Seedcamp closed $320m across two vehicles on Monday 22 June, its largest raise in an eighteen-year history that backed Revolut, Wise and UiPath at the earliest stage1. The money splits into a $220m Fund VII for first cheques and a $100m Select fund for follow-on rounds, roughly double Fund VI's $180m from 2023. Seedcamp now manages over $1bn, and Fund III returned 13 times the cash its investors put in, a distributed-to-paid-in (DPI) figure that ranks among Europe's strongest realised seed returns2.
The British Business Bank, the UK's state development bank, came in as a £10m limited partner (LP), an investor in someone else's fund rather than the writer of the seed cheque, alongside HarbourVest, Schroders, Sofina and around 80 founder-angels from Seedcamp's own portfolio3. Angel investors fell 7% to 33,220 over the 2024/25 tax year, and April's cut to Venture Capital Trust relief drained the retail money that used to fill the sub-£2m tier. Rather than build a public seed instrument to replace it, the Bank put a junior cheque into a private, transatlantic fund and left Seedcamp to do the work, which means a Seedcamp misstep now lands on the taxpayer on the same terms as HarbourVest and Schroders.
The Bank's recent moves stack up across every rung of the market. It cornerstoned Longwall Ventures Fund 4 with £50m for sub-£2m deeptech cheques, anchored Lansdowne Partners' €128.9m university spinout fund, and reached £275m through its Northern fund over two years. Under its £6.6bn April mandate the Bank is a direct investor, a fund anchor and a seed-fund LP at once, present at every tier and leading none of the marquee rounds. Seedcamp's own thesis names the trade plainly: a US presence to carry European founders toward American growth capital from the seed stage onward4.
