. or the EU Blue Card. And investment in technology talent is no different, where our workforce has been uniquely positioned to succeed. We are highly technical. So there are more PhDs working in European deep tech companies than in the U.S. We also have 40% more software developers than the U.S. And this success of the broader European venture ecosystem has also bred success, where VC-backed companies have become more attractive for skilled operators to come to Europe and build global businesses.

So to R&D. So a lot of the R&D strength is -- well, talent is only as good as the R&D that often supports it. And as you can see from the chart here, Europe is home to more than half of the world's top science hubs, and it has continued to remain the home of innovation for the last few decades. This has promoted deep academic and industry collaboration. Unlike in the U.S., where talent typically stays local and pulls into big tech, across Europe, this is fragmented and deeply tied to our academic roots. This is also expected to continue in AI, where we're home to some of the world's most renowned AI research hubs such as Oxford University and ETH in Zurich. And as Ben said, this has really established a sizable flywheel over the past decade.

So to walk you through this slide. So one is the success stories. So Europe has definitely proven we can build global winners. As I said, we have over 400 unicorns with nearly 3x that amount achieving GBP 100 million plus in ARR. Fortunately, a lot of our portfolio companies are also leading this charge, such as Revolut, Wise, N26, Ledger, Aircall. And these aren't just European success stories, they're really global ones. And this has brought an exceptional talent density, which is distributed across numerous hubs. So what's interesting about Europe is 90% of European unicorns have actually remained headquartered within Europe. And this level of innovation, particularly from a distributor perspective, is unmatched globally where numerous European cities that have the same amount and depth of talent is typically seen across 2 to 3 U.S. hubs. As a result, this has accelerated both capital and expertise throughout the ecosystem, where we're seeing the development of second and third time founders, people who learned at Revolut, Spotify, Wise are all spinning out and founding their own companies. For instance, Revolut alone has had 50 companies spun out of them. And this has recycled capital to make real returns. So over the past decade, over $900 billion has been realized in exits across European venture. Reflecting our ability to move towards an entire ecosystem built on the maturation of venture versus just the success of 1 or 2 individual companies.

However, as Ben was talking about, Europe is really at an inflection point. So having built an ecosystem over the past decade, Europe now sits at a once-in-a-generation convergence moment, creating an unprecedented opportunity for European tech. This is largely down to the sixth wave of innovation. And maybe to walk you through some of the innovation cycles that came before us. So the first was the steam train in the 1770s, then railways, heavy engineering, mass production and finally, IT in the 1970s, all of which were the cycles and time line between each of those waves had compressed significantly. And now this new wave is no different. So the era of AI, automation and robotics, largely marked by the launch of the first public GPT in 2022. This has disrupted and created entirely new categories and business models, which at the time were not previously possible or conceived and where there remain no clear winners. This has been combined with technological and also structural changes, where for the first time, European start-ups can compete globally from day 1.

So on the technological side, Gen AI as a technology when combined with falling cloud costs means that generational start-ups can truly be built from anywhere, which benefits Europe given our fragmented ecosystem. And also structurally, which are some of the benefits that we've seen both in the U.K. and the EU, where the EU in particular supported harmonized frameworks such as the 28th regime, incorporating EU Inc., the AI Act and the Digital Markets Act. Yet the need for self-resilience remains ever important in an increasingly complex global environment, where European companies can be the beneficiary. Here, there remains a real opportunity, in particular, to rebuild critical tech infrastructure, particularly across real assets such as AI infrastructure, semiconductors and batteries, creating the need for European champions in addition to global ones.

So on to AI, obviously, a big topic for today. So unsurprisingly, given the disruptive nature of this technology, funding in the space has accelerated drastically where we have already seen the emergence of category-leading European champions, both at the foundational and application layers. These rounds not only attract the most capital, but also premium valuations, typically 50% above what we're seeing for non-AI companies at the growth stage. And at Molten, we're excited by a variety of use cases where we focus on driving differentiated insights through our thematic-led approach. So just to name a few high-level areas that we're thinking about. So one is the need for new infrastructure. This is both true on the cloud perspective, both for SaaS models and also the emerging needs of AI compute, particularly around inference chips and the ability to utilize and high utilization of energy workflows. The second is augmenting existing workflows. So we're seeing this in next-generation vertical software when combined with open finance has a greater ability to have personalization than what we've seen before. The second is the rise of agentic commerce and consumer, and you're also seeing this in personalized medicine in health care. And finally is unlocking new categories of spend that were previously too difficult to access. So resilience in dual-use defense tech is an obvious example of this, but we're also seeing this in other industries such as within financial services, the focus on illiquid assets and wealth management.

So looking ahead, we expect enterprise adoption and budgets around AI to continue to grow with success ultimately compounding around the winners who are able to demonstrate real productivity and ROI over time. So to deep tech. So given Europe's historic strength in academia and our skilled technical talent, our appetite to invest in frontier technologies isn't new, but the capital required to succeed often is. So for instance, Apple alone spends more on R&D than the top 10 European tech companies combined. And at Molten, this is an area we have long been excited about, backing leaders in the space such as ESI and Riverlane across Quantum, semis and space. And now our focus is on the exploration of further frontier technologies, particularly in areas where tech sovereignty is required to scale, such as dual-use defense tech. And here, we are exploring 3 unprecedented waves, which are creating a golden 2- to 3-year opportunity before the market normalizes. The first is Europe is spending more on defense than any time since the cold war. We're also having governments moving at massive emergency speed with sizable leverage effects. And the last is private markets flowing countercyclically with defense talks outperforming with sizable capital now flowing into the space. However, whilst there remains opportunity and ambition to succeed, the required -- the access to capital required to do so remains a key challenge and one as an ecosystem that still needs to be addressed.

So obstacle one of what we're facing today in Europe is the scale-up gap. So as you can see, Europe has approximately the same number of start-ups raising for the first time from VCs as the U.S. However, at the breakout stage, this reduces by 2x, further compounding at the scale-up phase where there are 7x fewer $100 million rounds per year than the U.S. This misalignment has also created an opportunity for U.S. investors to increasingly play in Europe, leaving 60% of Series C investments versus 20% at the seed stage, at precisely the stage where capital is needed the most to scale real global businesses. Here in lies both our obligation and also opportunity as a European ecosystem, where more funding is required to build both European and global champions of tomorrow. And the second, as Ben discussed as well, is the sort of why is this gap so prevalent in Europe historically. The lack of European long-term institutional capital has historically been a key barrier for European venture, where more involvement is required, particularly given the need for increased sovereignty as we think about the current geopolitical environment. And on that note, when we think about sovereignty, the latter isn't about -- it's not about protectionism, but it's about winning through innovation and performance as part of creating and the formation of a new world order, which are really capitalizing on our structural advantages that we already have today to build both European and global businesses.

And on the positive, there really have been improvements in particularly public funding is a venture. So we are seeing renewed commitments from an EU perspective through the European Competitive Fund and also on our home sold via the BBB's industrial strategy. However, there's also a need to unlock numerous other stakeholders to provide long-term capital required to succeed. And part of this is cultural and also institutional. So for instance, from a public procurement perspective, only 9% goes to innovation in Europe, which is half the level of the U.S. The same is true on a corporate level in terms of how our corporates actually interact with start-ups. So only 20% of European corporates actually interact with start-ups versus 50% in the U.S. And the last is patient capital. So pension funds and university endowments make up 40% of European venture funding versus 90% in the U.S. And this gap, in particular, has to change, particularly as we think about the need for capital, both at the growth stage and R&D-intensive industries. In the U.K., we've had Mansion House reforms, which have gone some way to changing this, but we further need to capitalize on this momentum given the importance of the next few years as an inflection point.

So how can we, as Molten win and capitalize on this? So with the support of our investors, we believe we have built a differentiated offering to help address these challenges and also back the new champions that Europe has offer. So we play at this from the early stage through access by our fund of funds, which is confined on-the-ground local ecosystem winners where we can get access to their breakout stories. The second is from our direct capital at both the early and the growth stage, both areas where we've demonstrated a track record over the past 20 years at Series A, B and C, supported by our thematic-led sourcing and investment thesis approach and also in the U.K. by EIS and VCT capital. This continues at the late stage where we can be flexible such as buying out prior funds or accessing secondary opportunities, where the depth of our network in the U.K. and across Europe has also enabled us to support companies into the pre-IPO and beyond. And I think this is a great slide just to reiterate really the depth of our network within Europe from both a portfolio and fund of fund perspective. And this has really compounded and driven our own flywheel of connectivity, relationships and expertise, enabling a differentiated sourcing opportunity across the continent.

So to wrap up, just say last few words. European Venture has come a long way over the past decade, but the opportunity ahead remains even greater. As the next wave of innovation unfolds across AI and deep tech, Europe's strength in talent and research and also prior success stories enables us to position us globally. At Molten, our job is to back these generational leaders, leveraging our full cycle platform, deep network and thesis-led approach. And you'll hear today more from our portfolio companies and the rest of the investment team, how we're doing that. So thank you.

My name is Dr. Inga Deakin, and I lead on health tech here at Molten. I'm going to talk about the sector, some exciting trends and how our portfolio is benefiting. At Molten, we define health tech as companies whose customers sit within the health care ecosystem. That includes health care systems, consumers, pharma, medical devices and life science tools companies. Historically, these have been quite distinct markets with different buyers, different sales cycles and regulations. But the boundaries are changing. Consumer wellness companies are pursuing clinical impact. Medical device companies selling continuous glucose monitors are adding patient engagement software. Pharma companies, particularly with the rise of GLP-1s like Ozempic are adding patient engagement software, and they're adding coaching and direct-to-consumer models. Big tech is all in. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, all building significant health care capabilities. And the Frontier AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic have both launched dedicated life science and health care teams, and they're hiring aggressively. This convergence creates an enormous opportunity for companies positioned at these intersections to grow and define new categories.

There are many ways to evaluate health tech companies. Ultimately, the companies are improving access to care, efficiency of delivery or product development, clinical outcomes and/or the experience of everybody involved. As in any sector, we're looking for an outstanding team, a large market and best-in-class product. And in health tech, we're also interested in 2 things here in workflow integration, companies that embed into clinical or pharma workflow, deliver immediate ROI and become really sticky and a clear data story. So companies with unique often ongoing access to data that compounds their advantage over time. One important note, we invest in companies that help pharma, but not the drug itself. So infrastructure, platforms, picks and shovels, but not taking the therapeutic risk.

I'm going to talk about 3 megatrends in health tech and about our portfolio. First, of course, is AI, which is being rapidly adopted. This is data from the American Medical Association from last year, showing a steep growth in adoption to now 66% of physicians. I'm sure that's out of date, they're much higher now. And what's striking is how fast value is being created. Open Evidence is effectively the ChatGPT for doctors trained on medical and scientific literature. They've grown really fast, over $100 million revenue, free to use for doctors and about 40% of U.S. doctors are using it every day. And you can see a $12 billion valuation. Note the differentiated data source. Companies like abridge did not exist a few years ago. Now they're valued over $5 billion. Their revenue went from $7 million in 2023 to over $100 million in mid-2025. That's 15 to 20x in 2 years, less than 2 years. And their valuation doubled in 4 months last year. This is AI to capture clinical conversations and it fits seamlessly into workflow.

Anima is one of our own fast-scaling examples. They built a clinical operating system for primary care, which automates triage, documentation and workflow. You know what it's like contacting a GP. In 2025 alone, they processed over 5.7 million patient records, patient requests, forgive me. That's over 15,000 a day. The median response time is 1.2 hours and over 90% of requests are resolved the same day. They're now deployed in over 600 practices, meaning about 10% of the U.K. population has access to one or more of their products. Contracted ARR has grown to over GBP 20 million quickly because this ROI is so fast and significant. This is what workflow integration looks like at scale, and we led the $12 million Series A a couple of years ago.

The second area is in pharma and precision medicine. You may remember a fantastic exit from Endomag breast cancer company for over $300 million a couple of years ago. These companies are speeding up and improving drug development and ensuring the right treatment gets to the right person at the right time. There are many high-growth companies in precision medicine, and a great example is Tempers AI. They IPO-ed in 2024 with about $700 million of revenue. Now they're guiding to $1.3 billion this last year, 2025. That's 82% growth. They combine precision medicine testing with AI-driven data products for pharma, which is a great example of those changing categories. Genomics testing companies such as Billion show that new entrants can grow quickly and Natera and Guardant are showing this growth at scale. So genomics is the first wave of precision medicine measuring DNA and RNA, and we believe immunology can be next and potentially even more significant given how central the immune system is to so many diseases.

Here are 3 of our portfolio companies, 3 angles on pharma and precision medicine and none of them are drug developers. INU Biosciences has an AI platform mapping the immune system at unprecedented resolution. They have fantastic access to data and are becoming a discovery engine for precision medicine products. We led the Series A, and you'll hear more from John shortly. Deciphex is Ireland-based built by a team that really knows what it's like to be a pathologist. They provide digital pathology software, AI tools and services to both pharma and clinical customers, including the NHS. By delivering the service, they generate a unique and ongoing flow of pathology data to better train their models. That's the data flywheel in action. They're now at over EUR 20 million revenue, and we led the Series C to support their expansion. Polymodels is in the infrastructure layer. Model flow is the digital backbone for pharma process development, helping scientists design, simulate and optimize manufacturing processes. Clients report a huge reduction in the number of experiments they need to do, and we led the Series A last year. All 3 of these are picks and shovels. None of them, as I said, are taking therapeutic risk, but they are rapidly advancing the rapidly growing field of precision medicine.

The third trend is for -- is in tools for patients to engage with the health and for people. The wearables market is large. Aura, who make the biometric rings, raised 900 million at an GBP 11 billion valuation a few months ago. And the CEO said to set a new standard for what wearables can achieve in advancing preventative health, which is a really clear example of those boundaries blowing. Notably, the European digital health coaching company, OvEiva, recently passed GBP 100 million in revenue and raised GBP 200 million to scale. Consumer-first offerings like Neo in Europe and Function in the U.S. have raised big rounds and are scaling fast, also public companies like Hint & Hers. So consumers and patients are paying health care systems are recognizing the benefits of investing in preventative and chronic care. There's a long way to go, but we're backing some of the pioneers. We call this thesis consumer and preventative health because we don't think of consumers as just healthy people tracking their wellness, many have or are at risk of chronic conditions. So our portfolio spans the spectrum.

