Private companies

We back ambitious, fast-growing companies wherever they are, across any sector or geography. We root our investment strategy in patience, recognising it takes time for these businesses to transform industries and gain an enduring advantage. This is what ultimately drives value for our clients.

Private markets have grown and companies are staying private for longer. That means an increasing share of new technologies’ value creation is occurring in the private space. Frequently, just as these firms start to move from scaling up to industry leadership, they search for investors suited for this next chapter. Our structures let us invest when a firm is private and continue to hold after it becomes public. This allows for closer alignment between our clients and the companies their capital helps fund. To us, a listing can be just another funding round.

We are longstanding shareholders in many trailblazing companies. We first invested in Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, HelloFresh, Spotify, NIO and Wise when they were still private. And we continue to own stakes in them on behalf of our clients, often holding a multiple of the shares we held before they went public.

In many ways, we see this as a continuation of our heritage in public markets, where we have backed Amazon, ASML, Tesla and other innovators for over a decade, staying invested through periods of volatility.

We made our first private company investment in 2012 and have since selectively deployed over $10bn into more than 100 such high-potential businesses. Our current private portfolio includes ByteDance, Epic Games, FlixBus, Northvolt and SpaceX.

We conduct much of our private company funding via investment trusts. They draw on pools of permanent capital, which are unaffected by their own share price moves. So, irrespective of a company’s timeline to go public, we focus on supporting its efforts to achieve its full potential and deliver strong returns over the long term.