Balderton Capital, a London, UK-based venture capital firm, hired Rana Yared and David Thévenon as General Partners.
Rana Yared joined from Goldman Sachs, where she was Partner in the Principal Strategic Investments team. David Thévenon joined from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, where he was one of the initial Partners. During her time at Goldman Sachs, Yared’s team invested $2bn in 80 companies, with a strong focus on fintech. As one of Goldman’s tech investors, Yared led the US and European Principal Strategic Investment (PSI) teams and served on Goldman’s Growth Equity Investment committee. She spent five years on the board of the fixed income trading platform Tradeweb, until it went public in April 2019 with a market capitalisation of $6bn. Yared also brought the artificial intelligence platform Kensho to Goldman Sachs. Kensho was ultimately sold to S&P Global for $550m in March 2018. She currently sits on the boards of Nutmeg, Vestwell, NAV, Pensando, Digital Reasoning, Veem, and NYSHEX. Yared joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in 2006 and was named Managing Director in 2013 and Partner in 2018.
During his five-year tenure at SoftBank, Thévenon led investments in Didi Chuxing, Grab, Ola, Lemonade, SoFi, and Kabbage. He was also involved in SoftBank’s investments in 99 in Brazil (bought by Didi) and Legendary Pictures in the US (sold to Wanda Group). Before joining SoftBank, Thévenon had a 10-year career at Google, where he worked on partnerships for products that touched billions of users, including leading global product and business partnerships for Google’s Android platform.
Led by Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner, Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm focused exclusively on backing the best European-founded technology companies. Its most recent funds were the early-stage Balderton VII, raised in November 2019, and Liquidity I, Europe’s first venture fund dedicated to secondary investments in European-founded, growth-stage technology startups, raised in October 2018. Previous exited investments include Betfair (FTSE: BET), Magic Pony (Twitter), NaturalMotion (Zynga), Recorded Future (Insight Partners), Sunrise (Microsoft), Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and Yoox Net-a-Porter (BIT: YNAP). Among Balderton’s current portfolio of over 90 companies are Aircall, Carwow, Citymapper, Contentful, Darktrace, Depop, GoCardless, The Hut Group, Kobalt Music, Nutmeg, Peakon, Prodigy Finance, Revolut, SOPHiA Genetics, Tessian, Vestiaire Collective, Vivino, Voi Technology, and Zego.
FinSMEs
07/02/2020