Clu invented Femtech. They literally coined the term. So today, they have over 10 million users, and we're going to hear more shortly. HO delivers clinically validated blood pressure monitoring at the wrist. 30% of adults have high blood pressure, 50% are not aware. And of those 50% that are aware, 50% are not managing their blood pressure well. HLlow bridges the medical-grade precision with consumer accessibility. We led the Series A, and they raised a $42 million Series B last year. Topdoc is focused on cardiovascular risk. 90% of these diseases can be prevented with early detection. This product includes a fingerprint blood test, which can give you read your full lipid panel and give you a 10-year cardiovascular disease risks for in under 10 minutes. So this is preventative care made accessible.

There's so much more we can talk about. I'm really excited about the flow of talent into health tech, bringing tech and company-building experience from other sectors into health. And at Molten with our interdisciplinary approach, we're well positioned to know what good looks like. Our portfolio is already improving millions of lives and millions more to come in the future, which is personally extremely motivating and translates to growth. So I'd like to thank you all for your support. And next, we're going to hear from 2 of our portfolio companies that I've mentioned.

I'm going to give us quite a quick overview of how we see the world within energy and energy tech, and I'm going to do that predominantly through the medium of pictures and graphs. -- to try and sort of dispel some of the investment opportunities and areas that we've been focused on at Molten, specifically around certain areas of software and AI and data and analytics businesses. But the idea ultimately is to tee up a couple of the presentations that you're going to hear directly after me and give you a bit of a flavor as to why we invested in them.

So the first thing to say is I very purposefully called this section energy tech. Had I been doing this presentation 2 years ago, it might have been called climate tech. Had I been doing it 10 to 15 years ago, it might have been called clean tech. And had I done it in the period prior to then when I started my career in this space, we probably just would have called it renewable energy. And in some respects, that gives you important points of context. But in some respects, as I'll go into, it's largely irrelevant. So if I had one slide, which tries to capture where we are in this debate right now, it's this one. So as mentioned, in the recent past, this probably would have been about net zero pathways and carbon emissions. But right, in 2026, the discourse at the moment is about energy independence and energy security. And ultimately, where you don't want to be is where Europe is right now, and that's reliant on fossil fuel imports from countries that you probably no longer want to be reliant upon and they've got a long way to go there. And the best way to build out energy security and energy independence is to build and own your own generation, i.e., renewables.

And the reason I put this slide in is a sort of counter to some of the discourse that you might have heard around people rolling back from net zero is that periods of energy security concerns have always driven the fastest decarbonization. So that was the case in the '70s, the '80s, I think it was car that popularized the term. This is around quals with the Middle East and OPEC, and it was that which drove much faster transition than any concerns around carbon or anything else. So this is important. This is helpful -- but for me, this is far more important. And these 2 charts that I've got here are, a, probably slightly unnecessarily complicated looking; and b, frustrated my compliance team immensely in trying to verify them. But the picture that we're trying to show is quite a simple one, and that is every country is somewhere on this journey from bioenergy to generating clean electrons via the trough of burning hydrocarbons to burning fossil fuels. That is the megatrend that is undebatable, that's inexorable. And it's been this decade to the 2020s that have been the pivotal period accelerating that transition. And again, that acceleration doesn't really have a lot to do with carbon, doesn't have a lot to do with energy security. It's just economics.

So we entered this decade and the cost curves for the dominant technologies within renewables, so solar PV and lithium-ion they got crushed such that renewables just became the cheapest form of energy generation. So again, anything you might hear about people rolling back from net zero and carbon not being a thing, 2024 and 2025, somewhere between 93% and 95% of all new generation that came online globally was renewable. That's just a function of economics. As with any market that inflects and these have been massively inflecting markets, consensus, i.e. market analysts are really bad at forecasting markets that move so quickly. It's a job that I used to do, so I'm allowed to say that. But this has been a period of exponential growth, and it is continuing to grow a lot faster than people expect. It always exceeds consensus forecast, which get upgraded every year and never quite go far enough. And that's not slowing down. That's not changing. The CapEx requirements for the transition are in the trillions. And if anything, the risk to those numbers from where we sit now is only to the upside. And that -- that slope might not look particularly steep. But what that's showing you is the incremental demand, power demand just from data centers because of AI from 2025 to 2030, that's equivalent to like the whole of generation of Japan, the whole consumption of Japan. These are huge numbers. The CapEx rate is a megatrend.

So what does this mean for us as investors? Well, evidently, there's clearly going to be lots of hunting grounds at the earlier stage in the growth stage just because of the scale of investment, the scale of market change and the scale of disruption that this all causes. But as Ben alluded to earlier, as early and growth stage investors in the equity layer, you really have to think about where value accrues. And over the last 20 years, I've spent a lot of time looking at this space. You probably wouldn't have wanted to be investing in the hardware, just commoditizes, probably wouldn't want to be investing within new materials. The dominant materials just become more dominant as they traverse down their cost curves. But what has emerged and is emerging are really interesting data and analytics businesses and software businesses that enable a lot of these capital flows, but also benefit from the new market structures that it creates a fundamental transformation of energy and what's going on at the moment.

What do I mean by changing market structure? At the very high level, energy markets are just becoming more complicated. Data requirements are increasing and they're becoming more localized, more real time. And I sort of proxy that theme by looking at German power prices, which is a little bit niche. I'm laughing the laser. This is basically showing you as renewables grow within the mix, greater intermittency, greater price volatility. This is just one way of showing that renewables and the new system creates a lot of extra energy data, a lot more complexity. What does it mean at a broader level, the thesis, and again, it's difficult to do in 10 minutes, but at the high level, the move from a fossil fuel economy to a renewables economy is equivalent of going from analog to digital. So analog fossil fuel world is very few centralized points of generation, unilateral grids, relatively stable data and relatively stable and predictable and data requirements. And the use cases can and have been served by relatively rudimentary software businesses or in the most part, consulting and services businesses.

That's fundamentally different to the renewable world where you now have millions upon millions of distributed energy resources, incredibly high data frequency. So these markets are real time and incredibly dynamic to try to show the price volatility, all needs monitoring, all needs optimizing. The data types of how the markets evolved fundamentally changed, multimodal markets, and it's 2-way. The grids are now 2-way as a lot of people know. So the use cases in order to scale up renewables because this is ultimately a capital issue. These markets have to financialize. So everything that you might need to do, price forecast, risk manage, ensure, these require much greater levels of advanced intelligence. This is an area that we've been looking at for a couple of years. And there are, as I mentioned, increasingly valuable software businesses that are emerging in this space because the ones that have emerged from this space aren't fit for purpose over here. So even in the last 24 months, we've seen GBP 1 billion plus exits in the U.K., in Europe and globally for businesses that are building and starting to grow in that space, and it's been a focus for us.

Again, quite high level, but what defines in this world, some of the businesses that we like. We love software businesses that do what good software does, so embeds in workflows, Eats workflows gets adopted by the industry. Can you -- as a data provider into energy, can you get integrated into contracts? Are you bankable? Can people underwrite against you? Can people lend against you? -- if you are -- the output of your business is a price like it is with Neil's business that you're here or a forecast or a benchmark. This is the case with Quenton's business, does it become a trusted reference point in the industry like all good information services business become? Because if you do, it become incredibly sticky and can build a very valuable moat in that business. And then as I say the clear acquirers in this space because of the change and because of how disruptive this new energy system has become, there are lots of requirers, very acquisitive space around energy data at the moment.

So a few portfolio examples that tie into some of the work that we've been doing here. Those of you that were here last year, might remember hearing from Sightline Climate, building a data and analytics platform for this new economy. From BeZero Carbon, I think we're also here last year. They're building a ratings business but focused on carbon markets and new ecosystem assets are equivalent to a Platts or a Fitch. And then in this section, you're going to hear from General Index, is building the world's first technology-based price reporting business focused on commodity and new energy markets. And then from Quentin, who's already built one of the global leaders in terms of benchmarking, forecasting and valuing these new renewable energy assets.

So as I say, I've actually about 30 seconds to spare, so I've sort of done my job in not overrunning. It's very quick. So anyone can find me afterwards or feel free to e-mail me, tell me that I'm wrong or if you want to chat about any of this stuff, we can do that. Otherwise, I'm going to hand over to one of our portfolio companies next.

The title of this panel is AI hype Substance and opportunity, which we hope really encapsulates an awful lot of what we're thinking about as we navigate this kind of this really compelling wave. It's clear that AI is kind of both everything and nothing. We've talked a lot about it already this morning. No question, it presents extraordinary opportunity, but we're also aware that it's also creating extraordinary levels of noise. We've seen unprecedented levels of capital coming into the space. We can all see companies that are scaling at speeds faster than any of us have seen before. And on the other hand, there's a huge amount of volatility. A single product announcement, SteepSeek a year ago, Anthropic last week can hit the public markets and swing software stocks 30% to 40%. So today, it's not about is AI important? I think that debate is sort of fairly settled. It's more about just discussing with experienced investors, how do we separate the signal from the noise? How do we think about where durable value is being built and created here? Where are investors focusing or indeed getting carried away. And so to kind of dive into that, I'm thrilled to be joined by 3 very experienced investors, as Ben has said, all of whom we have had the privilege of backing as Molten as Fund of Fund Partners of Molten in Pietro, Max and Audrey. So I might ask each of them to just give a brief intro to yourselves and your funds, and then we will kick off.

Yes. I start.

Please.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. It's been great to be here. I'm Pietro Beta, I'm Co-Founder and General Partners at Connect Ventures. Connect Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm. We are seed specialists. We are venture generalists in terms of the areas we cover. I personally have been investing in B2B enterprise software and AI for more than 12 years. So this is a very special and exciting and challenging times. Before being an investor, I was on the other side of the table as a founder and CEO. I co-founded the company, Milan in 2001, speaking of platform shift and bubble, there was a dot-com. And yes, we got acquired like 2007, like 6 months before the iPhone came out, and we were fundamentally a mobile business. So navigating the platform shifts and the heights has been something I've been done for more than 20 years in tech at this point.

I'm Max Co-Founder and GP at IQ Capital, which is a deep tech VC firm based here in London and investing across Europe. We're actually turning 20 years old this year as well. We've been focusing on...

We shared a birthday.

We're about 6 months younger as it should be. So -- so yes, we've been focused on Deeptech from the very beginning. We have backed about 100 companies over this time. And AI is a theme across our core focuses, and we actually have a few co-investments with Molten within that. And so we'll be very keen to pick up on some of the trends that we're seeing and talk more about it.

Yes. I'm Audrey. I'm a partner at Tapestry BC. We are a U.S.-based fund that invests globally, and we specialize in pre-SEED and seed. And so we focus on founder archetypes. So we'll exclusively invest in repeat founders. So the way I like to think about it is any pre-FEED stage fund needs focus to filter the world for the best founders. Some folks do that based on geo, some folks do that based on sector. We really focus on founder archetype and look for founders who have had experience building great companies, and we'll back them on their next journey. So we'll often spend months, if not years, with these founders thinking about what their next journey is. The fund started 8 years ago. It's a really small team. It's 4 of us. And before that, I had spent basically a decade in Silicon Valley first studying and then starting my career more traditionally in investment banking, left that came to London, started a company in fintech out here. When that shut down, I reconnected with my former colleagues who were starting Tapestry and have been basically building the fund ever since.

Thank you. Max, I might start with you, right? And we'll take it sort of from the macro to start with. I mean I mentioned at the beginning, we are seeing unprecedented levels of capital coming into the space, both from venture capital and also the large tech giants, investing hugely. And all of this at a time of heightened sort of macro uncertainty. We're seeing those tensions show up in the public markets with these kind of big volatility swings. Question to you, I mean, are we in a bubble? And when we look at the level of investment, how do you see how all of this will sort of ultimately drive returns?

It's a good question. I will try to be focused in kind of giving some perspective on this. So I guess one perspective is that disruptive tech always create bubbles. The hard cycles have been well established. The question really is whether or not this bubbles burst or whether they deflate or sort of grow into themselves because the ROI case empowers or underpins the valuations. So on the valuation side of things, there are 2 perspectives or 2 angles. One is the other sectors that AI is actually impacting. The the SaSocalypsis, the an award for that now that we have seen last week has at one point, wiped out some 300 billion of the valuations. It has now recovered, but it shows that there's a lot of nervousness as to how this technology will affect various sectors, and it doesn't stop in software. Arguably, if you are an agritech, you should be thinking or could be thinking whether and at what point AI will be affecting your models. So it's actually a broader story for many industries. So for AI itself, fundamentally, it's all about ROI and ROI in turn does depend on whether or not there's the fit for purpose of the technology itself. Given the costs of AI, which we see no short-term perspective for significant reduction, both on CapEx and OpEx, the only ROI that can pay back for it is complete replacement of human labor in certain functional areas. That is ultimately what will drive the tools cost from $10,000 a year to engineer to $150,000 per year instead of the engineer. And we haven't yet seen that replacement. So the question is whether or not the market will actually have the patience to wait until that happens and whether that happens quickly enough for the market to not lose the patients.

That said, at the moment, the business use case is still is still being searched. There are some good areas like coding and legal tech. There are lots of areas like AI agents where it kind of works 90% of the time and then it doesn't, and that makes it unusable for the business applications. So there's still a lot of search. And I think the jury is out there whether that will happen in time. The model development rate still continues. We all see the news every week when they beat each other and it still is one of the highest depreciation asset on us of all time. So the cost is there. On CapEx, I think the interesting bit is, of course, it's a huge investment, but it is powered by equity, by all the hyperscalers. And that is a big, big differentiation to what we have seen in many other technologies in the past in that there's no leverage to unravel the valuations. Ultimately, if Microsoft or Google takes 5 years longer to return their investment than initially anticipated, what it's their call. Maybe the stock will come down a bit, but ultimately, that's an interesting expect. The OpEx side of things, I think there was this race for developing the best model. Now people are increasingly understanding that it's actually inference costs that you can't walk away with. Even if your model is greatly fit for purpose for a particular application, without continually investing into inference, you are going to be second to the least less good models.

Inference costs, just maybe to explain to the audience, when we talk about the training of models, which has been kind of all of the time and the data that has gone in over the last few years to get these models to the level that they are now when Max was referring to the inference cost, it really is kind of practical -- the training is about recognizing the patterns, the inferences of this net practical application of these patterns of these models into you data to sort of infer the results that we're all looking to see.

