British Patient Capital has committed £20 million to Connect Ventures Fund IV, which has closed at $80m with a final close to come later this year.
It joins other existing investors including De Agostini, Big Society Capital, Top Tier and Molten Ventures. The investment follows a cornerstone commitment by British Patient Capital to Connect’s third fund in 2020.
Connect is a London-headquartered pre-seed and seed-focused venture capital firm. Often the first institutional investor in the companies it backs, Connect has built a distinctive reputation for its expertise in empowering product-obsessed founders to build venture scale companies.
The firm has previously invested in category-defining product-led companies such as Typeform, TrueLayer, Lifebit, Oyster and Kheiron.
Its investment team invests across a range of specialisms, including B2B SaaS, FinTech, consumer, healthcare and Web3. Connect has already started deploying the fourth fund with recent investments in B2B Health, generative AI, payment infrastructure, B2B SaaS and developer tools.
“Connect Ventures invests in some of the UK’s most promising early-stage companies to provide both the capital and operating expertise they need to help them scale and realise their full potential,” said Catherine Lewis La Torre, CEO of British Patient Capital.
“This aligns closely with our mission of driving investment in innovative companies led by ambitious founders. We are delighted to continue our relationship with Connect as they build on their successes and help entrepreneurs develop their products as successful, high growth companies.”
Pietro Bezza, co-founder and managing partner at Connect, said: “At Connect, we’re low volume, high conviction, high support VCs. We don’t spread ourselves too thin. Each of the partners leads 2-3 investments per year so we have time for our founders.
“Connect Ventures is an intentionally designed, single-stage VC. We are pre-seed and seed stage specialists. We are the first believers and we love the 0-1 phase which is why we do so many first rounds.”