James Wise

AI agent-company Convergence acquired by Salesforce

Since announcing our seed investment into Convergence under 9 months ago, Marvin, Andy and team have been executing at lightning speed. They put together one of the most talented teams working on reinforcement learning in the world, developed a benchmark-beating web-browsing model and have helped 100,000s of users automate

Why We Invested: Quantum Systems – Engineering Europe’s Next-Gen Aerial Intelligence

Today we’ve announced our latest investment - backing Quantum Systems $160M round as the lead investor from Balderton’s growth fund. Aerial intelligence is becoming the nervous system of modern security—and the UK & Europe, for the first time in a generation, are building and investing accordingly. A

Prior Labs and the end of dumb data

The founder of Prior Labs, Frank Hutter, changed the field of data science once with his work on AutoML, which automated the end-to-end process of building machine learning models He and his team are back to do it again with TabPFN, the most performant tabular foundation model available. In their

Convergence and the end of dumb tools

Humans are a tool-using species. But that's only part of the hack that led to our evolutionary speed run. More important than using tools is our ability to teach others how to use them too. From person to person, generation to generation, tribe to tribe, ideas spread as

Balderton's $1.3B fundraise and conviction investing

I have a bug bear with most fundraising announcements. While it would be great to see more media coverage of technological breakthroughs and entrepreneurial journeys (see our own efforts at What's Next), a fundraise is usually a lagging indicator of success, and rarely a newsworthy moment itself. So

How to build a more entrepreneurial economy

This interview was given to CityAM, the original text is here. Every week, Charlie Conchie sits down with the biggest names in financial services, tech and fintech. This week, its Balderton Capital partner and Start-Up Century author James Wise. When Monzo founder Tom Blomfield packed his bags for San Francisco

Start-Up Century, interview with Bloomsbury Business Press.

As a Partner at Balderton Capital, James Wise has met with 1000s of founders and worked with some of the most successful technology companies of the last decade. He is a member of the UK Government’s Industrial Development Advisory Board and a trustee of Demos. All this experience made

How AI is changing product roadmaps everywhere

One of the most noticeable changes in how the best product teams are using LLMs is in lowering the barrier to entry for people to get the best from their products. In short, LLMs are massively expanding TAM (total addressable market). The demand to test new generative AI tools has

Investing in Deepset: Giving every enterprise it’s own AI platform

For over twenty years now, our team at Balderton have been investing in open-source solutions, machine learning applications, and enterprise software. Whether it was our early days supporting a new era for databases with MySQL and ETL with Talend, or our investments in Sophia Genetics, leveraging AI for cancer diagnosis,

The real risk of Generative AI - cyberfraud

This post was originally printed in the Guardian This year, I was sent a link to a video of myself, passionately explaining why I had invested into a new technology company. In the video I spoke enthusiastically about the great faith I had in the company’s leadership and encouraged

Focus

This month marks my tenth year at Balderton, and my 12th year investing in and supporting UK & European technology companies. I've been fortunate to have met and worked with Europe's best technology entrepreneurs, and their teams, in an exceptionally broad range of industries. I'

Why we need a new UX for AI to succeed

This post was written as part of our series on investing in AI with my colleague Sivesh. For those new to this space, we’re undergoing one of the biggest technological shifts since cloud computing. We won’t spend too much time on this shift as there are many great

Tibber raises $100M to make our energy smarter and more affordable.

The round was led by Summa Equity, with existing investors including Balderton, Eight Roads and Schibsted Ventures. Tibber is a smart energy provider that is revolutionising the energy industry with its innovative business model. As I have written about before, instead of profiting from their customers' energy consumption, Tibber

Epic Games acquires Sketchfab in a $100M+ M&A deal

We're delighted to congratulate the team at Sketchfab [https://sketchfab.com/], who today announce their acquisition by Epic Games. Balderton first invested in Sketchfab in late 2013, leading the companies seed round and I joined the board as part of that round. Today, Sketchfab is the leading global

Depop joins Etsy in a $1.63B acquisition

As shared on Balderton.com Etsy, which operates two-sided online marketplaces that connect millions of passionate and creative buyers and sellers around the world, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Depop for $1.625 billion. Following the closing of the transaction, Depop will continue to be headquartered in London,

Protolabs acquires 3D Hubs to build the world's largest distributed manufacturing platform

Today we're happy to announce that 3D Hubs, a Balderton portfolio company, has been acquired by Protolabs in a deal worth $330M in cash and shares. Amsterdam-based 3D Hubs [https://www.3dhubs.com/] was founded with a single goal in mind, to connect designers and manufacturers to give

Tibber and the future of home energy consumption

Home energy consumption is amongst the most critical industries in the world. It provides us with access to the fundamental necessities in life from heating to refrigeration, but at the same time contributes to 20% of the West’s Green House Gas Emissions (GHGs). It also makes up between 11%

Building, sustainably

As run on TechCrunch, April 2020 Marc Andreessen, Florence Nightingale and Building in a Vacuum. If you want to get a structural engineer excited, ask them what they could build in space. Freed from the constraints of gravity and aerodynamics, a single human could move skyscrapers like lego bricks. A

Cracking the City Code

This was a guest edit of the exceptional Exponential View [https://www.exponentialview.co/], a weekly series of essays and podcasts run by Azeem Azhar. Challenging the power structures of megacities Hi, I’m James. I feel particularly fortunate that Azeem asked me to contribute to Exponential View this week

How more patient investors can help tackle the climate crises

As printed in the Sunday Telegraph [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/05/05/investors-must-realise-evolution-much-better-option-extinction/] - 5th May Climate change deniers still exist in the City. Increasingly financiers accept that man-made climate change is a danger, but they are still in denial of an equally obvious truth: that climate

Our investment in Kaia Health: how software can tackle chronic pain

Working in technology, you see plenty of graphs. But one graph bothers me more above all of them: While new markets, practices and technologies have seen the cost of many goods fall over the last few decades, healthcare has remained stubbornly expensive. And even more worryingly, the length and quality

What big tech can learn from the financial crash

As syndicated with The Daily Telegraph 9/1/2019 After the financial crash of 2008 many bankers looked back and wondered how they became one of the most disliked industries in the country. While there were bad actors in every company, most employees were decent people just trying to make

Announcing Sophia Genetic's new funding round

After a very strong 2018 for our portfolio company Sophia Genetics, in which they achieved many technical and commercial firsts, we are happy to announce our participation in their latest $77M funding round, led by Al Gore's Generation IM and supported by IdInvest. As we noted in our

The Government's tax on tech is the right diagnosis, but the wrong prescription

As published in The Telegraph 10th November 2018 While the last year has been one of the most successful ever for the UK’s fast-growing tech sector on the international stage, the industry has also faced a ferocious backlash at home. From the disgraceful conduct at Cambridge Analytica to legal

How to make calls with us useful

Your time is your most important asset, so to make the most of calls or first meetings with Balderton we have a few recommendations of how to prepare in advance, things we've learned from looking at over 5,000 pitch decks a year. 1) Everyone at Balderton is