Yes. And put simply, it's it can scale quite substantially in terms of costs. So the more -- if you think about your ChatGPT or any other model that you're using, it's how many of those experiences that you've had specifically dialogues does it actually remember. That all scales up. People talk about it as kind of the new marketing budget really for many of the applications, and they are very significant. So that's all back to the ROI question. So the final point that I'll make is just 1 or 2 kind of historical parallels in that we've kind of both seen it and not seen it before. Yes, there are some of the learnings from the dot-com era that are informing where we are perhaps -- and while AI in all likelihood will create a bigger outcome that we can possibly imagine now in the long run, whether or not it will probably not get -- it will probably take longer than the 2 or 3 years that everybody is talking about and what the market probably has the patience for. That said, the multiples for most AI firms are actually not outrageous or not as outrageous as we saw in the dot-com bubble. Many of them are 25, 30, 35x multiples on revenues, and those revenues are growing quite rapidly, but are not that durable is the test of time. And finally, one, if some of the performance are correct and we see, say, 20% of the world GDP being transitioned on to AI, we're talking $25 trillion. If it's a 2x that some others are also talking about, that's $250 trillion. And that's why the race is there. There's a lot of money at stake, and we have not ever seen a technology, which is not just a tool used by humans, it's also able to function on its own independently. And increasingly, we're going to start seeing that, which creates effects which are very difficult to predict.

All of us individually, collectively and as a set of investors are now navigating our way through -- I mean, our jobs are to place bets in this space, the space is that's so deeply complex with such a degree of uncertainty. I mean, Pietro and Audrey, interesting, Max, I hadn't heard SaaSoccalypse before. But we spent the last 15 years through cloud transition assessing a set of SaaS benchmarks for what does best-in-class actually look like. And these next generation of AI companies are ripping that up, this kind of triple, triple, double, double, double as your framework to 0 to $100 million ARR. We're seeing companies today going from 0 to 10 in year 1. But we're also seeing coming back to the durability point, these AI companies with high churn, there's a lot of testing. There's a lot of people trying to figure it out. So much higher churn than traditional SaaS. You both -- maybe Pietro, to you first, you're both -- you're investing at sort of the earliest stages of these companies. How are you thinking about the companies that will sustain the companies that have true defensibility and durability? And what's the kind of framework you're using to assess that?

Yes. So as preceded investor, we -- it's a bit different situation, right, because we do the initial investment, the initial assessment, most of the time pre-product and almost the time pre-revenues. So we don't have the chance to assess the quality of the revenues. There are no revenues at all. But what we always have is the founders right? And so what we need to do is distinct those high-quality founders that are good fit for the AI for those founders and they start are more like riding the hype and they have no right to win in this new world. And what we're actually seeing, I think it's cool to share is that as we meet more and more founders, we call next-gen founders like really native, people that spend only 5, 10 years in their life as the operator, as a founder or as in start-up, all fundamentally work on AI, they think radically differently. And so the realization is that a lot of founders are not living in the future living in the past or even today. And then what means is that they are not optimizing their product decision and the go-to-market decision on what will be the future? What will be the tomorrow way of working. And so for us, the main question that when we try to do the assessment on the fund is like are they building for tomorrow? Or are they building still for today? Are they led by the fear of AI or they fully enthusiastic and really embracing AI. And so they fundamentally make product decision on where the models are going rather than building for the constraint of today. That is a radical difference in the way you think about the product and how also you design your organization, like they are hiring agents like literally like they're not hiring people, 2 or 3 engineers and then they think they can really, really serve thousands of customers. It's quite a radical change. So what I'm realizing is as a founder today in AI, you can be half pregnant in AI, like you have to be all in, take your risk and take your opinion bets on how you design things. And so for us, now the exercise is like, what does that mean? How can we identify and select those founders that can actually -- they are building for tomorrow. It's quite a new thing. Then of course, we also are investing in our portfolio company at advanced stage. Then in that case, we have revenues and we have assessment on the durability, the sustainability of their market share, et cetera. The single framework that we have is the question that we ask ourselves is do this company can grow when their customers -- when its customers, we became way more efficient, but also way less numerous. And so that is going to happen. We might not know when, but I think it's going to happen company, AI provides much more output per person. And so eventually, company can do -- we will do more with less. So it was much more less people. And so if your business model and what you're serving as a software company today, an AI company today is people fundamentally is you might be more in trouble and your revenues might not be at a good retention.

Also sort of on that team as well. I mean, has has the way you diligence companies or founders changed as you sort of transitioned into these investments?

I think it's a good question. Some of my answer will echo what Pietro has been saying, which is we invest truly pre-revenue. So the thing I'm assessing is founder ambition and execution capability. And that has not changed. The bar is high as always. Speed has changed. So how quickly can you get product to market, how quickly can you test product market fit, iterate, pivot, that's at an unprecedented level. And that's what I'm doing in terms of diligence, but then you invest in companies and obviously, they need to go raise the next round, right? And so we spend a lot of time with our portfolio companies thinking about what will the next stage of diligence look like. And there, I think -- I mean, I was just in San Francisco maybe 3 weeks ago, and I was speaking to a Series A investor who literally told me, -- we will not take a meeting with the company if they haven't gone from $1 million to $10 million in revenue in a year, right? And I mean that's rhetoric, and I think that, that rhetoric is great. There was a Bessimmer report last year that said there's a difference between shooting star companies and Supernoovo companies. And every founder read this report and started freaking out about how I need to get to $100 million revenue in a year, right? And I'm very good storytellers with these. Phenomenal storytellers. I think the issue with some of that rhetoric is it, to your point, doesn't talk about revenue quality. That's great for prosumer, but namely a GovTech business that's sold $10 million in a year. And so I think where it does change is how we speak to our founders about what the next round looks like and what are the metrics they will be assessed on. When we're investing it so early that some of this hyperscale is not really in our realm of diligence, yet it does really affect how we think about the next round.

And on that point, I mean, you both talked about focusing on sort of founders and the profile of the individual or the founder who will be able to navigate this depth of uncertainty that we have ahead. I mean, how do you -- because there's so much uncertainty, do you taking more sort of -- is there particular sectors that you have built theses on that you believe are more ripe for disruption? Do you take a more targeted approach to either sectors or indeed kind of layers of the stack? I mean where are you placing your bets today? I mean, Pietro, maybe...

We need, right. And so again, ours about founders. But of course, we need to be on specific sector or corner. So actually we spent more time recently is everything about robotics and physical AI -- so we try to go as vertsiblearrowsible and making founders with extreme domain expertise and a strong right to win in specific angle. And one that we think there's a lot to build a lot to innovate is the infrastructure layer for physical AI and robotics, which is way less hyped than the digital AI stack. And there's much more to build and there's a massive gap in tooling and infrasture. So one of our recent investment we made atE.,veslem,y to fix the infrastructure for robotics and AI, which is currently quite broken. So when you want to train an autonomous system, a robot, you need to collect a lot of sensor data from cameras and LiDAR and the data are very heavy, very diverse. And in order to generate the training for the autonomy, you need a massive management of data. And normally, as of today, the models companies, they also need to build the infrastructure of data to serve this purpose, which does not make any sense, like? And so what ModCo does actually has built a purpose-built data management platform, purpose built for the physical AI. And we think that it is a massive opportunity because that -- once this is fixed, it will unlock much more innovation and much more acceleration in the generation of autonomy. This is a good example of how we in the vertical.

Max, you guys are also kind of quite focused on the deep tech space and infrastructure there. Where are you focusing your time or are you excited?

Well, to the extent that we're staying within the domain of kind of AI side of things, -- so one area for us is crossover into big verticals like life sciences. You have heard from IMU and John just before this, and it's our latest investment actually. So super delighted to partner there. And we have done a few others in sort of drug discovery into cancer therapies. We see the opportunity in bringing robotics into that domain. And then echoing also on the physical AI, it seems that robotics and industrial automation is just starting to scratch the surface of what's possible. And you can get sort of on one hand, one of the biggest challenges for us given the sort of size of our funds and the stage where we invest, we can't pick a fight with the top 5 model providers, and they keep increasing and improving the functionality. So how do we invest in spaces which are big enough to build a big outcome, but defensible enough for us to see that technology mold and to do that. So Magenta here in London, for example, is focusing on helping robots train much faster. So you show it once and it can repeat that task so that you don't have to do the reproramming. This SIM sort of similar to the kind of foundational models in robotics, it's okay, we've collected all the data, how do you then train the model itself, it's kind of spin-off from NVIDIA that does it sort of 100,000x faster than NVIDIA's own product. and so on. So that domain of industrial automation is for specific AI applications or very deep areas which require a lot of specialist knowledge like life sciences are the 2 things that excite us a lot at the moment.

Ary, I think...

Most excited...

Some of the similar themes, but one that comes to mind immediately is where can you have physical moats. And so hardware is something that I think has been historically out of fashion in venture over the last decade. And I think that's -- there's a big resurgence, whether that's in robotics with physical AI or even in consumer, one of our portfolio companies, which some of you might actually own product from is a company called Nothing. They are...

Best earbuds.

Right? They do literally earbuds and phones, right? And if you think about the real estate of your pockets, you have 2 back pockets in your browsers. And so AI will need to be convened into our experiences through a physical product. There are many companies iterating on what that looks like, whether it's visual, auditory, wearable. Nothing is ideating in those spaces as well. But as of now, it's ear phones and physical phones, and you normally have 1, maybe 2. And so to me, that's a really defensible kind of mechanism.

What's really interesting is that the sort of consistency of physical AI, data infrastructure, hardware, we talked much about sort of the application layer I mean I was going to ask the question like where will you not invest? I mean coming back to maybe this question about the hype end of our title here, what are -- what are you actively avoiding? Where do you not want to invest? You touched on defensibility, perhaps areas that the LLMs that kind of we're seeing such reach here. Maybe speak a bit to where would you not place a bet today?

I can -- my short and fast answer is probably marketing tech just because you see so much changing in that space. You've got -- we had SEO, we're moving to GEO. How do we think about ads within model providers? That's a space that I think is just too early from the stage that we're investing in right now to see something defensible. Similarly, I always ask a founder, what does your product experience look like when we have OPUS 7 and GPT-9, right? And if there's no clear thesis of how this product experience gets better as models become more performant, which then lends itself to AI wrapper style...

Defensibility point, which is obviously top of mind for everybody. Red flags areas you won't invest.

Well, I mean, as a deep tech investor, we wouldn't invest in an AI wrapper company. We wouldn't invest in a SaaS company in its time. We look for that defensible moat and ability to really capture a big chunk of the global market through that. And I wouldn't put -- I wouldn't take a bet against the top 5 model foundational model developers either. So it's kind of carving out, as I was saying, those areas where you require specialist expertise to to do that and you are not likely to be affected by these models as they go. One thing I will say is that even on the foundational model side of things, historically, 2 funds ago, you will actually hear from that company later today, CosalLams, you have kind of an angle at a very, very specialist model because all the age in the market has been about LLMs. Yet LLMs are a very small element of what is actually possible in AI. And they're not a very good solution for many of the problems that we're actually trying to solve in the industry or specific applications. So we're expecting to see a lot more intelligence from those models and more intelligent decision-making digital scientists sort of -- and some of the AI labs are trying to do that. And actually, these are the sorts of things that we're seeing in Europe as well. And maybe it's intriguing whether or not it's an investable proposition, but some of these things are super cool.

So clearly, the AI is changing the economics, right? So there are a few categories or a few areas that are suffering and not exciting. But -- and probably the horizontal software, the workforce software, those are clearly suffering mostly in the market -- in the recent market downturn, but also objectively and intellect they start losing sense in an AI-first world. But on the positive spin, there are trigger or new effects that are brought by AI. As an example, coding now is free, like AIcuritizing the -- what was used to be not like an important capability was creating and building software. This is free. And so as a consequence of free code, now there is an incredible abundance of code. And that triggers new needs and new opportunities. So more code, it means more surface area of code to be secured. So security AI-powered is still a very interesting area and it's going to here to stay. Again, more AI, more data, more data pipeline. So the data infrastructure, I think has a structural tailwind also in the future. Developer tools, we can discuss more code requires more code to be handled to be secured to be the bag to be deployed. Agents are already doing that. But still, it will require still toolings for handling such a vast volume of code. Poxically, now I think company will compete more on what to build rather than how to build. It's more important to decide the direction and the strategy of what you're going to build rather than just the ability of shipping code. And so at this point, design and user experience has become a differentiation point more than before because it's when you decide and you explore what to build. And so I think tooling they are augmenting the ability for exploration, for creativity, for designing, for building great user experience, I think that will have a much bigger option.

Okay. We're nearly on time. So let me sort of finish up with a quick question. A very brief sort of one answer -- one word answer. We -- there's very clear optimism on the sort of trajectory and the direction of travel and the opportunity for AI. Are we in a bubble today that will correct?

Yes or no. Yes.

Yes, we are in a bubble. -- will it burst, I don't know.

Everlasting bubble.

I think financially, yes, but technologically not.

Financially, yes, technologically not. Thank you, all 3 of you for taking your time to come and join us today. It's been a pleasure to have you and really appreciate your time and your insight.

Good morning, and welcome to the Molten Ventures plc Interim Results Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand over to Ben Wilkinson, CEO. Good morning, sir.

Good morning. Thank you very much, and welcome, everybody. We're pleased to present our 6-month results to the end of September. We'll take you through some of the detail of the numbers and also some more of the detail on our portfolio of companies. You have myself, Ben Wilkinson, CEO of Molten Ventures; and also Andrew Zimmerman, who will take you through this presentation. Before I hand over to Andy, who will take us through the financial highlights, I wanted to give a bit of an overview of Molten Ventures.

For those that may be unfamiliar with us, we are a firm that has been almost 20 years in existence and almost 10 years of those have been on the public markets. We have about 80 portfolio companies in our listed plc vehicle, which the ticker is GROW. And we also manage EIS and VCT funds alongside the plc vehicle. We're a generalist technology investor with deep domain expertise amongst our investment team, and we're investing in companies that are born in Europe. And as you'll see through the presentation, that gives exposure to really cutting-edge technology and cutting-edge innovation in the companies that we invest into.

Over the years as a public vehicle, we have invested over GBP 1.1 billion. And one of the features of Molten, which is -- makes us stand apart to other vehicles is that we've actually returned over GBP 700 million of that original invested capital. On the right-hand side, we've put an overview of some of our targets. Andrew will go into this in a bit more detail, but we target 20% fair value growth in the portfolio. And as an average, we've delivered over that with 26% delivery. And we also look through the cycle at 10% of realizations on the opening gross portfolio value, and we have been pleased to deliver again ahead of that with 14% delivered.

When I took over the role as CEO just over a year ago, having been with the business now over 9 years, I focused on strategic priorities, which were really doubling down on what Molten is very good at and what is our essence as an investor and also aligning that with where the capital need is in the European ecosystem with our skill sets as an investment team. And that really hinges on investing directly into companies at Series A and Series B stage where businesses have commercial traction and where they have proof points in their go-to-market journey and where they will take capital and active management from us to help them scale further on that journey of growth.

