Connect Ventures Bets $80 Million on Technical Founders

Connect Ventures has taken a $55 million first close on an $80 million fifth fund aimed at Europe’s technical founders. The London firm disclosed the close on 23 September 2026, with the British Business Bank as anchor. Cheques will run from $500,000 to $5 million at pre-seed.

Returning limited partners include Aldea Ventures, Sella Venture Partners and Molten Ventures. New money comes from European family offices and founders of companies Connect already backed. The target matches the last two funds. The filter does not.

Connect Holds the Fifth Fund at $80 Million

Founded in 2012, Connect has now spent 14 years as a London pre-seed shop with a pan-European brief. It has invested in more than 120 companies. The cheque range on the website is the same $500,000 to $5 million band Fund V will use. The headline number on the fund has barely moved in six years.

A $62 million second fund closed in 2016. The third fund closed at $80 million in 2020, after an about $40 million first close in January 2019. On 5 September 2023 the firm announced an $80 million fourth fund in 2023, sold as a product-founder vehicle in a weak market. Fund V, three years and 18 days later, is another $80 million target. The first close is $55 million, which leaves $25 million still to raise.

CONNECT’S FUND SIZES SINCE 2016

Keeping the pool at $80 million is the wager. A larger vehicle would have let the same three partners write bigger follow-ons or take more boards. They chose another concentrated book and a tighter screen for who gets into it.

Technical Depth Is Now the Entry Ticket

Fund IV was sold with a blunt line, “Product is back, baby,” and a hunt for founders obsessed with distribution, product-led growth and network effects. The live site still greets visitors with “Product Founders” and still lists consumer names such as Zellify, a Swedish web-to-app growth company. Fund V does not throw that book out. It puts technical depth at the gate.

Sitar Teli, co-founder and co-managing partner, said the fifth fund keeps the same operating code and changes the kind of founder it is built to lead.

The values and the ambitions for our fifth fund remain the same: thesis-led, low volume, high conviction and high support. We’re delighted to reach the first close of Fund V, which enables us to invest in the most exceptional founders and give them the support they deserve.

Sitar Teli, co-managing partner, Connect Ventures

She added that outlier companies in this period will be built by founders with real technical depth at their core, and that Fund V is built to lead their first rounds across Europe. On LinkedIn she wrote that after more than a decade the view had become clearer: technical depth is increasingly one of the defining advantages of an exceptional founding team. She pointed at Aikido Security, ai-coustics, Dust, Mosaico and Molecular Glue Labs as the recent book that made the case.

The sectors named around Fund V are AI and infrastructure, hardware, robotics and biotech. Connect’s homepage now says it backs founders at the intersection of AI, hardware and automation. That is a narrower brief than the consumer-internet and mobile shop that hired Teli in 2012. It is also a bet against the easier story of this market, that coding tools have made technical skill cheap enough for generalists to ship.

Aikido Reached $1 Billion in Two Years

The working exhibit is Aikido Security, a Ghent company founded in 2022. Connect co-led its seed in 2023 after meeting Willem Delbare, Roeland Delrue and Felix Garriau. On 14 January 2026 Aikido announced a $60 million Series B at $1 billion, led by Tom Stafford at DST Global, with PSG Equity, Singular and Notion Capital in the round. Delbare, the chief executive, said most security tools are still built for a slower way of writing software.

AIKIDO AT THE JANUARY 2026 ROUND

• Valuation: $1 billion after the Series B led by DST Global.
• Reach: More than 100,000 teams, including Deel, SoundCloud, Niantic and Revolut.
• Pace: Revenue up 5x over the prior year, customer base more than tripled.
• Connect’s clock: About two years from the 2023 seed to the $1 billion mark.

Aikido called itself one of the fastest cybersecurity companies to reach that valuation globally, and the fastest in Europe. On Connect’s site, Delbare said the firm understood from the start that technical depth and product sat at the heart of what the company was building, and that the conviction had held as Aikido grew. Pietro Bezza, Connect’s managing partner, later called it the only European unicorn in code security.

Tracxn, the private-markets tracker, lists three unicorns in the Connect book: Aikido, Oyster and TrueLayer. Connect’s 2024 year-in-review said Oyster raised further capital that year at a $1.2 billion valuation. TrueLayer, whose pre-seed Connect led in 2016, is the longer proof. Tracxn records $322 million raised, a Series E, and 292 staff as of 31 July 2026. Francesco Simoneschi, a TrueLayer founder, wrote on Connect’s site that the firm had gone with the company from day zero to unicorn and called it “our top VC.”

Those three names are why a fifth fund of the same size is even on the table. They are also why the technical-founder line is not a blank page. Dust in France, ai-coustics in Germany and Mosaico in Italy, an open-source data layer for physical AI and robotics, are the nearer examples Teli is using to sell the next decade of that same idea.

