Kindred Capital: The London VC That Shares Fund Profits with Founders

Kindred Capital is the London early-stage VC that turned its own economics into a founder magnet. Founded in 2015, the firm practises what it calls equitable venture: every entrepreneur it invests in becomes a co-owner of the fund. In its first fund it set aside 20 per cent of the fund's carry — the investment profits — for the founders it backed, meaning that once limited partners have their money returned, portfolio founders share in subsequent fund profits alongside the partners. With the third fund, founders retain around 12 to 13 per cent of carry after allocations to the non-investment team and advisers, with carry vesting over five years.

The idea, in the firm's words, is simple: founders help founders more than investors do, so Kindred bought a piece of the founders' businesses and gave them a piece of its own. The model appears to work as deal-flow machinery — around 40 per cent of Kindred's top-of-funnel deal flow, and 60 per cent of closed deals, come from founders already in the portfolio.

Kindred invests at pre-seed and seed across Europe and Israel, leading or co-leading rounds with cheques of $200,000 to $3 million in roughly 25 to 30 companies per fund, reserving half of each fund for follow-ons. It has raised three funds: Kindred Capital I at £80 million in 2018, Kindred Capital II at £81 million in 2020, and Kindred Fund III at £130 million in 2023, backed by institutions including Legal & General, British Patient Capital, Isomer and the University of Chicago. Fund III leans further into pre-seed — roughly a 70:30 pre-seed-to-seed split — with a particular appetite for techbio and infrastructure picks-and-shovels deals. The investment team is partner-only, with no layers between a founder and a decision-maker, and the firm says it can move from first meeting to a closed deal in about a week.

The partners include Leila Zegna, Tracy Dorée, Mark Evans, Russell Buckley and Maria Palma. The portfolio features Paddle, the SaaS payments unicorn that closed a $200 million Series D; Gravity Sketch; M3ter; LabGenius; Cradle Bio; Dexory; and BotsandUs. Exits include FiveAI, the autonomous-vehicle startup sold to Bosch in 2022, and Atlas ML, the machine-learning startup acquired by Meta within a year of its Kindred seed round.