We are looking to scale the portfolio by running our winners and doubling down on our best companies. And we're also looking to build out third-party institutional capital alongside the plc balance sheet. And this is really to make sure that we have sufficient pools of capital that we can ensure we can consistently invest in the best companies across Europe as they need to raise their capital. There are -- as we'll come to in the market section, there are gaps to capital for this, particularly the Series B stage, which I would consider to be early growth in the European ecosystem. So us being able to deploy capital into that space is obviously differentiated.

We've talked to a narrower Fund of Funds program. One of the ways that we invest capital at the stages before we will put direct money into the businesses is to invest as an investor into seed funds. And we started a program in 2017 to do that. And for the next iteration of the program, we're going to narrow that down to a really targeted group of managers, which really ensures that we can target the capital that we have more into those direct investing and where we see opportunities to grow the NAV.

Balance sheet strength is another priority, clearly having enough capital, be that working capital for the group, but also investment capital to support our companies and to take advantage of opportunities in the market. This is something that we focus on very acutely. And then as we recycle capital coming back to the balance sheet from realizations, we focus very clearly on the best uses of those funds. and we talk about NAV accretive use of capital, and we'll talk to our capital allocation policy a little more as we go through the presentation. But using some of that capital to buy back our own shares and support the share price relative to the NAV has been an important feature, and we'll update a bit more of that in the presentation as well. So with that, I will hand over to Andrew, who can take us through the financial highlights for the period.

Thanks for that, Ben. So good morning, everyone. I'm Andrew Zimmermann, and I'm the Molten Ventures CFO. It's been a busy and a productive period, and there's a lot of really positive news to tell you about. So without any further ado, let me get on with presenting our 6-month results to 30th September 2025. Let me start by saying that I'm really pleased to present these financial results. In the 6 months to 30 September, we have delivered a portfolio fair value uplift, continued to generate strong realization proceeds, enhanced NAV per share returns with ongoing share buybacks in the period and maintained new and follow-on investment into our portfolio with a robust balance sheet. Gross portfolio fair value, excluding FX, was 6% up or GBP 86 million, which was comprised of GBP 135 million of valuation uplifts, offset by GBP 49 million of reductions.

FX on our portfolio valuations added an additional GBP 11 million in the period with a weakening of GBP against euro, partially offset by strength versus the U.S. dollar. In terms of valuations, market-leading companies still command a premium when raising capital. AI, deep tech and hardware public company multiples strengthened significantly and lifted some of our portfolio valuations, but this was partially offset by some softening of consumer and SaaS public company multiples reducing some of our company valuations. It's pleasing to see that some of the premium holdings in the core like Revolut and ICEYE are showing really strong commercial traction, which support their increased valuations. So our GPV ended the year at GBP 1.4 billion and our NAV at GBP 1.3 billion, both up on the FY '25 year-end position, thanks to that fair value uplift in the portfolio.

Realizations exceeded investments with deployment of some of those proceeds flowing out as share buybacks rather than into new investments. So realizations to 30 September were GBP 62 million with an additional GBP 25 million realized since the end of September. So we are ahead of track for the current year. The exits included Free Trade, List and a couple of partial realizations of Revolut and secondary deals led by Revolut. It's worth highlighting once again that these exits were at or above our holding value, providing further proof points of our robust valuation process.

During the 6 months, we invested GBP 33 million into our portfolio with more since then, and I will come on to that shortly. We also completed more than GBP 19 million of share buybacks in the first half of the financial year and began a further GBP 10 million program in November, recognizing that the current discount level between our share price and NAV makes buying our own shares an attractive NAV accretive proposition.

General admin expenses for the period to 30 September 2025 were GBP 12.1 million, an 8% reduction versus the same period last year. This reflects our ongoing efforts to streamline operations and improve our cost to NAV ratio while maintaining investment in critical areas such as investment team talent. Operating costs net of fee income were 0.1% of NAV, well below the targeted 1% guidance.

So we ended the period with our NAV per share at 724p, up nearly 8% from 671p at the year-end. Our cash position was GBP 77 million, with a further GBP 23 million subsequently received post period end from the partial realization of Revolut. In addition, our managed EIS and VCT funds held a further GBP 23 million ready for investment, plus we have an undrawn RCF of GBP 60 million available. So we are in a strong, solid balance sheet position. So we target annual returns of 20% through the cycle, and we have delivered an average annual return of 24% since IPO. However, it's also important that we get back to growth in discrete years. So it's obviously pleasing to see that coming back.

You can see from this chart that after the peak in FY '22, we were quick to take valuations down in FY '23, with things starting to stabilize in FY '24 into FY '25, and we're now seeing growth start to come back through in FY '26. We are optimistic that this growth will continue into the second half of the year with us holding at sensible valuation marks and strong tailwinds for a number of our key holdings in the portfolio.

Obviously, we never want to call the bottom of any cycle, but we are positive about our portfolio of companies and their prospects moving forward. And it's really encouraging to see that there are some signs of life finally coming back to IPO markets and to corporate activity. The key message of this slide is that our experience and expertise as a firm means that we can balance risk and deliver returns through the cycle by investing in this diversified portfolio of great companies.

Okay. So this next slide is a similar story to the previous slide, but around realizations. Obviously, we need the portfolio to grow, but we then need to turn that to cash at the optimal point for each investment. We target annual realizations of 10% of the portfolio through the cycle. And you can see from the chart that since IPO, we have delivered average annual realizations of 14%. It's a similar pattern to the previous slide with strong levels of proceeds peaking in FY '22, followed by a marked slowdown in FY '23 and FY '24 as market conditions changed and exits became difficult.

FY '25, however, was an exceptionally productive year for realizations, and it is positive that we've been able to maintain that momentum into FY '26 with GBP 62 million received to the 30th of September from exits in free trade list and one tranche of Revolut. An additional tranche of Revolut in October means that we are at GBP 87 million in exits for the current year already, and we continue to work hard on crystallizing further potential exits in the portfolio.

So again, this slide demonstrates our ability to manage through the cycle. This is a key feature of the Molten Ventures model. The evergreen balance sheet allows us to allocate liquidity to fund the next generation of category-leading transformational technology companies, balanced with returning capital to shareholders through our ongoing share buyback program when the share price discount to NAV means that buying our shares is a NAV-accretive proposition.

So the plc deployed GBP 33 million into investments during the first half of FY '26. Since then, we've deployed another GBP 17 million, and we continue to work on deal flow of exciting new investments. Ben will talk more about our portfolio companies later, but just to call out one example across each of the different types.

In the GBP 6 million of new deals, we invested into General Index, a data-driven energy pricing provider for global commodity markets.

In the GBP 5 million of follow-ons to support the scaling of our existing portfolio, we invested into Manna, which is a pioneering drone delivery company in Ireland. And those of you that have heard me speak before know how much I love talking about this company.

The GBP 16 million of secondary was into a SpeedInvest continuation fund. These secondaries complement our direct investments as they give us attractively priced access to some later-stage companies, which we know and which should generate strong realizations in a shorter time horizon.

And then finally, we invested GBP 6 million into our early-stage Fund of Funds program in Earlybird, which help us to feed the pipeline of future winners in our portfolio. So you can see from the chart on the right-hand side that we are getting back to more of a normal cadence of investment after a more capital-constrained FY '24 and FY '25. You may also have seen that we've just announced a GBP 12 million Series B lead ticket into Modo, a market data platform redefining benchmarks for batteries and electrification assets. This is a good example of the refocus that Ben was referring to earlier into our Series A and Series B deals and backing our future winners.

So it's pleasing to see a stronger overall fair value uplift in the portfolio in the first half, building on that modest return to growth in FY '25, and I'll come on to some of the key drivers in this slide. We've talked about investments in realizations and FX. In terms of the main drivers of fair value growth, the leader was the core portfolio. Again, we'll talk about that in a bit more detail shortly, but a fair value uplift of GBP 92 million or 11% is much more where we want and expect to be.

The earlier-stage fund investments were also positive, but there was a slight net down of GBP 13 million in the emerging portfolio, which I'll now come on to in the next slide. So we've listened to feedback from shareholders and analysts and other stakeholders about adding some more visibility in our presentations on the companies outside the core. As these will include the next generation of future winners in the portfolio, we absolutely agree. So we're going to try and shed a bit more light on them now. As well as this slide, there is a lot more material on our website and in the appendix of this presentation. And Ben is going to talk -- come to talk about some of the specific companies later, but I would encourage you to access all that material.

So there are 68 portfolios in this emerging cohort. The average age of the investment position is 5 years and the average size of the investment cost is GBP 4 million. However, there's obviously a wide range of investment and sizes and maturities within this. The range of smaller initial positions, which is about 76% of this cohort of companies, enables us to scale up in them as conviction in the emerging winners grow through follow-ons and involvement in further raises. So over time, these ones should become part of the 24%, where there's more than GBP 5 million invested. And then in due course, some of them should grow to become the next generation of the core portfolio.

In terms of the fair value movement for the period, you can see that the majority of companies had fair value uplifts, which reflects good progress within these. Although there were less companies within -- with the write-downs, 3 specific ones resulted in the small overall fair value decrease for the period. So as you know, we like this fan as a way to visually represent the core portfolio fair value and the movements in the different holdings. Note that the scales are slightly different left and right with Revolut on the left, obviously having very strong growth and skewing the scale slightly. So we've split it to make it easier to see. So starting on the right-hand side and working towards the largest fair value holdings. SimScale, which is a cloud-native simulation platform has had strong logo acquisition and revenue growth and strong ARR retention.

Isar Aerospace, which is space rockets, and hopefully, some of you have seen the videos online. It's a really exciting business. First test launch of their rocket unlocked capital at 1 billion valuation. So that's been a strong growth story.

Thought Machine, which is cloud-native core banking software was one that we pulled back the valuation at the interims last year with slower go-live activation of the client base. But since then, there's been really steady improvement with continuing client wins and continuing ARR growth. And so further growth is enabling a gradual continual walk-up in the valuation of this business.

ICEYE, which is a synthetic aperture radar satellite. So rather than cameras, they use radar to visualize things. So you can see through cloud, they can see at night, a really interesting business. Market comps have obviously increased strongly with the tailwinds in this sector. And we've been winning a lot of revenue contracts from numerous European governments because of the defense angle as well as the civil angle in terms of the images that they provide.

CoachHub, which is an enterprise staff coaching platform was one that we pulled back this period. It was profitable, but the revenue growth in that has stalled, so we've reduced the premium to the market comps for that one accordingly, while that business works on fixing that and getting back to more venture growth rates.

Aircall is an AI-powered cloud-based business for communications for enterprises. It's a really good business. It's profitable and consistently growing at more than 20% per annum, and more than 20,000 businesses using it. So a good growth story.

Ledger make hardware wallets and accompanying software to store crypto and NFT. Again, market comps have been really positive in that sector with tailwinds, especially from the U.S. and as well as that, the business has had really strong revenue growth and an improving revenue split between hardware and software.

And then finally, Revolut, which I'm sure everyone knows, is still growing really strongly with good customer acquisition and revenue growth. We are holding this based on commercial milestone traction. But obviously, with ICEYES the $75 billion round that they just announced the other week, there's room for our valuation to grow further in the second half of the year.

So just in general, it's good to observe that visually, there's a lot more green areas across the fan and the breadth of growth, I think, shows the quality of our portfolio with good momentum and maturity for a number of these companies. So looking ahead, we are optimistic. year-end -- built on our year-end results and our exciting and diversified portfolio has delivered a stronger fair value uplift with NAV per share increasing by 8% in the 6 months to 724p.

With our evergreen balance sheet model, the ongoing good level of realizations is returning capital to the balance sheet. And we have continued to take a disciplined and balanced approach to capital allocation between new investment and share buybacks. And so with that, I'm going to hand back to Ben to talk to you a bit more about the actual exciting companies in our portfolio and the outlook. Thanks.

Thank you, Andy, and it's very helpful to have that overview of the highlights, but also a bit of the detail of what's driving those numbers. What I'll try and capture here in the portfolio overview is a bit more detail on how the value of the portfolio breaks down, some of the sort of key drivers in terms of the metrics that drive the growth, and then we'll get into some of the specifics of the portfolio companies as well. In the left-hand side of this chart, you can see the gross portfolio total value of GBP 1.4 billion and that the top 16 companies that we call the core are the majority of that value with GBP 888 million.

And then in the remaining portfolio, we have a split between the direct holdings, which we call the emerging, there's GBP 256 million of value there. And then in our fund investments, we have GBP 293 million of value. So substantial value below the core, even though, of course, we focus on those businesses, and we'll try and give a little bit more detail on how that breaks down. On the right-hand side, you can see from the fund investment perspective, we have the Fund of Funds, which is the seed investments that we've made into seed funds. There's about 80 funds across Europe that we've invested into, and that gives us quarterly reporting on about 3,000 underlying companies.

So this is very helpful for us to look at future pipeline. It gives us geographical reach beyond the U.K. market and also gives us insights into which of the companies and subsectors are performing very strongly. We have about GBP 82 million investment into early growth funds, which are those remaining value outside of the assets that are held within the core. And then we've invested into secondaries, which is a topic we'll touch on in more detail.

From the core portfolio perspective, we're seeing strong growth. Andy has outlined quite a bit of this in terms of 40% growth of the revenue, and it's the commercial traction in those businesses, which is driving the fair value growth in our underlying portfolio. I point you to the average holding period that we've had with those companies of about 6 years versus the age of those businesses at 11 years. which suggests that on average, we've had about 5 years of traction in those companies building out their profile, building out their products and their teams and getting their commercial traction before we will put in a direct investment into those businesses.

On the emerging portfolio, so this is the direct 68 companies where we have GBP 256 million of value. We've shown on the left-hand side the years that we first invested in those businesses, and you can see that there's a real spread of the vintage of those investments going back to 2017. And then on the right-hand side, you can see the split between the quantum of revenues in those companies with 44% of those businesses having over GBP 10 million of revenue. So a degree of maturity even within what we consider to be the emerging portfolio. So coming to some of the specifics.

We have our largest holding in Revolut is $152 million of fair value. Revolut is a business that's been scaling and growing very strongly. As Andy said, they announced their latest investment round just the day before we put out our interim results at a $75 billion valuation. We're holding it based on the commercial traction of the business and helpfully, Revolut put out that their revenue for 2024 was $4 billion and showing about a 30% EBITDA margin. So it demonstrates the growth with 72% growth in their revenue just in that year and now above 65 million customers and roughly targeting to 50% growth for the coming year.

