Baillie Gifford is an independent investment manager founded in Edinburgh in 1908 and owned and run by 54 partners. Its signature move is patience: it backs exceptional growth companies for decades, first investing when they are private and continuing to hold — often increasing its stake — after they go public. To the firm, a listing can be just another funding round.
Investment thesis
The firm's Private Companies team focuses on late-stage private businesses across any sector or geography, providing patient capital to support decisions that may take years to pay off. Its reasoning is that companies are staying private for longer, so an increasing share of technology's value creation now happens before listing — and it aims to give its clients access to that pre-IPO growth.
Scale and structures
As of 30 April 2026, Baillie Gifford managed $260 billion in assets, achieved through steady organic growth — 40% of it for clients in the United States. Private-company exposure is accessed through listed vehicles the firm manages, notably Scottish Mortgage — which held 23% of its assets across 52 private companies as of July, including ByteDance, Stripe and Anthropic — and Pacific Horizon Investment Trust, capped at 50% of assets in private companies.
Notable investments
The firm first invested in Affirm, Alibaba, Spotify, Tempus AI and Wise while they were still private, and continued to own stakes in them after their IPOs — often a multiple of the pre-listing holding. Other private holdings have included Epic Games and Oddity, which listed in July 2023, alongside the long-term public-market bets it is known for, such as Amazon, ASML and Tesla, each held for well over a decade.
India footprint
Baillie Gifford has real, documented exposure to Indian startups. It was among the new investors in Flipkart's $700 million funding round in December 2014, alongside Qatar Investment Authority and T. Rowe Price. It later joined Ola's $500 million Series F round in November 2015, alongside SoftBank and Tiger Global, and participated in Zomato's pre-IPO rounds — the $660 million December 2020 raise and the $195 million November 2020 round, partly through Pacific Horizon Investment Trust.
People and programmes
The firm operates as a partnership — 54 partners own and run the business — rather than around individual star fund managers. There is no published dedicated founder-facing programme, accelerator, or startup credit/perks scheme: Baillie Gifford is an asset manager investing client capital, not a venture fund offering founder services, so startups engage it as a late-stage investor via its listed trusts and private-company team.
Why it matters for founders
Baillie Gifford matters to founders approaching the late stage: it is a proven source of growth capital that writes patient, long-horizon cheques across sectors and geographies, has a documented history of backing Indian consumer leaders like Flipkart, Ola and Zomato, and does not pressure companies to list before they are ready. If your company is scaling toward category leadership and wants a shareholder that thinks in decades rather than fund cycles, the firm's private-company team is one of the few institutional names worth a conversation.