MJ Hudson represented the co-founders and new general partners of Entrepreneur First on the establishment of a new £40 million Enterprise Capital Fund, supported by the British Business Bank. With this fund, the company builder aims to help its early stage companies scale up.
Entrepreneur First publicly announced the launch of Next Stage Fund at its sixth cohort’s Demo Day at Facebook’s London-based UK HQ earlier this week where 21 newly formed startups pitched on stage. The Next Stage Fund will invest in the funding rounds undertaken by the startups being built at Entrepreneur First up to and including series A rounds.
New general partners Joe White and Wendy Tan White will manage the fund alongside co-founders Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck. As entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture partners at EF, the management team will look to ensure the EF startups scale successfully.
Entrepreneur First invests in people pre-team, pre-idea and creates startups from scratch. Since 2011 it has worked with 350 individuals to build over 100 startups that are now valued in excess of $400 million. Most famously, one of the first graduates from the EF programme, Magic Pony, was recently sold to Twitter for $150 million.
“We are proud to have advised Entrepreneur First on yet another successful fund raising. Without doubt, the Next Stage Fund is not your typical fund in that it will seek to build the companies in which it will invest and MJ Hudson is glad to have been one of the key facilitators of that story,” MJ Hudson partner and head of its venture capital practice, Karma Samdup, said.
Ravi Longia, up and coming senior associate who led the MJ Hudson team alongside Karma Samdup, commented that “our work on establishing and launching the Next Stage Fund comes on the back of a series of recent successful fund raisings on which MJ Hudson has advised and underlies our strength and expertise in both the fund formation and venture capital spaces”.
The MJ Hudson team was led by Karma Samdup (partner) and Ravi Longia (senior associate), supported by Hannah Daly (associate) and Ronan McCann (associate).