So it gives you a real sense of, one, the scale of the business, but two, that they continue to grow at very high rates. And now with over 65 million customers, they're adding about 2 million customers a month. So that growth continues, and it's very much on the growth path to eventually IPO-ing seems to be their stated aim as a business, and that's been targeted within the next 2 years. We put here an exit horizon of 2 to 4 years. But clearly, the company has stated a target to IPO of around 2 years. And that just demonstrates the maturity that we have in a lot of those core portfolio companies where there is now a horizon to seeing them turning into cash.

The next business that I'll point out is ICEYE. ICEYE is a Finnish company, which has low earth orbit satellites that can take images of the earth. Those satellites have a synthetic aperture radar technology, which allows them to take images through cloud cover and at night. and they're imaging areas of about 400 kilometers, but it can also get down to granularity of centimeter detail. So it's very strong technology, and it's had over GBP 400 million of contracts from governments, leaning on security and military applications, but there's also an application for monitoring of wildfires and floods and selling that data into environmental agencies, but also into governments and to insurance. So it has a real mix of selling hardware products, the actual satellites themselves and the data alongside them. So very strong traction within this business.

Looking at Isar Aerospace, Andy touched on this a little. They had their rocket launch earlier this year, and it was their first test launch of the full rocket bringing together over 100,000 different component parts. They had a technical success in terms of reaching the milestones they wanted to achieve with about 30 seconds of time in the air and a safe landing of the rocket, but also clearing the launch pad. And that delivered for them an uplift in their valuation, unlocking additional capital. So they are now looking to do a second launch, which we believe will probably be either towards the end of this year, but clearly, we're getting pretty close to that or potentially into Q1. So certainly, we'll be in the next few months that we'll see something coming through here.

What is very attractive for us is not only the fantastic technology of this business, but the commercial traction that's already happening in the company. If they get that rocket launch, there's a really strong pipeline of demand to use the rocket to reach low earth orbit.

Ledger is another company in our portfolio that we invested in around the 2018 period. This is a hardware wallet for cryptocurrency and blockchain and digital assets. And it also has a signature layer that allows for the customers to do in-wallet trading. And so it has a blend of hardware sales, but also some of the reoccurring revenue that comes from the trading of the underlying assets. Also performing very well, strong business, has over 8 million devices sold and roughly 20% of the cryptocurrency market on its devices. And we're seeing a lot of institutional traction now as blockchain and cryptocurrency become much more mainstream, particularly in the U.S. market.

And then we wanted to show a little more on some of our emerging companies, those that sit within that GBP 256 million of value. Starting with BeZero, which is a carbon rating agency. They assess carbon offset projects and have a database of getting on to 500 projects that they sell into customers as a software product. That's a business that's also been growing very strongly, been in our portfolio for about 3 years and last raised a Series C in the year with a GBP 32 million raise, taking our total funding to over GBP 100 million, again, demonstrates a degree of scale into these companies.

The next business we invested in over the prior year is called Deciphex, which is an Irish company that focuses on AI-enabled and powered pathology, and it's looking at AI models, which are improving the pathology workflows efficiency and accuracy. So this is selling into large pharma principally. Staying on the space theme, we have a company next called SatVu, which is thermal imaging of buildings from space in a similar way to some of the other space companies. This has a very strong pipeline of customers and demand once they have their satellite -- their next satellite, which will be HotSat-2 up and launched in low earth orbit and operational.

And then finally, Manna, Andy mentioned already is a business that's delivering food delivery in Ireland by their drones, and they have already over 200,000 deliveries. So it's substantially ahead of a lot of its competition in terms of the data and the accuracy that they're able to demonstrate. And they're currently in Dublin and 3 to 4 sites in Ireland, but they're going to expand that to roughly 11 sites and expanding also into Europe and the Middle East.

So a lot of activity and traction in those companies. And as Andy mentioned, Modo Energy is a business that we've just invested more capital into, which is focusing on the electrification market and the data and analytics that go with that and selling that product into customers that need to assess those underlying battery storage and wind and solar assets that are powering that electrification.

So you can see there's a real breadth in terms of what we have invested into, but also a maturity to these companies, and they're all in those exciting sub-technology areas of the market that you would like us to be giving our shareholders exposure to.

[indiscernible] touch a little more on secondaries. Secondaries is one of our strategies for creating value in a primary investment, we'll invest directly into the business. And the average age of -- or average hold period for those companies tends to be around 7 years. We sit on the Board. We're very active with those companies. We help them scale and grow. With secondaries, we're looking at companies that are already at a more mature stage and quite often will transact in secondaries by buying out fund positions from existing LPs that may already have made some money, but those funds will be beyond their 10-year life and that allows us to get direct access to those underlying mature companies and usually turning them to cash through realizations in a shorter time horizon, much more akin to 3 years versus the 7 years of a primary investment.

And you can see here that we've had very strong returns from that strategy with a 2.4x average combined secondary return across the 6 investments that we've made over the last 9 years as a public company.

And this last slide demonstrates the returns and the spread of those returns from a multiple perspective and a percentage of invested capital across those realizations of over GBP 700 million that we've had since we've been listed. And what this really demonstrates is the importance of portfolio construction. We are in the risk business. We are taking risk on these underlying assets. And I would argue if we weren't seeing some zeros in those companies and some less than 1 return, we wouldn't be taking enough risk. But you can see in venture capital, the strength of the returns is really determined by how many of those winners in the 3x plus brackets that you're able to get value into and to ride those winners over the long term and support those companies as they scale.

So it's very much a business that requires risk taking. It's very much an asset class that's skewed to the winners in terms of the returns, but it requires a lot of private market management skills of those underlying companies in the portfolio. So that portfolio construction point is very, very important to how we deliver over several market cycles and how we deliver these underlying returns to shareholders.

Touching briefly on the market environment here. We have seen in Europe that the investment capital on the left-hand side has been fairly consistent over the last few years, coming down from the peaks in 2021, 2022, and that's been overlaid with technology valuations and interest rates, which are factors that come into how much capital is deployed. We're seeing that on the right-hand side, that's been going into fewer companies. So the number of deals has reduced over time, even though the amount of capital -- that quantum of capital has remained rather stable.

In the areas where we invest, the cohorts will be in that GBP 10 million to GBP 20 million, which is sort of the pink bars you can see on the left-hand side, and that's remained fairly stable in terms of numbers of deals and the quantum of capital. But you can see that as companies start to scale, there is a narrowing of the capital that's available for those businesses.

So coming to the outlook. I said at the outset of this presentation, and I won't dwell on them too much what our strategic priorities that we set out are. You can see through the results that we've been delivering on those with our investments in the period into PolyModels, General Index and Duel plus what is now announced as Modo Energy, a follow-on investment in Series B. So very much sticking to the areas that we want to be deploying capital into the right balance of risk and upside.

Scaling the portfolio and bringing in third-party capital, we have a strategy Molten East, which will be a fund that's looking at the Eastern European part of the ecosystem and particularly the engineers and the talent that comes out of those regions, and that's moving towards the first close into next year. And then narrowing our Fund of Funds program, we've already spoken to a lot of the managers in the ecosystem and new commitments are going to a much narrower cohort of managers, but we are still very active in that part of the market in terms of supporting the companies in the ecosystem that we already invested into, and there's a lot of value there, as we described earlier, GBP 120 million of value in those Fund of Funds already.

Balance sheet strength is a key focus for us, continues to be realizations obviously support that. And as we've seen the scaling of companies like Revolut, we've been taking some of our value off the table as they continue to grow, leaving enough for the upside, but making sure we're sensible about our portfolio management and then recycling that capital into new opportunities to continue the growth of the NAV and looking at the growth of those companies over the coming cycles as well. And then with that return of capital, we've had GBP 41 million up to September that we've put into share buybacks, so reducing down the number of shares that we have in circulation by buying them where the share price is attractive.

We're effectively buying our portfolio at discounts. And then we've announced an additional GBP 10 million to that program to ensure that while that elevated discount persists, we can make sure we're supporting the share price and driving that NAV per share return. So I think in terms of the overview, we've covered quite a lot of the positive fair value growth in the portfolio. Certainly seeing the breadth of that growth has been important and growth of 6% in the portfolio, leading to 8% growth in the NAV with those -- the benefit of those share buybacks. So I would say, a strong first half of the year performance.

Capital return to the balance sheet. We've talked to the GBP 85 million now post year-end. I think that's even slightly higher than the GBP 85 million that's come through. And that's clearly supportive of future investments and us going through our capital allocation policy and looking at the most NAV accretive beneficial use of those funds as they return back to us. And then that strong performance, that 8% that we touched on and that continued deployment really strengthening our brand in the market and taking advantage of our existing networks and our existing proprietary opportunities that we have to put capital to work and to see the uplift in those NAV numbers as we see the growth in the fair value of those underlying companies. So I think that we will pause.

There's a lot more in the presentation that's available on our website, and we will, at this stage, go to questions. But of course, I do encourage you all to sign up for our newsletters, which give a lot more detail on the assets as we travel through the year and then making sure that you can spend some time on the appendices in these presentations because we do give a lot more detail on the underlying companies and the shape of the portfolio.

Fantastic. Then Andrew, thank you very much indeed for the presentation. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to remind you recording of the presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard.

And then Andrew, as you can see, we've had a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and thank you to all the investors for submitting those. If I may just ask you just to click on that tab and just where appropriate to do so, read out the question and give your response and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Super. Thank you, Paul. And thank you, everyone, for submitting questions, but also for your attention in the presentation. We recognize this time of the year is busy with corporate reporting. So certainly appreciate your attendance here.

So first question, I'm going to look at is as we highlight a number of investments that are maturing and then thinking about those exits over the coming time period. In the core portfolio, in particular, we do highlight quite a lot of those companies like the Revolut of the world, Ledgers of the world, and ICEYEs and Aircall that are at that level of maturity where we could see a pathway to those companies exiting. Our target returns are 10% of the gross portfolio value, but we call that a through-the-cycle target because, of course, we don't know exactly the right point to achieve those exits and achieve the right value for those businesses.

Quite a lot of our companies will have stated ambitions of IPOs potentially be those in the U.S. or in Europe, but 85% of our exits are through trade sales to corporates. So more often than not, that tends to be the route that those companies go down. So -- but we certainly see a lot of maturity in those companies, and we see the possibility of turning some of those back to cash in the coming years.

Deployment of capital is the next question, which effectively follows on from realizations coming back to the balance sheet. We follow our capital allocation policy, which looks to that NAV accretive best use of the capital across 3 areas. One is primary investing where we go directly into those companies. The second is secondary investing where we're investing into more mature assets or portfolios of assets we can usually target those secondaries with a discount because you're providing liquidity to an illiquid part of the market.

And it gives us greater visibility on those mature assets in terms of their scaling journey for the coming years. And then the final part is looking at the share price and our -- how the shares are trading relative to the underlying value of the assets in the portfolio, which is the NAV per share. And clearly, in the last year or 2 where we've had discounts to that share price versus the NAV per share, we've been buying back our own shares. So that's the other use of capital that we will look to.

And that can be a moving equation of thinking around what is the most NAV accretive use of those funds. And so we'll assess each of those 3 areas at each point.

There's a question here about diligence on our underlying companies when we undertake investments.

We're investing at the critical cutting edge of innovation. And so we are ahead of the curve. A lot of the businesses in our core that we're talking about here, we've invested in for 8 years plus. And you can see, therefore, that the diligence of the underlying technology is an important feature of what we do at the time of investing. Some of that diligence will come through the domain expertise in our team, but we'll also use external providers to come and diligence assets, people either through our own network of investors and entrepreneurs that we've invested in over some years or even third-party specialists.

There is a question here on Saba as an investor in our stock, and it says, how are they influencing your management of the business?

The reality is they have a Tier 1 in the market to say that they are an investor in our stock. We welcome all of our shareholders to be active and recognize the value that we have in the shares, particularly while they trade at a discount to NAV. You can see from our capital allocation policy that we are very focused on creating value for shareholders and narrowing that discount. And so ultimately, we treat Saba like everyone else in our share register. We are engaging where people would like to engage with us. We'll report to them like we would everybody else. And we think all of our shareholders are aligned in wanting to see growth in the value of the company. So that's very much aligned with our Board and our management as well.

There's one here. I might ask you to take, Andy, because it talks to more of the valuation process. It says, can you describe a bit more detail on the multiples of revenue used for the core valued and the discounts that may be there in the pricing points and particularly for companies that aren't yet at profitability. So I think it might be worth, Andy, you giving a bit of an overview of how you approach that valuation.

Yes. So just -- and there's detail in the appendix of this presentation, which has the basis that each of the core companies has been valued on a little letter that indicates it. So for companies that are valued on a comps basis, there's like a basket of publicly quoted companies that are not identical, obviously, because a lot of these are new and innovative businesses, but are closely aligned to these businesses as possible. And you take those revenue multiples and get that basket of them and compare them alongside the ones that you have.

So -- and then you can have a premium or discount depending on how the portfolio company is doing relative to that. The runway lengths for those companies as well, we've put a slide in there about that, which just shows how well funded they are. We don't break it down by individual company because of commercial confidentiality reasons, but they do all have a robust capital runway and revenue growth prospects.

Thank you, Andy. Just going to a few more of the questions. There's a question on our market cap and the discount to NAV. I have touched on the realizations and the apportionment of capital back to buybacks. So I think that's a question we've addressed.

There is a question on capital-intensive companies.

And I would say the majority of our businesses are software companies and therefore, very much capital light, focused on data and software and selling into enterprises. There are a portion of our companies like Isar Aerospace, which will need more capital as they scale. We wouldn't be the source of that capital. And therefore, the question is, could that dilute your equity position? And if companies raise new money, it can dilute our equity position.

That is a feature of the model. But quite often, those companies are raising at higher valuations. So that level of dilution and then not taking capital from ourselves is a trade-off that we're happy to take and as part of the model. Clearly, when our companies scale and grow, if we feel that they're growing at the rates of return that we would like to continue on that journey as we've seen with Modo Energy, we'll double down on those companies and put more capital to work. So we're assessing the return that we see versus the price of those underlying investment rounds.

So I think with that, Paul, we've come to the end of the questions. And again, I'd just like to thank everybody for their time. and their interest in Molten. And I think that interest is well placed because we have a lot of exciting companies in the underlying portfolio. I think investing in European technology is a very exciting period, particularly over the next 5 to 10 years as we see generational shifts in technology. And I think Molten is a partner that can give people access to those underlying technology shifts and the growth that comes with those as they disrupt markets. So I encourage you to stay with us as we show you more of our companies over the coming reporting periods.

