Balderton Portfolio company THG goes public on the London Stock Exchange

SEP 21, 2020

There are few pieces of news so exciting in the technology industry as a new IPO, so we are delighted to congratulate THG on its IPO on the London Stock Exchange.

Matt Moulding first came in to meet our partnership in March of 2010, and we had made our initial Series A investment in THG by April of that year as the company’s first venture capital investor.We made four further investments in the two year period after April 2010, with the final round in August of 2012, investing £24.3M in total to make Balderton the largest institutional shareholder in THG when it went public.

The London Stock Exchange

THG was an early pioneer in direct to consumer. Since its founding in 2004, THG has grown into a vertically integrated, global e-commerce technology group, and beauty and nutrition brand owner.The company has enjoyed strong growth over the past decade, today employing more than 7,000 people and posting revenues of £1.14 billion in 2019. The company’s operations now span the entire product and customer journey from product development and manufacturing, to content creation, hosting and digital commerce. THG’s IPO is the largest tech IPO in the UK in the last 5 years and one of the top 5 UK tech IPOs of the decade. It’s also among the top 15 largest tech IPOs from Europe in the last 10 years.*We believe this is an incredibly important moment for London and for European tech more broadly.In the past, many successful European tech companies chose to move their HQs to the US, raise future rounds from US growth investors and then list on Nasdaq or NYSE.However, the notion that tech companies need to move their headquarters and list outside of Europe to be successful now no longer holds true. THG is a great example of this new trend – the team was born and bred in Manchester, raised initial capital from European sources and then, as the company scaled, directly tapped into a global investor base through a London listing.Balderton has been represented on THG’s board since 2010, with Managing Partner Bernard Liautaud joining the board in 2017.Read his perspective on THG, and on the company’s remarkable CEO and Co-Founder Matt Moulding here. Read the case study from the London Stock Exchange here.

Matt Moulding founded THG in 2004.

*Source: Pitchbook