Molten Ventures, the London-listed venture capital firm that backed Revolut and Zopa, has raised £175m for a new fund aimed at closing the gap in scale-up capital for fast-growing UK technology companies.
The fundraising for the Molten Ventures Growth Fund was led by the British Business Bank, the government’s economic development agency, which made a cornerstone investment of £75m.
The fund is aimed at high-growth technology companies across the UK and Europe, in industries including space, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Molten is seeking further investors to expand the fund to £350m, double the amount raised so far.
Molten Ventures, formerly known as Draper Esprit, is a FTSE 250 constituent with offices in London and in Dublin. It manages £2bn across its funds and has invested more than £1bn over the past decade.
The fund is being raised against concerns that a shortage of scale-up capital is driving an exodus among the fastest-growing UK companies. There has long been a dearth of the later-stage funding needed to grow the most promising businesses, and there are concerns that UK markets are not attractive enough to retain the highest-quality British start-ups.
The British Business Bank has stepped up its own direct investing in recent months. The bank said on 29 June that it had invested more than £600m directly in over 50 UK science and technology companies, up from £290m in October 2025, and that it aims to deploy more than £400m a year. The wider UK tech funding market reached $15.3bn in the first half of 2026, although the money went to fewer companies.
Molten Ventures is among the investment firms vying to manage a separate £1bn government-backed fund focused on helping the most promising British companies scale up.
On 27 July, a consortium of some of the UK’s largest pension providers agreed to explore the creation of a “UK Scale-up Fund” of more than £1bn. The group includes Railpen, which manages £34bn in assets and oversees railways pension schemes, Nest, the government’s workplace pension scheme, and Border to Coast, one of the largest pension pools in the UK, along with LPPI and LGPS Central.
Andy Burnham said the scheme would “help unlock good growth in every postcode, connecting pension investment with the entrepreneurs and technologies that will reindustrialise Britain and create the jobs of the future”.
The British Business Bank is working alongside the pension providers to support the launch of that fund, with the intention of investing in partnership with the consortium, and is running the process to select a manager, according to the government announcement of the pension consortium. The consortium’s move followed a period in which pension funds were urged to back UK tech scale-ups as returns from British companies flowed to overseas investors.
The British Business Bank and Molten Ventures have previously co-invested in early-stage British companies. They include Satvu, a British satellite company, and Paragraf, which produces semiconductors made of graphene that can be applied to a range of advanced electronic, energy and medical devices.