Fantastic. Ben, Andrew, thank you indeed for updating investors today. Please ask investors not to close this session to be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. Molten the team can better understand your views and expectations. It only take a few moments to complete and they're greatly valued by the company.

On behalf of the management team of Molten Ventures plc, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session, and good morning to you all.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us for Molten Ventures interim results. This is the results for the 6 months to the end of September, and we'll take you through key movements in the portfolio. We've moved with the trading statement at the end of October and then now giving you the final numbers here. Today, you will be spoken to by myself, CEO, Ben Wilkinson; and also our CFO, Andrew Zimmermann, who will take you through the financial highlights. I'll just give a quick introduction, a reminder to Molten, and then we'll get into the numbers.

So Molten Ventures is actually, next year, celebrating our 20th anniversary as a firm and has been listed since 2016. The benefit of that is obviously that we can get to show the model working over time. And I think here in these results, you'll see the breadth of the portfolio and the demonstration of that vintage creation that's been happening over these many years, 80-plus portfolio companies in the portfolio. And when we look at the PLC numbers here today, that's what we'll be talking to, but also we manage EIS and VCT funds alongside. So the capital pool is an important function and driver of our model and how we address the market.

On the right-hand side, you can see the important factors. We've targeted 20% annual growth in the portfolio fair value, and that's -- we call that through the cycle because obviously, these things tend to be up and down somewhat, but actually delivered 26% when you take into account the 6 months growth. And then in realizations, the important factor is turning that value into cash, and we've delivered 14% versus our 10% target. And again, I think that's a differentiated point from us versus some other firms and something that we've been able to demonstrate through many years. So we'll touch on those returns. In aggregate, GBP 1.1 billion of capital deployed in those years as a public company and returning over GBP 700 million coming back, which is a really strong proof point of our model.

A year ago, when I took over as CEO, we refocused our strategic priorities on these key areas, really focusing on our core investment strategy of Series A and Series B investing. Particularly at Series B, this is a part in the market in Europe where there's a gap to capital, somewhere where we have strong experience and it's where you see the commercial traction in those businesses coming through most strongly, but also requiring the venture capital skills that we can bring to bear to help grow those companies and manage their scaling journey. And so it's capital, but also active management that we bring to bear with these companies.

Scaling our own portfolio and developing the co-investment pools of capital further continues to be a key priority for us. We'll touch on the progress in some of those areas, but having the public balance sheet, having the EIS and the VCT funds and then growing out our third-party capital on the private side is a key strategic priority for how we scale and grow within the market. And as part of that, thinking about our fund-to-fund program, which is the investment into funds at the earlier stage from when we invest directly, we've been going through that program and looking at a narrower cohort for the next iteration of investment. So the existing program is largely funded in good shape. It gives us quarterly reporting on 3,000 underlying companies, which is great for our deal funnel. But just thinking about the uses of our capital when capital is ultimately constrained, we want to put more of that into direct investing and thinking about the shape of our portfolio, how that evolves over time.

Balance sheet strength, we're going to be able to touch on that today. It's clearly getting back to growth is an important factor within that, but also driving the liquidity from realizations and then thinking around the use of that capital as it comes back. And we always talk to this NAV accretive use of capital. And importantly, that can be buybacks of our shares when we're trading at big discounts, and we've demonstrated with GBP 50 million committed to buybacks, that's something we're willing to do, and we recognize the strength of doing that in terms of buying our portfolio at a discounted value, but also NAV accretive in terms of driving investment. A lot of the companies that we're going to talk about today, we invested in those businesses almost 8 years ago. And the growth that's come through over that time and management of those companies that's come through over that time, and that will drive the growth in the future by the investments we make now.

Another part of our strategy is to invest in secondaries where we can acquire mature assets at discounts to their holding value by providing liquidity to an illiquid part of the market and giving ourselves and our shareholders access to those growth companies and that are known winners, if you like, in other people's portfolios is a very sensible way for us to use our capital. So when we talk about NAV accretive use of capital, we're thinking about it in a holistic way about what is the best use of that capital depending on the opportunity set. And clearly, driving a narrowing of our share price discount to NAV continues to be a focus. Some progress has been made on that, but a lot more to go. You'll see today that the NAV is growing, and therefore, the shares have to trade up even further as we drive value in the portfolio.

And I will, therefore, hand over to Andy to take you through our financial highlights and demonstrate some of that.

That's great. Thank you very much, Ben. So I'm Andrew Zimmermann. I'm the CFO at Molten Ventures. About a year ago, I was interim CFO, presenting my first set of interim results. So it's nice to be here 1 year later as actual CFO. And we've got a really positive set of financial results to present. So without any further ado, we will get on to that.

So very pleased to have -- talk about a 6% GPV uplift to NAV, GBP 135 million of uplifts offset by GBP 49 million of reductions. FX has added another GBP 11 million to that with the GBP euro being a tailwind, but GBP USD being a slight headwind. Market comps have helped sectors like AI and deep tech and hardware have obviously been stronger [Technical Difficulty] that's been offset a bit by consumer and SaaS. Core names like Revolut, people have read the news about yesterday and ISI have shown very strong commercial traction. Sorry, GPV and NAV are both up at GBP 1.4 billion GPV and NAV GBP 1.3 billion.

Realizations have been slightly ahead of investments with some of that cash going to buybacks, again, as Ben referenced, recognizing the NAV accretive additive potential of those. Realizations were pleasing at GBP 62 million to the half year. There was also an additional GBP 23 million from another tranche of [Technical Difficulty] Revolut in October. So GBP 87 million so far year-to-date that we've done with some other little bits and pieces. Freetrade, Lyst and Revolut, the 2 partial Revolut-led secondaries are the drivers of that. So been at GBP 87 million already year-to-date after a very strong FY '25 of GBP 135 million. It's really pleasing to see that momentum continuing.

From that cash, [Technical Difficulty] we've put GBP 33 million into the balance sheet, GBP 33 million. We'll come on to that in a bit more detail in terms of [Technical Difficulty] some of the things that we've done. Again, there's been more invested post period end with about GBP 25 million that's either been invested already or is about to be and will be announced. We've also done GBP 19 million of share buybacks. Again, that is NAV accretive to our NAV per share, that's added about 14p to our NAV per share. And we've just announced another GBP 10 million extension to that, which will take us up to GBP 50 million committed so far.

OpEx, we've managed to reduce. We've been really disciplined. We've looked at technology and how we can drive some efficiencies from that. We've been able to, therefore, reduce our general admin costs from GBP 13.1 million to GBP 12.1 million year-on-year or half year-on-year, which is an 8% reduction, some reductions in headcount there are mainly on the operational side so that we can rebalance our investment and really drive that investment quality. So we're at 0.1% operating costs net of fee income, which is well below the 1% target of NAV. So that means we end the half year at NAV per share of 724p, which is 8% up on the year-end position, which is obviously a really strong, great position to be on, and then we'll be looking to build on that in the coming period.

And our balance sheet at the 30th September had cash of GBP 77 million. We also have cash plus GBP 23 million from that Revolut tranche that came in, in October. And we also have funds available in EIS and VCT of about GBP 23 million available for investment. So we're in a really strong balance sheet position where we've managed to balance the investment with buybacks and cash available going forward.

So this is a chart that you're used to seeing where we talk about our performance through the cycle. We have a target of 20%. Our average return through the cycle is now 26%. You can see from this chart, we -- obviously, there was strong growth with a real peak in FY '22. We were quick to take valuations down in FY '23. FY '24, things started to stabilize a bit. And then in FY '25, there's a smaller return to growth in FY '26. That first half, 6% for the half year is obviously a good start and obviously, not quite a hockey stick yet, but starting to turn up there in terms of the growth. So we'll be looking to see that continue in H2. I think with sensible marks for our portfolio and tailwinds behind a number of the core companies, there's good signs that, that will continue. Everybody has been reading a bit about a bit more activity in IPO markets and M&A. So with our diversified portfolio and our experience managing through the cycle, we're optimistic about this continuing.

So the story on realizations is really similar -- similar shape. Our target is 10% through the cycle, and we've delivered 14% so far average return. Again, you can see that builds up towards FY '22, where it really peaked. Then obviously, it was a difficult market in FY '23 and FY '24, really slowed momentum for realizations. There's a positive return in FY '25, where we did work really hard to engineer different realizations for a number of the companies. And that's obviously pleasing to see that continue into FY '26, with a GBP 62 million to the half year 30 September and an additional GBP 25 million since then. We're obviously still working on other things. So we would hope to be able to generate more realizations before the end of the year. And obviously, our evergreen model then enables us to recycle that back into future investments, which are going to drive the future NAV growth as well as other NAV accretive opportunities like secondaries and buybacks when the discount is wider to the share price.

So this is just a slide a little bit about our investment deployment. We've deployed GBP 33 million in the first half of the year. We've done more since then. So the cadence will pick up a bit in the second half of the year. I'll just call out a few deals. Ben will talk a bit more about the portfolio later in the presentation. But in new deals -- yes, GBP 6 million in new deals. One example in that is General Index, which is a data-driven energy pricing provider for the commodities market. In the follow-ons, we've done GBP 5 million, which is helping to scale and build our portfolio. For example, the one I'll call out is Manna, which those of you who know me know I like to talk about just like drones delivery food. But again, it's a good example of us investing in the ones that are going to be the future drivers of growth in the portfolio.

In the secondaries, we did the secondary with Speedinvest for GBP 16 million in the continuation fund. These give us access to a portfolio of companies that we understand as venture managers that are later in life, so they've got a shorter exit window, and we can get them at a very attractive price. So it's another good option for us in terms of driving NAV. And then finally, we've put GBP 6 million into our fund of funds program. Obviously, we're trying to manage a tighter cohort going forward, but this helps us to scout the future winners that are going to feed through into the emerging and then the core in due course.

We've also recently signed a GBP 12 million Series B with someone in the portfolio company, which we can't announce just yet, but we'll be working on that. So watch this space, you should see an announcement of that soon. But that's just a really good reaffirmation example of us backing our portfolio and backing the winners in our portfolio and getting back to more of this focus on Series A and Series B core investments. And then just on the chart here on the right, again, just to call out the shape of it, you can see FY '23, just before things started to go south, we deployed a more normal level of capital. FY '24 and '25, obviously, a bit more capital constrained, but we're now getting back more to a normal investment cadence with targeting somewhere around about GBP 100 million by the end of the year.

So this slide just walks us through the fair value movement for the period in the portfolio. So you can see investments and realizations we've talked about, so slightly more realizations than investments, which are a net down in terms of the GPV. FX has worked in our favor. As a pan-European investor, we're obviously going to be exposed to movements in euro and dollar, but that's been a small net benefit for us this period. The real talking point, I think, is the movement in the core, GBP 92 million uplift, and we'll come on to talk about the specific drivers of that with the portfolio fund in due course. But that's like an 11% uplift, which is much more where we want to be and where we feel we should be. And so that's really pleasing to see. The fund performance contributed about GBP 7 million. That was offset by about GBP 30 million, a small write-down in the emerging portfolio, which I will actually now just come on to talk about. But overall, a really strong net 6% fair value increase for the first half of the year.

So we've had a lot of feedback from people in terms of the emerging. We talk a lot about the core. That's obviously the biggest part of the portfolio by value, but the emerging are what's going to drive the future. So we're trying to talk about this a bit more and shed a bit more insight into it. Ben will talk about some of the specific companies, which I know people find really interesting and exciting. So that will add a bit more color. There's 68 companies in this emerging portfolio, so it doesn't lend itself to a big list, but this table gives you a sense of the diversity and range of across that cohort. So the average age of investment in this is about 5 years. And the average cost of investment is about GBP 4 billion. So you can see the average is obviously smaller. These are the earlier Stage 1s. There's obviously a broad range within that. And you can see from this doughnut here, about 3/4 of them are the smaller sub-$5 million positions. So these are the ones that are still proving themselves out.

As they start to scale and grow, and we can spot the emerging winners and we have some conviction, then we can put more capital into them. And so the remaining 2 sections of the donut are as these companies start to grow and we can follow on and help them grow, we'll put a bit more money into them. And then eventually, these companies should grow, keep growing and some of them will get into the core as the future winners in the portfolio.

In terms of the fair value movement in this segment, you can see that actually the majority or nearly the majority had an uplift in terms of the number of companies, a number flat and then about 1/3, there was a small reduction. Overall, although there were more uplifts in the portfolio, there was a small net reduction. There were 2 or 3 sort of larger write-downs just in specific companies in that emerging sector that meant it was a small net write-down of GBP 13 million. But overall, still positive momentum in that cohort of the portfolio.

So this is the fan, which obviously you're familiar with seeing. Again, I would just call out the point that the scales are different, which is why it looks a little odd, but Revolut because it's so large by fair value had skewed the scale. So we've split the two halves slightly. The right-hand side are the smaller ones that are growing. The left-hand side are the more mature ones in the core. So just to call out some specific ones where there's been the more significant movements. So SimScale, which is cloud-native simulation. It's doing really well in terms of starting to add logos, starting to really grow revenue. It's got good ARR retention. So that one is starting to move up the fan. And obviously, we have a strong belief in that one going further.

ISAR Aerospace is one that you may have seen like the rocket launch. It's a German space rocket company, hopefully, a European SpaceX. They got their first rocket away off the platform earlier in the year. It didn't -- it blew up, obviously, partway through, but that is expected as part of the development process. So they got all the data that they needed, didn't destroy the launch pad, so they were really happy. And they're already working towards launch 2. But that first successful launch in terms of the data collection unlocks a capital for EUR 1 billion valuation. So that one has shown good growth in the half year.

Thought Machine, although it's not moved that much, I just thought I would call this one out because people are interested in that one. That's obviously core native banking software. You'll maybe remember a year ago, we'd actually taken that one down quite significantly as it sort of stalled in terms of the speed of its revenue growth. In the second half of last year, we started to write it back up, and we've done a little bit again in this first half of the year. The story hasn't really changed. It's a really good business. They're signing Tier 1 banks. They've got a good pipeline of logos. It's just the cycle for that particular line of business. It takes a while to turn it to permanent ARR and longer than they originally perhaps forecast. So as they get these books of business live, the ARR will grow again quite lumpy and that speed of revenue growth should start to accelerate again, justifying more of a premium valuation. So we should see that start to pick back up and walk back up as they hit those commercial proof points.

