Conviction is a venture firm born out of a group of angel investors who have been investing since the early 2000s. We invest in early-stage business to business (B2B) software as a service (SaaS) pan-European ventures and founders. We look for founders who can demonstrate their technology is disruptive and their product delivers quantifiable value to the customers and markets.
We typically look for good deals over proprietary deals, and we invest against metrics, whereby we invest small but with larger incremental follow-ons when the venture delivers growth. This allows us to manage risk, invest with other tier one VCs, and build a credible rapport with our founders to secure further rounds for our LPs.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Conviction started with my first large investment back in the early 2000s when I met Peter Bauer, the Founder and CEO of Mimecast. It gave me a first-hand experience of how a start-up can evolve into a multi-billion-dollar unicorn.
Mimecast was disruptive, future-proofed, and essential to how emails were managed. I saw the potential, became the company’s lead financier, employee number seven, and brought in investors at each key milestone.
I successfully raised funds through an informal syndicate of high-net-worth individuals and family offices that later formed what I called the ‘Conviction Syndicate’. This syndicate continued to invest with me all the way until 2017, when we decided to use the Conviction name and give it a home in Conviction Investment Partners. We have since used it to build a portfolio of nearly 20 companies and invested over $100m.
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How has Conviction VC evolved over the last couple of years?
I co-founded Conviction with my good friend Jeremy Middleton CBE, a successful entrepreneur, operator, and investor, who co-founded Homeserve plc, a multinational home repairs business. Our focus over the years has been to formalise our investing approach.
We have backed several founders as they’ve scaled up their companies. At Conviction, we practice a method called “milestone investing”, where we start with smaller investments, and build bigger positions when the founder delivers on milestones — which are mostly revenue-based. This helps the founder by protecting their position on the cap table, while also taking away their biggest pain-point: fundraising. Having both funds and direct investing capabilities brings flexibility that most “fund only” VCs can’t match.
This relationship pays back multiples. Even in the case when Conviction already has followed its money into a portfolio company, we will continue to support its growth. In the past, we have pulled together syndicates of follow-on investors, from our curated network of co-investors and LPs.
This investment methodology and our ability to provide our LPs with co-investment opportunities has differentiated us in an otherwise crowded field.
What can we hope to see from Conviction VC in the future?
We at Conviction will continue to invest in high-growth, disruptive B2B SaaS companies. We see a few big winners within our portfolio and our target list.
One such company is CreativeX, a game-changing creative data platform for marketers, which enables brands to measure and track the effectiveness of their content. This is just one of the companies in our portfolio from which you can expect to hear more about in the coming years.
