(Finally) introducing Latitude
We’ve not spoken publicly about what we’re building at Latitude — we prefer to walk the walk, before we talk the talk.
However, 23 investments in, we think it’s time to share what we’ve been up to…
The basics
Latitude is the sister fund to LocalGlobe — we refer to it as our ‘breakout fund’.
LocalGlobe invests at pre-seed and seed, then works closely with founders to help them deliver their best possible series A. LocalGlobe companies have raised over $2bn in funding in the last 12 months and over $6bn since 2015.
From series B onwards, Latitude picks up the baton. As the name ‘Latitude’ suggests, we are flexible in how we invest. We love to back:
a) LocalGlobe breakouts. These include the likes of Tessian, Zego, Tide and Rekki — companies we backed at seed through LocalGlobe and now through Latitude from series B.
b) Non-LocalGlobe breakouts. These could emerge from:
— 3,000+ companies LocalGlobe has met but not invested in (we all make mistakes, right?),
— founders doing amazing things in areas we know intimately and love (for instance Ben at Impala whose vision for the future of travel infrastructure absolutely mirrors our own), or
— companies emerging from a group of 30+ pre-seed and seed fund managers that we’ve backed (a program we internally refer to as ‘Basecamp’)
Consistent with LocalGlobe, we overweight our activities towards companies within a 4 hour train ride from London — including Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Bristol, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam — an area we refer to as ‘New Palo Alto’.
Today, New Palo Alto accounts for 110+ unicorns and 120+ ‘futurecorns’ (tech companies valued at $250m-$1bn).
However, Latitude is not restricted by geography. Our reach has naturally led Latitude to back teams in Berlin (Raisin and Infarm), Israel (Melio and Hailo) and Barcelona (TravelPerk).
We also love backing companies from outside Europe and Israel that are looking to the UK as a critical hub so we can support their expansion plans, as with New York-based Flow.
So how does Latitude invest?
Latitude does not lead rounds — Latitude is a price-taker, not a price giver.
We typically write cheques of up to $5–10m initially, with the ability to follow on meaningfully in multiple future rounds. For instance, we recently invested in TransferWise’s latest round, having originally backed Kristo and Taavet at seed with LocalGlobe back in 2011.
We are highly flexible capital, equally happy to:
— invest alongside leads, having already done so with friends at the likes of Accel, General Catalyst, Sequoia, Northzone, Benchmark, Atomico, Balderton, NEA, Lakestar, DST, Spark, Index, Target Global, Bessemer, Coatue… to name a few
— join insider-led rounds, as we have with companies like Wagestream, Goodlord and Moshi
— invest in primary and secondary, alongside or between rounds — secondary accounts for nearly a quarter of our investment to date. We absolutely believe in the flexibility secondary affords teams to swing hard for the fences
While we love to invest at series B and weight our investment towards this stage, we focus on potential. Our post-series B investments in Cazoo, Graphcore, Oxford Nanopore and Justworks underline this. We believe each of these is positioned to become an enduring, category defining company.
Doesn’t this leave a gap at series A between LocalGlobe and Latitude?
Yes, by design.
We believe being a seed fund is a highly specialised discipline, requiring special focus, tailored support for company building and natural constraints on fund size. Our friends at series A funds are critical collaborators to LocalGlobe and the founders we back at seed.
Series A funds are also fantastic partners for Latitude from series B. Decades of collaboration as founders, operators, board members and co-investors underpin these series A fund relationships.
We believe there continues to be a profound gap in experienced series B+ funding in Europe, with the stats bearing this out…
Who is the team?
We have eight Investment Partners across LocalGlobe and Latitude. We each have fund focuses — overweight to Latitude or LocalGlobe. I spend most of my time on Latitude.
Behind the scenes we work as a closely coordinated team. Three quarters of Latitude investments now have a LocalGlobe partner meaningfully involved — consistent with our operating philosophy of ‘total football’. Think of us as Partners with specialisms, just as each of us have themes or sectors we love to major on.
We have seen the path ahead.
Latitude brings huge accumulated experience of navigating the journey from series B+; from traction to hyper-scaling. Our team has seen the full journey from ideation to IPO, as founders, operators, angels, investors, advisors and board members.
My own experiences, living in the Valley and Europe, involved working with internet and software scale ups as they navigated hyper-scaling, as well as the major tech incumbents.
By launching Latitude as a new fund and new name, we’re making the statement we ‘go again’ from series B+. The new brand is effectively a commitment to build a collective set of experiences, resources and tools for scale up founders.
Our ‘Fellows Network’ for instance is an amazing group of domain specialists coming from critical scaling functions, each of whom we’ve been fortunate to conspire with along the way. Our Fellows include CMOs, CPOs (people and product), CTOs, CFOs, CEOs, COOs and Board Members from companies including Farfetch, Deliveroo, Amplitude, Airtable, Zoopla, Tesla, Booking, Expedia, Skyscanner, King and Skype, to name but a few.
Like us, these experts have trodden the path that lies ahead for Latitude companies.
What does Latitude look for?
The best way to answer this is to explain our world view…
The depth and scale of tech companies being built today will dwarf anything built to this point. In our eyes we are early in the tech cycle, not late — there are large swathes of the economy yet to be rebased. The world will continue its abrupt pivot towards digitization and this will only accelerate.
We are flexible when we think about what defines ‘early stage’. We look at potential. You could look at the letters of the latest funding rounds of Transferwise, Cazoo, Graphcore, Oxford Nanopore and Justworks as a signal of their maturity — we believe they are just getting going.
We’re not tied to particular ownership requirements. We simply look to build close relationships with founders who see opportunity in a similar way — we want to share their vision to build through to IPO and beyond.
We back founders. No, seriously, we back founders.
Numbers and spreadsheets can give a warm feeling that everything will work out just fine.
However, we NEVER forget that the single biggest determinant of enduring success is the founders we back.
Success at scale is the amalgamation of innumerable compounding decisions by founders and teams they build — we are unequivocal that is the case from series B+ as much as it is at seed.
It is absolutely logical to us that the largest companies of our age are not just tech companies, but founder-led tech companies — Facebook, Tesla, Twitter, Tencent, Salesforce. Those that have transitioned leadership have done so to insiders who grew up alongside the founders — Microsoft, Alibaba, Alphabet.
We have reach.
Most of us have lived and worked in the US at some point; I have the wardrobe of branded gilets (US — ‘vests’) to evidence life in SF. As a firm we can draw on 20+ years of investing and sharing the load alongside the best investors from the West and East coasts.
These experiences and relationships are an asset which our founders leverage, as they grow into the US or simply want to access US capital markets — private or public. We absolutely expect many (although not all) Latitude companies will naturally look beyond Europe at some point, either for future investment or growth opportunities.
We are now increasingly investing time in Asia, as a growing number of our founders choose to look East as much as West.
So what next?
More of the same.
We launched Latitude two years ago with an idea for a breakout fund. We wanted to speak through actions before words. This is a small, but hopefully instructive insight into what we do and what drives us.
We love what we do — working with founders who can make a dent; collaborating openly with great investors; and using our cumulative experiences and reach wherever we can.