Who Put Up the First $55 Million?

The British Business Bank anchored the close. That is public capital sitting in a pan-European pre-seed vehicle, not a UK-only growth fund. The bank, through its patient capital funds programme, still writes early-stage commitments, but its stated tilt is later. It wants over 60 percent of venture and growth flow aimed at scale-ups, and on 16 April 2026 it agreed a £100 million cornerstone commitment to Apposite Healthcare Growth I, described as its largest fund commitment to date.

Connect is not that product. It is a first-round specialist. British Patient Capital, the bank’s commercial arm, was already in the 2020 fund, so the relationship is old. What changed is the billing. Fund V names the British Business Bank as the anchor of the first close, which is a stronger credit than a line in a long LP list.

THE FIRST-CLOSE BACKERS

• Anchor: British Business Bank, the UK’s state-owned small-business bank.
• Returning funds: Aldea Ventures, Sella Venture Partners and Molten Ventures.
• New money: European family offices and founders of Connect-backed companies.
• Molten overlap: On 9 September 2026 the bank also made a £75 million cornerstone commitment to Molten Ventures Growth Fund I, so the same two names now sit in both an early vehicle and a growth vehicle.

Aldea and Molten are familiar names on London seed closes this year. Tapestry VC, which closed an $80 million third fund in July 2026 to back repeat European founders, also listed the British Business Bank and Molten among its investors. The limited-partner market at this size is not a secret club with one ticket. It is a short list of institutions recycling into several $80 million stories at once.

That makes Connect’s founder-LPs more useful than a family-office logo. The firm has been putting former founders into successor funds since Fund IV, when Bezza publicly thanked Francesco, Paul, Carlo, David, Hana, Luca, David and Toby. Fund V repeats the structure without publishing a fresh roster. The people who already took Connect’s first cheque are being asked to underwrite the next technical-founder screen.

A Partnership With No Associate Layer

The investment team is still three people. Bezza and Teli are managing partners. Rory Stirling is a general partner. Mark Pettit is CFO. Founders deal with the partner who leads their round, and that partner stays on as the company develops. There is no associate layer to hide behind, which is the point of the low-volume model and also its constraint.

Decisions run through a unanimous three-partner vote. One partner has to champion a deal hard enough to bring it to a founder meeting and then to an internal committee. Stirling wrote that the three of them decide together, “one for all and all for one,” and that they try to get founders a term sheet within days of that conviction. In 2020 the partners described the pace as 8 to 10 investments a year and about 25 companies per fund. In 2024 they said they had welcomed eight new founding teams.

A book that small only works if the partners actually have hours. Connect still runs a founder community it puts at 160-plus people, with two annual “lightning strike” events and a Notion hub for product-led growth and fundraising notes. Built By Few, the product summit, was held on 19 June 2025 with speakers from Aikido, Arduino, Dust, ai-coustics and TrueLayer. London 2026 and Amsterdam dates are already on the site. The support layer is real. It is also finite, which is why the fifth fund is not $200 million.

Bill Earner, a founding partner, left in 2020. The remaining three have now raised through a pandemic close, a 2023 product-founder fund, and this technical-founder first close. The continuity is the product they are selling to LPs: the same people, the same cheque sizes, a sharper test for who is on the other side of the table.

Fifty Pre-Seed Cheques Versus Twenty-Five

Connect is not the largest dedicated pre-seed pool in Europe, and it is not pretending to be. On 30 September 2025, Concept Ventures closed an $88 million Fund II and called it the largest dedicated pre-seed fund in the region, with plans for up to 50 companies and an average cheque of about $1 million. Tapestry’s $80 million third fund, closed in July 2026, is aimed at about 30 companies with cheques from about $1 million to $3 million. Connect’s own model, about 25 companies and a $5 million ceiling, sits in that same size band with a different shape.

THREE LONDON-AREA PRE-SEED POOLS

Concept spreads more first cheques. Tapestry wants second-time operators. Connect wants fewer companies and a technical core on the founding team, and it still has $25 million of Fund V to raise before the target is done. The first close is large enough to keep leading rounds. It is not a final close, and it is not a step-up in AUM.

The leftover $25 million will be sold against the same pitch Teli has already made public. Outlier companies, in this firm’s telling, will come from founders who can build what others cannot, and Fund V exists to take the first line on those cap tables across Europe. The raise is still open. The filter is not.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a venture-capital fundraise. It is informational only and is not investment advice, an offer of limited-partnership interests, or a recommendation to commit capital to Connect Ventures, its portfolio companies, or any other fund named here. Readers who are considering an allocation to private funds should consult a qualified financial adviser or licensed fund counsel and should review the relevant private-placement documents. Figures, fund statuses and valuations reflect the company statements, fund disclosures and data-firm records cited above as of the dates given in the piece, and they can change with later closes, new rounds or restated metrics.