ICEYE is another one that's had a really strong period. You may have read about it in the press, dual-use technology, it synthetic aperture radar satellites, which are just a very cool technology, can see through cloud, can see at night. They've just released their latest version of them, which are even more high definition. You can see things about the size of a laptop from space. Obviously, the shift in defense, particularly for European governments, financing themselves mean they've signed a lot of contracts with different European governments. So they've got really good traction, both in terms of hardware, the actual satellites themselves, but then the software in terms of delivering the images to people. And obviously, the comps in that sector have really benefited from that as well. So it's really strong growth in that one.

CoachHub is the only one in the core really that we've had to take down much. That one, CoachHub is obviously coaching software for enterprises and it matches coaches with executives. That's had a slightly tougher year. Firms are probably being a bit more mindful of what they spend their money on and things like that can be the first to be paused. It's actually profitable, but the growth has just stalled. So in terms of the valuation, you need revenue to really be growing at a stronger level to justify a higher premium. So as they get back to that growth, we would expect to be able to walk that valuation back up again. But until they hit those commercial traction proof points, we've pulled that one back slightly.

Aircall is business communications software, AI cloud-based, more than 20,000 customers, really good solid business. It's profitable. It's doing more than 20% revenue growth year-on-year, consistently performing a really good example of a mature company in the portfolio that should be heading towards some kind of exit scenario, whether it's an IPO or a trade sale as it really matures.

Ledger, again, benefiting from really strong tailwinds, crypto and NFTs, it's a hardware wallet and software that goes with it. Really strong revenue growth, really strong performance. Comps are doing well because of the U.S. market being very favorable towards that kind of asset class. So it's been a strong beneficiary of that.

And then finally, Revolut, you'll all have seen the news yesterday about their GBP 75 billion round. That obviously came a bit late for us in terms of this performance. So we've held it based on commercial traction and commercial milestones. It's obviously still performing really well, more than 60 million customers. They did GBP 4 billion of revenue last year, should do something like GBP 6 billion this year based on the growth rates they talk about. So we've been able to take that up quite considerably, but we obviously have a bit of scope to grow further if it's going to grow into that GBP 75 billion valuation. So overall, really positive, I think, for the core portfolio.

So I think I would just say just before I hand back to Ben, it's a really positive set of numbers. It's pleasing to be up there talking about fair value growth coming back, really driving NAV per share. We've obviously continued to generate that momentum in realizations, which allows us to allocate capital to the new future winners of the investment and also to allocate some to buybacks, recognizing the NAV accretive benefit of being able to do that. So a nice set of numbers to talk about.

And with that, I'll go to Ben, who can tell you a bit more about the portfolio.

Thank you, Andy. So as Andy described, we wanted to give you a bit more of the breadth of the portfolio, at least 10 in the call there that's showing those uplifts. We're also trying to show a little more of a -- shed a light on the emerging so that you can see the core is driving the growth. There's GBP 888 million of value there, but the emerging, there's almost GBP 500 million of value sat within that. So what we'll do here is take you through some of the drivers of the growth in the core, but also give you a little bit more of an overlay of how the portfolio comes together.

You can see here that gross portfolio value that we talk about GBP 1.4 billion, core being GBP 888 million of that. And then think about the emerging, that GBP 256 million in the light blue bar. We'll talk to some of the details of that. And Andy touched on the fact that there are 68 companies sat within there. And then there's GBP 293 million sat within fund investments. If you look to the right-hand side of this chart, you'll see how that splits down. That's splitting down between some secondaries that we've been doing over the last few years, also SPVs, special purpose vehicles that we've invested in through the years, but also the fund of funds. There's GBP 120 million in that seed fund of fund program where we're an LP into funds across Europe, and there's about 80 funds across Europe that we're invested into. So small checks going into those funds, but that supports the ecosystem, gives us the data on those companies as they come through to the Series A and Series B stages of investment where we can look to invest in those companies directly. And then finally, with Earlybird, about GBP 80 million sat there as value, which is value that's not sat within the core. There are a few assets like Aiven and ICEYE, which are sat in the core, which are look-through into Earlybird investments.

So if we touch on the larger part of the portfolio first, the core companies, their growth is driven by their revenue growth, that commercial traction that then feeds through into fair value growth. And we can see that the margins are very strong in that part of the portfolio as they are through the rest. That really gives an indication of really strong technology businesses with 68% gross margins, 6 of those companies being profitable, also some of those moving to profitability in coming years. So we have about 40%, 45% of that core being profitable now as well. Companies are well funded and growing strongly. You can see here that growth has continued and just touched on some of the assets, in particular, that Andy has just taken us through, but it's that commercial traction in the underlying businesses that we really look to. So where we're taking valuations up or we're taking valuations down, it's really underpinned by the growth in the underlying companies.

One thing in terms of the age of the portfolio, the average age of those companies is 11 years, and our average age of the holding that we've had is 6 years. So it gives you a sense of where we're investing in those businesses on their own journey. And it's really where we start to see those commercial proof points, commercial traction selling to customers, increasing that revenue, demonstrating that you can sell to a breadth of different customers, but also increase your value within each of those logos. So upselling to those customers as well. Those are the points of reference that we're looking to when we're first putting our investment tickets into these companies.

So the emerging portfolio, trying to provide a bit more color on how that comes together. On the left-hand side, we've got the capital deployed. Obviously, now we've been deploying for 9 years, over GBP 1 billion deployed. A lot of that's gone into the core, and that's driving strong returns. But then a lot of that has also gone into the emerging. And you can see here that that's been invested over a period from 2017 right through to now with the majority invested up to 2021. So you can see on the left-hand side that there's a real balance of that vintage creation within the emerging. It's not just focused on any one vintage. And I think that portfolio construction point comes across strongly when you look at that left-hand side of the chart.

Average holding is about 9% equity, which is in line with our 9% to 11% probably average across the portfolio, which is also really where we start to think around 10% to 15% of initial equity. Sometimes that gets diluted down. So that's all in line with our original investment thesis. And talking to scale, you can see on the right-hand side here, how much of that is split by revenue. So the blue, the 44%, that's GBP 10 million plus of revenue. So it demonstrates a degree of maturity of those underlying companies. Some of them are pre-revenue, particularly where they're in the deep tech parts of the market where revenue might come later than the traction in the technology. But also you can see that some of those are earlier-stage businesses, GBP 1 million to GBP 5 million of revenue or GBP 5 million to GBP 10 million as they start to scale through that journey.

Our job is to portfolio manage. Some of those will not scale and grow, and we'll reduce them down in our holding value or sell them on. Some of them will scale and grow into the core. And we talk in a couple of weeks about one of the investments that we've made in one of our existing companies, a Series B investment where we've led the round in that company preemptively, that's where we start to see that commercial traction coming through, and we want to put more of our shareholder capital to work in that business and then those companies can become the core companies that drive the growth going forward.

So I wanted to talk for the next few slides about some of the specifics. We're touching on four of the core portfolio companies, and we'll also touch on a little bit of the emerging as well to give you a flavor of those underlying businesses. Revolut, we've talked a little bit about here, and it's obviously very strongly in the press. I think the only comment I'd like to add in addition to what Andy said here is this is a business that was founded 10 years ago, now has over 65 million customers, was a company that was scaled in the U.K. and then grown into other markets, and it is now getting licenses in South America, Mexico, and Colombia as an example. And it's just driving growth globally. So this is a really good example of a success case in Europe that we need to celebrate, and we need to make sure that the capital that goes into these companies to enable that success is there for these businesses that have the ambition to have global scale.

And we're talking about productivity earlier today in some of my conversations. We need to drive more productivity growth, and these are the types of businesses that really allow that to happen. If you look back and think about when you had to go into your bank at least once a week to process checks or to go and deal with anything that required an over-the-counter service or when you traveled and maybe you had to have travelers checks, for example, at a certain stage of that journey. Think about how seamless your banking is now relative to how it was perhaps even just 10, 15 years ago. And this is the productivity that's been driven through all of the companies in our portfolio and it's been driven by this part of the ecosystem that drives job creation and innovation.

In a similar theme, ICEYE, we invested in that business in 2018 into 2019. So they have now 50 satellites up in low earth orbit. And those satellites, as Andy touched on, can take images of the earth giving a range of 400 kilometers from single pictures down to the laptop scale of granularity. And that allows security to be a factor and a use case, but it also allows use cases and climate change. So thinking around forest fires, thinking about flooding and the impacts of that on the insurance part of the business, that drives a massive efficiency looking at areas that are affected or impacted by that. And our use of space is going to drive a lot more productivity in our daily lives. It already drives productivity with things like GPS. But clearly, that's becoming an important driver of growth going forward. And this company is performing very strongly. And another business that's quietly under the radar for several years while we've invested into those companies. And then they start to emerge as growth companies and drivers in our portfolio. And then in the last year as security and defense becomes more of a theme and sovereignty around assets becomes more of a theme, you can see that these companies are getting much more focus in the press.

A similar business that Andy touched on is ISAR Aerospace. It's definitely worth watching the launch, 30 seconds into the air was important. There's over 100,000 components coming together in a single rocket. That's the first test of that rocket. And so demonstrating that it can get off the launch pad, demonstrating that they can safely bring that rocket down as per the plans, but also taking all the data into that next launch. This is a business that's exciting to watch. And hopefully, in the next few months, we'll be able to give you a bit more of an overview of that next launch happening, and we can all watch that one.

And then Ledger, Andy touched on Ledger, cryptocurrency, hardware, security layers, security in anything, clearly very important. Even more important, as we've seen all of the cryptocurrency marketplaces have their own ups and downs over the years. A lot of people are recognizing you have to have it stored on a Ledger device. That's the most prominent device, hardware wallet for crypto and blockchain applications. And there's about 20% of the cryptocurrency market stored on Ledger devices. So it gives you a sense of their scale and what they've been building. Very strong tailwinds now for crypto and blockchain, particularly out of the U.S. And as this institutionalizes as an ecosystem and Ledger at the forefront of that with their hardware devices and the software that they can drive to allow trading.

And then some of our emerging companies, equally exciting, the ones that we'll be talking about in a lot more detail in the coming years. BeZero is a carbon market. It's verifying offset projects and creating a pricing market for carbon. This is a business we invested in 2022 in the financial year and is growing strongly and undertook its Series C funding round, total funding of over GBP 100 million. And again, this is a business that's driving a new part of the ecosystem, a new part of the market that doesn't currently exist and hopefully becomes ubiquitous and something that we just take for granted in the next few years.

If I look at that productivity theme, Deciphex, which is focusing on workflows and AI-driven support for pathology, that's a part of the ecosystem where we're investing a lot of capital into the NHS and investing a lot of capital into health. But a lot of that capital needs to go into the productivity tools that drive efficiencies. Public sector efficiency has reduced over the last few years, not increased. And these are the tools that allow that to happen.

In a similar way to the space theme, we have Satellite View, another company in the portfolio, which is looking at thermal imaging of buildings. And so low earth orbit satellites go up, images of those buildings, looking at the heat signatures, looking at the efficiency of buildings, looking at security aspects that go alongside that. And this is a company that has a really strong order book behind it already.

And then finally, Andy's favorite company, Manna, delivering -- it's interesting when you think around if you stand in London and you talk to people about drone delivery, it's a pipeline dream. In Dublin, that's already happening. There's hundreds of thousands of deliveries that have been occurring already over 200,000. And Manna, as it expands, we will go into 11 sites across Dublin, but we'll also be expanding into Finland, into the Middle East. It's a company that's born in Europe, that's scaled in Europe that is already ahead of many of the big players that we would assume would be at the advanced stages of this. So Manna is a very exciting company that we'll be hearing more about this year.

Give you a sense across the board of the excitement that comes through our portfolio. But one important factor within our portfolio is how we think about driving growth. Direct investing is clearly the heartbeat of what we do and fund-to-fund investing, as we've touched on, helps to drive the ecosystem. But another important part of our platform is driving growth through secondaries. I just wanted to touch on that for a moment because sometimes when we invest in secondaries, people are trying to understand, well, why are you investing in other people's portfolios. But if you think about the journey of scaling technology businesses, they often scale in years 10 to 15 of their life. You can see in our core, the average age of 11 years. And then if you reflect on the average time horizon for a private structure is a 10-year fund. And so those technology businesses that are the winning companies in those funds are scaling and maturing at the very latest years of those funds where the managers of those assets need to show realizations and drive returns.

So we provide a liquidity solution to those managers that allows them to give money back to their investors that allows those investors in turn to put new capital commitments into the managers' new funds. So you're unlocking a part of the ecosystem, which is clogged up. For us, the benefit is clearly investing in scaled mature assets. And we've demonstrated with our track record here that we can drive returns averaging 2.4x multiple. A lot of that has been realized in a short period of time. And it's really a way for us to create additional value for our shareholders by being active in the market and using our network and using our relationships and using our ability to value technology businesses and being very fundamental about the value of those companies and drives additional value to the direct investing that we have in the portfolio. So delivering returns in excess of GBP 200 million on our secondary strategy. It's not something we do every year. It's something that we do where we feel there's pockets of value and discounts that we can take advantage of.

So then finally, how does that drive to returns across our entire portfolio, over GBP 700 million of realizations over the 9 years and thinking about venture capital as an asset class, the returns are skewed to the winners. You have to run your winners. And in turn, the management skill of a venture capitalist is managing an entire portfolio and ensuring that you can drive returns from the rest of the portfolio as well. And you can see here that we've had over 5x plus returns, which have driven the majority of the value. That's the pure power law playbook of venture capital. And those are the companies that we'll naturally talk about a lot, but also driving returns coming from more modest multiples in the 1 to 3x ranges, that's an important part of what we do.

And I think that's been very differentiated at Molten in terms of how we think about the portfolio and consistently driving those returns coming back through -- and even in the scenarios where we might not be making positive returns, we get less than 1x our capital back. We are in the risk business. We should be taking risks. We should be investing in companies that have great potential, but clearly, not all of those companies will make it to be the key returners. And therefore, trying to drive some returns of capital back is an important part of that portfolio management as well.

So finally, as we look to wrap up, I'll just give a sense of the current market environment that we're investing into. Left-hand side, you can see Europe has been scaling as an ecosystem up until '21, a lot of capital put to work in that period, but has really settled to a level of around GBP 60 billion to GBP 70 billion a year being deployed. If you compare that with the right-hand side, though, we're seeing a lower number of companies being funded. And that deal count coming down has shown that the capital has been going into companies where there are perceived winners, particularly around AI. And therefore, there are companies that can raise substantial pools of capital, substantial amounts of capital, but that's not growing across the whole of the ecosystem.

