Hoxton Debuts $215M Fund for European Startups

Hoxton Ventures announced Thursday (March 17) that it closed a $215 million fund to help Europe’s new startups scale up, a press release said.

The fund, Hoxton III, was “significantly oversubscribed” and exceeded its original $150 million target.

“This is our largest fund yet and a reflection of the emergence of Europe as a growth market for tech startups,” said Hussein Kanji, a partner at Hoxton. “When we started Hoxton eight years ago, there was doubt that Europe could produce winning tech companies. Last year, Europe attracted more capital than China with $116 billion invested, up from $8 billion a decade ago. There are great companies being built in Europe, and we’re proud to be one of the earliest American VCs to spot this opportunity.”

The company’s first fund has delivered high returns from Europe, the release said. Three of its investments, Deliveroo, Darktrace and Babylon Health, went public last year.

The firm’s goal is investing in seed-stage companies building new market categories and which want to expand into the U.S. market.

Hoxton has made 63 investments to date with 19 from its new fund, and four of them are currently worth in excess of $1 billion.

With the new fund, Hoxton will get the ability to make bigger investments at inception, then follow-on investments in future rounds.

Read more: UK Cybersecurity Firm Darktrace Buys Cybersprint

In other news related to Darktrace, the British cybersecurity company recently bought Cybersprint, and valued the latter company at €47.5 million ($53.7 million).

Darktrace says it wants to integrate Cybersprint’s attack surface management tools with its own products for detection and response. According to the report, Cybersprint’s ethical hacking and data insight will add to Darktrace’s products and add to its entry into the proactive AI cybersecurity market.

The deal was set to close March 1, and Darktrace got a second European R&D center out of the deal to help support its U.K. software engineers.