White Star Capital’s Year In Review — 2023
Many predicted the tech sector and wider VC ecosystem would witness a downturn in 2023, but from raising new funds to supporting some exceptional new funding across our portfolio, this year has been another leap forward for White Star Capital.
Having maintained our investment discipline over the last few years, we were able to double down on our current portfolio and also step in to support companies that needed additional funding to achieve growth momentum.
As ever, we remain immensely proud of all the efforts our founders and their teams have made as they look to develop sector-defining companies and ideas.
Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from the past twelve months…
We celebrated some impressive portfolio milestones
Having been proud supporters of Dialogue since leading the Series A, we were delighted to see Sun Life acquire the company for C$365m earlier this year. It’s been an incredible journey and a deeply fulfilling experience as board members and advocates of the leadership team. Congratulations to Dialogue’s co-founders Cherif, Anna, and Alexis on this milestone.
Following a fantastic few years of growth, Butternut Box raised an impressive £280m Series E from General Atlantic and L Catterton — one of the UK’s largest funding rounds of the year — as the team look to continue and capitalise on their European expansion. We’re really excited about this next stage of Butternut Box’s growth as they pursue their mission to deliver health and happiness to dogs and their humans all over the world and remain bullish on the future of tech-enabled pet innovation.
Despite market headwinds, our founders raised $550m+ in fresh funding
With 14 of our existing portfolio companies raising fresh capital, highlights included:
- Butternut Box raised a £280m Series E
- Novisto raised a $20m Series B
- Percent raised a $30m Series B
- Petfolk raised a $40m Series B
- TransactionLink raised a €5m Seed
- Una Brands raised a $30m Series C
We announced the first close of a new and novel fund strategy
Our new Structured Growth Capital fund has a simple mission: helping exceptional companies accelerate from scale-up to global champions. The new strategy, co-managed by General Partners Hemal Fraser-Rawal and Bryan McLoughlin, will deploy a hybrid approach that combines credit and equity capabilities in a single fund. This is an all-weather strategy allowing investors to benefit from income generation, at a time of higher interest rates, while remaining invested in the long-term capital appreciation. You can read more about the fund here.
The team welcomed six new portfolio companies to our second Digital Asset Fund
- Rymedi — a cloud-based digital workflow and data automation platform designed to enhance the patient-provider experience across diagnostic testing, treatment delivery, and patient monitoring.
- Trident Digital — institutional digital asset lender restoring market liquidity with a new standard of risk management.
- Eyeball Games — Singapore-based game studio whose first title, Eyeball Pool, is a high-quality and fun pool game built on Unity.
- BoomFi — removing the complexities traditionally associated with accepting as a method of customer payment for both web3-native companies and traditional merchants.
- Oamo — decentralised data broker that allows individuals to own and monetise their data while remaining anonymous.
- Thala Labs — building the first Move-native stablecoin, Move Dollar (MOD), a fully collateralised, yield-bearing stablecoin backed by a basket of on-chain assets.
Our Early Growth Fund team announced our Fund IV investment themes
Ahead of the launch of each new Early Growth Fund, we align on investment themes that address contemporary global challenges and opportunities. Our themes of focus have evolved over our three funds to date in response to rapid technological adoption and the changing world around us, but the criteria we apply to each investment have remained consistent across our three funds to date.
Ahead of Early Growth Fund IV, we’ve been excited to share more details on the themes, sectors, and sub-sectors that our team is excited about backing. Over the past few months we’ve published three reports:
Stay tuned for our final report on Demographics in Motion, which will be published in January and explores some of the startups and technologies that will ease the impact of changing population dynamics.
As we close out the year, we wanted to share a special note of thanks to our limited partners, founders, and co-investors for making 2023 another special year of growth. We look forward to working with all of our existing and future partners in 2024.