The area where we invest will be in the GBP 5 million up to GBP 20 million sort of range. So if you think about that in the context of these charts, that's the dark blue lines on the left-hand side going into the lighter pink lines. That's had a reasonable amount of consistency in terms of the capital that's been deployed there, but there's still a gap to capital. And one of the things we'd like to do is drive more capital coming from pension funds coming from our own institutions to support this part of the ecosystem where the opportunity set is fantastic. The innovation that's occurring in Europe is very strong. The opportunity to invest in generational shifts in technology is here right now. And these are technologies that are going to be profoundly changing our societies and how we work and the productivity that occurs over the next 20 years. This is the time to put capital to work, and we're the vehicle to do that through, and we've demonstrated that over many years.

So finishing up before we move to questions, just to reiterate the priorities that we started out with the outset of this presentation, how are we performing against those, so core investing in Series A and Series B. We've demonstrated that. We've invested GBP 33 million in this first half of the year. We've also continued with our secondary strategy. And then post the period end, another GBP 20 million has been invested. The company that we've been indicating as a Series B investment exactly in line with our strategy of supporting our best companies, helping them scale and grow, and we'll be announcing that in the next couple of weeks.

Co-investment capital touched on as an important feature, bringing more capital into the ecosystem. We have Molten East, which is focused on Eastern Europe and the technologies and the entrepreneurs and the engineering ecosystem that exists there. That is a fund that we'll look to close in the next calendar year, some good progress being made there, and that will demonstrate additional capital coming into the ecosystem that we will manage. Narrower fund of fund commitment, focusing that capital back to our direct investing and secondaries. We've been speaking to all of the managers in that ecosystem, supporting the ones that we're already an LP into, but also being clear that we'll put the capital into a narrower cohort of managers going forward.

And then balance sheet strength, Andy has touched on this in some detail, continued realizations and continuing to redeploy that capital into those NAV accretive areas. And finally, narrowing that gap to our discount in the share price. So NAV 724p a share, shares clearly trading at a discount to that. So the buybacks have been an important feature of the model over the last year. And I think that flexibility we demonstrated of allocating capital that comes back into new investments, into secondaries and into buybacks has been a core pillar of the last year or 18 months that has been a way of us driving value.

So looking ahead, extremely positive, strong portfolio, very good growth coming through the portfolio, strong balance sheet, capital pools expanding and then the performance coming through in the NAV accretion as well. So very happy to be up here and to demonstrate all of those pillars of our strategy and our platform and seeing those coming through the numbers.

So I think with that, we will say thank you and go to questions.

Will Larwood from Berenberg. Firstly, I was just wondering if you could give us a flavor of how valuations are changing across from Series A, Series D and then sort of more towards some of the later-stage businesses. And then secondly, if we think about future capital deployment, how should we think about sort of secondaries, primaries, buybacks? I noticed that you've got GBP 39 million committed or potentially going to be invested in your forecast for this rest of this financial year. So just a bit of a sense around that for this year, but also into the next couple of years as well.

Thank you, Will. So taking them in order, valuations at this stage we're focusing on is A and B. At that stage, you will see -- let's take Series A, you'll see commercial tractions, maybe a couple of million of revenue. And then what you're focusing on at that stage is how much money the companies are raising, trying to make sure that's balanced between what they need to raise versus what they'd like to raise. And what I mean by that is if they're raising [ GBP 10 million ] because that unlocks the next level of proof points for them, that's usually a better thing for them to do versus raising [ GBP 30 million ] and having excess cash. And so the valuation is a function of how much they raise versus the dilution. So getting that balance of the size of the raise is important, but also being able to demonstrate to new investments that we're an investment house that can follow on in our capital.

If you keep proving your growth, if you keep proving your commercial traction, we'll put more money to work. And that's when you start thinking about Series B investing. The tickets are going to be deeper. So you're thinking GBP 20 million type tickets as an average. And then again, it's a function of dilution. But by that stage, you should be seeing GBP 5 million, GBP 10-plus million of revenue. So it starts to become a function of multiples alongside. As you get to later stages, the commercial proof points come through, and therefore, you're really valuing those businesses more on financials and pure financials and there's more capital available at those stages. So you'll often see higher, larger raises, but also more availability of capital.

So when I talk about gaps to capital and why we play in a part of the ecosystem, which is very important, it's because you need people with deep pockets that can write consistently GBP 20 million investment checks plus, but also have the venture skills to balance risk and growth and help those companies with active management. So that's why I think the part of the market that we invest into is quite important, but also something that we do, which is a unique point of reference.

In terms of how we deploy capital going forward, we think about GBP 100 million is where we'll end up this year, GBP 95 million to GBP 100 million is what we're budgeting. We clearly want to put more capital into those Series B deals we've been talking about supporting those later A deals as well. And then secondaries are still an important feature. I think that's a great way of us balancing the portfolio. We've got this core, which is maturing. We think that those will turn to realizations in the next, call it, 2 to 4 years, you'll see a lot of that value coming back through to our portfolio. And our job then is to be NAV accretive allocators of that capital.

So we want to put it into direct investing. We want to put it at the Series B stage, which is where we feel is that right balance of commercial traction, risk and upside. But also we want to be putting that into buybacks if we're trading at these discounts. So that's the way we'll think about it. Getting back to a level of GBP 100 million, GBP 150 million of deployment might be where we'll end up. But what we will be doing is balancing our capital deployment with other pools. So if we have third-party capital coming alongside the public balance sheet, that means that we can more consistently write those bigger tickets at Series B, and that's the way we're thinking about the strategy going forward.

I just follow on with the Series A -- sorry, just the Series A and Series B valuations, how have they changed versus sort of 12 months ago or 18 months ago?

It really depends on the type of business, honestly. If it's got an AI wrapper around it, clearly, those companies have been getting elevated valuations. And if it's a more normal, let's say, business that we like to invest in, clearly, companies that are driving productivity, innovation, they are infrastructure layers into certain themes, then I think they've been fairly stable, actually. You've seen a real degree of consistency. And when I showed you the European market and the movements we've seen in the market in terms of capital, a lot of the capital that's going to a fewer number of companies has been going into the AI ecosystem. Clearly, early stages in terms of the large language model levels, that's really intensive capital area. That's not somewhere that we've been looking to play. We're more interested in those application layers thinking around how do enterprises use the underlying technology, how does it drive productivity? How do you get more customers wanting to buy it? That's where we think about technology.

Patrick O'Donnell here, Goodbody. A couple of questions. So just on the secondaries, in terms of sort of what you alluded to in terms of near-term realization, anything you could give us whether it's relating to Connect and some of the key assets there or anything -- any developments strategically or commercially in some of the kind of secondary funds?

Yes. When we invest in secondaries, we're pinpointing key assets that are a maturity profile that we can then map that out and look to get our target returns. In terms of the Connect Ventures deal, that gave us exposure to Typeform and Soldo, 2 very good businesses, also already levels of maturity that suggest within a 3-year time frame, which is roughly the average we've seen in secondaries, you might see those turn into liquidity.

So that's the way we think about it. Not necessarily right, we've invested now go and sell the asset. It's more about -- it's within their maturity window, sell it at the right time to create the right value. And those companies are on that journey, but they're also scaling their own businesses. They're at a stage where scaling that and continuing to grow might be the best option, and we're going to get the benefit of that fair value growth that goes with it. So I don't want to paint it as a picture of we're invested now. This is your time, you're on a clock. It's just about value creation and value creation from growth is just as good as value creation from realizations. In the most recent SpeedInvest deal, again, we've got companies that we haven't been able to be specific about them, but there's at least 5 assets there, one key asset in particular that we're excited about that hopefully we'll be able to talk to you about a bit more next year.

Very good. And just on the sort of valuation, anything you could point to sort of since you bought, say, the Connect Venture assets, anything moving in the right direction or whether it's some of the key assets?

There are some uplifts in the secondaries. When we bought them, we've acquired them at discounts, more often than not because you're providing liquidity to a part of the market where the LPs who are the investors in those funds can choose to stay in and ride the upside, but they might be in for a time period when they've already been in those companies for 10 years in those funds rather for 10 years that they would feel actually taking some cash off the table now is more appropriate. So we can usually acquire at discounts. And then with the commercial traction of those businesses, they continue to grow, then we can write those up. And you've seen, I think, on the last slide that I showed you that the multiples of capital on those most recent investments are in the positive territory.

Clear. And just maybe one last one. In terms of sort of the operating costs that you've flagged the sort of reduction over the last 6 months in general admin expenses. Would you expect a similar pattern of cost between H1 and H2 on that? And like is the H1 number broadly sort of a 50-50 split?

It should be, yes. We're continuing to work on efficiencies and managing our operating cost base, both in terms of third-party costs, administrative fees, technology and leveraging the maximum from those and also with our headcount. So we've obviously reduced our operational headcount slightly by being a bit more efficient, but maintaining that investment in the investment team so that we have that quality, high part quality with the investment team to keep growing that NAV in the portfolio. But we'll be very on top of the costs going forward because we're obviously mindful of that and how that benefits shareholders.

Understood. And very last one, just on the sort of core portfolio. You obviously have very mature assets now. You pointed a 2- to 4-year exit time frame on revenue. I'm actually a bit surprised at the length of it. Anything you can kind of give us on that? Are any nearer term sort of which ones you'd point to as sort of from an exit point of view that have the shortest timeframe within the core?

Yes. We're always quite careful to talk about our targets through the cycle because things tend to be lumpy naturally. When we talk about exits, we want to talk them within a timeframe because it's ultimately what's right for the business. If you're going down an IPO path, as you know, that's a minimum 18 months project. And then if you're going through an M&A process, that can happen at any time on your journey, and it's then about working out what's right for the company and for the returns profile. So we always talk about them in broader terms because we're not in control of exactly when these things happen.

If I look at the shape of the core, though, you have companies like Revolut that have a stated IPO target. I think in the press, most recently, they were talking about that within 2 years or at least 2 years. So that might be the horizon. For us, if the business continues to grow at 70%, 50%, let's say, uplifts, then the reality is we're going to create value by holding on to our position and just managing that as a portfolio position as we see pockets of liquidity, taking some off the table. We think that that's the right balance.

Companies like ICEYE clearly scaling to a maturity, supporting parts of the ecosystem where naturally you think that might be a public company, certainly has a profile of a company that would perform well. And then things like Thought Machine have talked about potentially going public at some stage on their journey also. What is true, though, is that 85% of our returns have come through trade sales. So this is often an arbitrage of larger businesses acquiring great technology companies and then putting that technology into their existing customer channel. That's the arbitrage that often exists, and we'll see many instances of that as well. So I think the maturity of the core companies, the breadth of the technologies that they're addressing and the markets they're addressing really lends itself to us seeing a lot more coming through in the next -- in the coming years.

It's James Lockyer from Peel Hunt. Maybe just a follow-up to the last question about exits, not specifically timing, but given that you were able to exit some of the Revoluts, which allowed you to sort of demonstrate liquidity for your trophies. Are there others out there that you have the ability to do that? Because obviously, as they grow and those core are the ones that are going to grow most presumably, that risk in terms of proportion of your business gets larger. Is there any thoughts around going, well, as it gets to a certain size, we'll think about trimming if we can because then it reduces our lingering overexposure sort of threat perception, let's say?

And then secondly, you seem to allude that your particular AI exposure isn't so much the bubble or perception around there. You said your valuation has been relatively steady. Is it fair to say that if there was an AI bubble burst, the assets you've got are less exposed to that? And how are you valuing the AI adjacent companies such as General Index, Polymodels and Deciphex in that context?

You're going to ask me another one then. I was going to forget them.

I can, but...

Yes. You always have a list. Thanks, James. Let's start with the Revolut position and thinking about the shape of the portfolio more generally. We look to take value off the table, thinking around returning costs, thinking around opportunities for balancing each of the investments. So I think we demonstrated that clearly with Revolut where it becomes a more significant asset. It's still growing strongly. Commercially as a business, very, very positive. But for us, it becomes a moment of thinking around what's the shape of the portfolio, what's the time horizon over the next few years. And we would take a bit of liquidity on the journey has been our strategy. And we'll do that with other companies as well.

Quite often with funding rounds, there's an opportunity to take some liquidity, and we'll take some of that off the table. But what we'll also want to do is balance that with the commercial traction and the upside. So we'll always think around this point about NAV accretive use of capital. If we're going to recycle capital, we want to put it to work into assets that are growing faster than the company we're already in. And some of it is balancing because you don't want the luxury problem of risk, if you like, in the way you've described it. I think it's certainly a luxury problem. But you don't want too much of your eggs in one basket, and therefore, the balance of the portfolio is the way we will think about that. I think we've demonstrated that we've been sensible about taking liquidity at the right times, balancing with riding the upside and also balancing with reinvesting into new opportunities.

In terms of the AI assets, the companies that we're investing in fundamentally are driving business by being efficient, if you like, for the customers that they're selling to. So think about a General Index, that's driving an efficiency in a market by using technology that makes it quicker and cheaper to get the data that people like Bloomberg and ICE ultimately need for their commodity prices. That doesn't go away if there's an AI bubble burst. It's about ultimately fundamentally, what's that technology used for. That's what we care about.

And then the pricing of those deals, I would say, has very much been in line with the market. I don't feel like there's been a sense where we've had to massively overpay. And you say, okay, well, why would that be? It's because we build relationships with those teams. We build a trust that we understand their companies and we understand their markets, and we can help them grow and scale. Their chance of success in those businesses is higher with our capital and our support than if they didn't have that. That's ultimately the way that we will try and create value.

If I may ask a third question. Just on the 6% on that basis specifically on that 6% fair value growth, how much of that was financial upgrades versus multiple reratings, I'd say as a sort of split?

Andy, if you want to...

It's a mix, actually, because comps have helped in certain sectors. So obviously, things like ICEYE, that's obviously been beneficial. They've probably not helped in some sectors like SaaS and cloud. But -- and CoachHub is a good example, I guess, where that revenue proof point has fallen away a bit. So we've had to reduce the premium for that value. But other ones have had very strong commercial traction as well as the benefit of the tailwinds, Ledger being a good example as well as Revolut.

I think that brings us to the end of the questions, and we're about time. So thank you, everybody. It was a slightly longer presentation, but we really wanted to get into a bit more of the depth of the portfolio. So hopefully, those slides are very useful. There is also appendices to the presentation, which we won't take you through now, but there's some more interesting information to look at in there as well. So just leads me to say thank you to everybody. We're very pleased to have a positive set of results, and thank you for your attention.