A top European software investor raises $700 million — defying the venture capital slump

cnbc.com:

Dawn Capital, one of Europe's biggest backers of business-to-business software companies, raised $700 million in two new funds — doubling down on its bid to find technology champions in the region at a time when venture capital funding for tech startups has dwindled.

The London-based VC firm is one of the most prominent tech investors in the continent, with a portfolio that includes the likes of Swedish online payments firm iZettle, which was acquired by PayPal for $2.2 billion in 2018, and Swedish open banking company Tink, which Visa acquired for 1.8 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in 2022.

Hannah Gubbins, a newly promoted partner at Dawn Capital, said raising the new funds in a time when private startup company valuations have tanked and investor sentiment toward technology has soured was far from easy — but that it came down to deep relationships with institutional investors built up over years.

«For us, the LP [limited partner] side, even those that weren't building programs in venture where lots of people felt historically, 18 months ago, they ought to be allocating a lot more to venture,» Gubbins told CNBC in an interview.

«Suddenly with everything with the markets and the denominator effect, their private book was overallocated even if technically by their own benchmarks they weren't. That meant a lot of funds could only reup with existing managers or those with high convictions.»

«It's the same as in those cycles where there is still capital out there, there are still investors investing. Investors are excited to be investing in this market,» Gubbins added. «There's some of the best companies, some of the best vintages have come out of the dotcom [bubble], out of the global financial crisis. They know that, they