Molten raises £175m growth fund, £75m of it from the state
The British Business Bank has cornerstoned Molten Ventures' new scale-up fund with £75m. Molten wants to double the fund to £350m.
Molten Ventures has raised £175m for a growth fund aimed at fast-growing technology companies in the UK and Europe.
The British Business Bank, the government's economic development agency, led the fundraising with a cornerstone investment of £75m. That is more than two-fifths of the money raised so far.
The fund targets high-growth companies in industries including space, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
Molten is looking for further investors to take the fund to £350m, double what it has now.
The firm was formerly Draper Esprit. It is a FTSE 250 constituent with offices in London and Dublin, manages £2bn across its funds, and has invested more than £1bn over the past decade. Its earlier backing includes Revolut and Zopa.
The stated problem is later-stage money. The concern in the market is that a shortage of scale-up capital pushes the fastest-growing British companies abroad, and that UK markets are not attractive enough to keep the best of them.
The state is now a direct investor as well as a fund backer. The British Business Bank said on 29 June that it had put more than £600m directly into over 50 UK science and technology companies, up from £290m in October 2025, and that it aims to deploy more than £400m a year.
For context, the wider UK tech funding market reached $15.3bn in the first half of 2026, though that money went to fewer companies than before.
A bigger pot is being assembled behind this one. On 27 July a consortium of large pension providers agreed to explore a "UK Scale-up Fund" of more than £1bn, including Railpen, which manages £34bn and oversees railways pension schemes, Nest, Border to Coast, LPPI and LGPS Central.
The British Business Bank is working alongside those providers and running the process to select a manager, according to the government announcement of the consortium. Molten is among the firms competing for that mandate.
The bank and Molten have co-invested before, in the satellite company Satvu and in Paragraf, which makes graphene semiconductors.
For a founder raising at Series B or later, the practical change is who sits on the other side of the table. A growing share of UK late-stage capital now has a government agency behind it, which means state investment criteria — sector, location, whether the company stays British — increasingly shape which scale-ups get funded. If your company is in space, AI or quantum, there is £175m looking for you now and possibly £350m later.
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