Former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Miller is nearing the close of a new $400 million venture fund to invest in European startups, the Financial Times reported.
Miller has already secured $355 million in commitments from institutional investors for the new London-based fund, the report said, and plans to focus on European AI and B2B startups at Series B.
Moving to London in 2021 to lead Sequoia’s European expansion, Miller left the firm in December last year after a 12-year stint with the company, following a boardroom dispute at Sweden-based portfolio company Klarna.
While at Sequoia, he led the firm’s investment in enterprise cloud provider Confluent, which went public at a valuation of $11 billion in June 2021 — a deal that helped secure his presence on Forbes’ Midas List Europe. He also led investments in U.K.-based semiconductor company Graphcore and Berlin-based workflow automation startup n8n, among others.
“I have made the decision to start my own fund focused on the great founders of Europe,” Miller wrote last year when he announced his decision to start his own fund. “It has been a dream of mine to be an entrepreneur again and I am excited to build something specific for this region that I love.”
His new fund comes amid a sluggish period for European venture funding. Around 1,200 startups based in the continent altogether raised roughly $12.6 billion last quarter, Crunchbase data shows — flat quarter over quarter and down 24% year over year.
The region’s leading countries also shifted in Q2. For the first time since 2012, Germany-based startups led the region’s funding totals, leapfrogging the U.K.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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