Balderton Capital has cashed out roughly $2bn of its Revolut stake over the past year, cementing its early £1mn investment in the fintech as one of the most lucrative bets in European venture history and capping an exceptional year for the London firm.
The stock sales include $1bn worth that people familiar with the matter say was announced at Balderton’s annual meeting in November, as well as other deals earlier in the year.
They come as Revolut sits at a $75bn valuation and edges towards a public listing that could come as early as this year.
Revolut, founded and led by Nikolay Storonsky, has been by far the best deal in Balderton’s 25-year history — a period in which it has raised a total of $5.7bn to invest.
The firm’s fifth fund, in which the UK neobank holding sits, has returned the initial $305mn raised from investors more than 25 times over, according to people familiar with the matter, and retains a significant chunk of its previous stake of more than 10 per cent.
“The best companies keep unlocking new opportunities and we knew with Revolut that Storonsky was an entrepreneur who was going to do just that,” said Daniel Waterhouse, a Balderton partner who sat on Revolut’s board for several years. “He had the capacity to take this in many different places.”
Balderton’s Revolut windfall, which has offered its institutional investors some much-needed cash returns, has been reinforced by a flurry of positive news elsewhere in its portfolio, from energy group Fuse reaching a $5bn valuation in December to fintech GoCardless’s $1.1bn sale last month.
Other recent successes include UK autonomous driving group Wayve, which is in talks to raise up to $2bn in a funding round, and German spy drone maker Quantum Systems, which has tripled its valuation to €3bn since Balderton first invested in May.
Balderton last year secured another windfall as it joined fellow VC backers of Turkey’s Dream Games, maker of the popular mobile app Royal Match, in selling a stake to private equity group CVC at a $5bn valuation just five years after its initial investment.
The London firm led Revolut’s earliest investment round in 2015, contributing £1mn of a £1.5mn total that valued the start-up at £6.7mn including the new capital, according to people familiar with the terms.
“Europe had a relative advantage in fintech,” said Tim Bunting, a former Goldman Sachs partner who joined Balderton and brought in the original Revolut investment. “Whereas Europe had already lost in certain verticals to the US, fintech was a real chance.”
That helped make fintech “the big thing” for Balderton’s fifth fund, accounting for almost half the total invested — an unusually large “tilt” towards a single sector that has not been repeated by the firm. “It was a hunch,” Bunting said, even though at the time it was still widely seen as “a gamble that consumers would trust start-ups” with their cash.
“I don’t think there was any doubt in our minds that the opportunity was going to be great” for European fintech start-ups, added Waterhouse.
Storonsky’s original pitch demonstrated the scale of his ambition and his detailed understanding of payments infrastructure — but also his “functional” style, with a presentation that contained “zero bullshit and zero window dressing”, according to Waterhouse. “That’s one of the reasons he’s been so successful.”
Balderton went on to lead Revolut’s Series A round in 2016, when it raised £6.75mn from venture investors and a further £1mn from crowdfunding, as well as participating in its $66mn Series B the following year, which was led by Index Ventures.
Today, Balderton’s initial £1mn investment is alone worth billions, even before those subsequent investments, according to a person familiar with the matter.
A private share sale last year gave Revolut a roughly $75bn valuation. Balderton, which participated in the sale, declined to comment on fund returns.
With many VC firms having overextended themselves during the Covid-era financing boom and at a time of relatively few public listings to provide liquidity to early start-up investors, Balderton’s backers have welcomed its ability to generate returns.
In 2025, according to people close to the firm, Balderton distributed billions of dollars to investors in Fund V and its $375mn Fund VI, raised in 2017 — with more returns still to come from its remaining stakes in Revolut and others.
Robert Greenwood, senior investment director at the British Business Bank, which has backed several Balderton funds since 2017, said that while it was too early to fully assess the investments, there were “strong indicators” that they would “perform well over the longer term”.
“Our first direct commitment to Balderton’s Fund VI in 2017 is performing comfortably in the upper quartile relative to its peer group, including in respect of realised returns,” he said.
Balderton’s origins date back to 2000, when it was created as the European unit of Silicon Valley investor Benchmark Capital. Benchmark had made a huge return from a 1997 bet on eBay that remains one of the most lucrative deals in VC history, and later went on to back Uber, Twitter and Snap. However, by the mid-2000s it had become clear that Benchmark “didn’t have global ambitions”, Bunting said.
The two groups separated, with Balderton’s partners naming themselves after the street in London’s Mayfair where their office was located at the time.
Because of the split the firm’s fifth fund was Balderton’s hardest to raise as it had to win over investors without the patina of Benchmark.
One vestige of the Benchmark era is that Balderton operates as an “equal partnership”, unlike most VC firms. The investing partners responsible for each fund have an equal vote and all get the same benefit from a successful investment, regardless of who sourced the deal or sits on the board.
The firm now operates out of a renovated stable near London’s tech hub of King’s Cross and has evolved in some ways — in 2021 it launched a growth fund to back more mature start-ups. But other than Wayve, it has not followed the VC stampede to back highly priced AI model developers such as Europe’s Black Forest Labs or Mistral.
Similarly, Balderton has not yet been tempted by the moves of some rivals to raise huge new funds to invest in start-ups across all stages of development or to open multiple offices across continents.
“The core is stick to your knitting,” said Bunting.
The Revolut bet a decade ago has helped Balderton stay in the top tier of European VC firms alongside the likes of Index Ventures and Accel. But the six-partner business must fight to keep its position as a small partnership focused on Europe at a time when international investors raising megafunds are competing to back top start-ups.
“The tech industry is prone to oscillate wildly,” said Waterhouse. “A lot of people get sucked into the hype and the drama. We are pretty good at staying balanced.”