Building Foundations, Planting Seeds: A Chairman's Note
Q1 confirmed the economic engine - a portfolio validated across three clock speeds, our first carried interest distribution, a market moment that vindicated two decades of conviction and crystallisation of our governance structure. Q2 was the quarter we built the foundations and planted the seeds for the next decade. It was less a headline quarter than a foundational one: governance made real, capital committed patiently across all three clock speeds, and an inclusive innovation gathering convened.
Crystallising Governance, in Practice
In Q1 I described our move from a founder-led business to a shared ownership model. In Q2 we made it operational. The Board is now formally constituted - myself and Robin alongside two independent Non-Executive Directors, Darren Shapland and Diana Barran. We have a stellar operating team reporting into the Board: Ziv Reichert on Investment, Nin Pandit on Value Creation and Special Projects, Rhian Saleh on Legal, Operations and Compliance and Paul Bishop on Finance and IR. This mirrors what we ask of our portfolio companies - transparency, strong governance, clear ownership, clear accountability - and it's how we run our company.
We crystallized a decade-long direction of travel. Every full-timer at Phoenix Court is now an owner of the business alongside holding carry and profit share - not just the founders - and we spent time this quarter walking key stakeholders including our team, founders and of course LPs through exactly what that means. While there are always better ways to manage the transition from founder-led to shared ownership, the feedback has been consistent that we're simply doing what we always said we would.
On June 4th this really came to life at our first inclusive innovation gathering at Somerset House where hundreds of people from across our network came to discuss our shared opportunities to sustainably and with purpose benefit from innovation.
Planting Seeds Across Three Clock Speeds
Our investment activity this quarter was deliberately unevenly paced across clock speeds - patient at the fast end, more active at the long end, where seeds take longest to show and matter most.
It's worth saying plainly: while AI is generating this letter's headlines, the science portfolio is quietly one of the strongest parts of the platform right now. At the long science clock, we spent more time in Munich planting seeds in proven quantum hardware and in Swansea and Boston with revolutionary thin-film solar materials to support energy transitions. We also followed on into Spore.bio, Nyobolt, Sirona Technologies and Open Cosmos. The same Paris trip that closed with our founder's dinner began with an afternoon walking Spore.bio's lab at Hôpital Cochin with their team - the kind of close-up time no dashboard replaces.
At the fast AI clock, the last two quarters have been about sustained momentum in both exits and follow-on capital. On realisations, Faculty's acquisition by Accenture in Q1 and Rossum's acquisition by Coupa this quarter book-end six months of AI-clock liquidity, alongside a partial secondary sale of newly public Raspberry Pi, into strength. This was alongside new backing for Integral and continued support for CuspAI, Granola and ModelML. ModelML in particular echoes Faculty's founding thesis - that a decade of understanding how AI would rewire professional services would eventually pay off. The same prepared mind is showing up in Wonder's AI-native filmmaking and Cosyne's AI-driven drug discovery. As this letter goes to print, OLIX is closing a significant round which we supported - a reminder this is a sustained run, not a lucky quarter. And Sakana AI, one of our stable-clock bets from Japan, shipped its first commercial product this quarter: proof-of-thesis at the other end of the AI curve.
At the stable, thoroughbred clock, we deepened M-KOPA’s relationship with Standard Bank and closed a further round into Starship Technologies.
None of this is headline-grabbing but that's rather the point. Foundations and seeds rarely are in the quarter you lay or plant them.
Three Things I Keep Coming Back To
Beyond the mechanics of the quarter, three convictions have been sharpening for me each with real implications for how we invest, who we back, and who backs us.
Firstly, the $3 trillion correction and the $10 trillion beyond it. My honest expectation is that public and private markets will lose something in the order of $3 trillion of AI-related enterprise value over the next 18 months before we gain $10 trillion of it by 2030. This will be a sharp, overdue repricing followed by roughly $7 trillion of durable new value this decade. We believe we already have exposure to many of the companies that may make up that $7 trillion, whilst also remain disciplined across the other clockspeeds rather than only chasing the froth end.
Secondly, why Nazare and Venture+ position us for what comes next. The next phase of capital allocation in the innovation economy will be AI-first: capital sourced, monitored and deployed by AI-native systems, not just AI companies raising it. Nazare is the infrastructure we're deliberately building to compete in that world. Venture+ is adaptive; exploring our thesis that value generation is predicated on the application of that infrastructure alongside the depth and quality of our networks and relationships. Nin and a small team spent the quarter on forming the first wave of Venture+ support, from procurement matching to market access, with a proper launch to come at our Showcase. Even at this early stage, the direction is already reshaping the firm. We have more technical and scientific judgement in the team, a portfolio moving toward parity between software and science, and founders and an LP base that want managers who can operate and amplify, not just allocate.
Thirdly, why we’re continuing to look East, not just West, to Paris, Munich, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Zurich. This is not because the Bay Area has stopped mattering but because durable value is increasingly built in a federation of centres outside it. Our emerging Paris and established Tel Aviv portfolio are indicators of a thesis we've held for a while: the next decade's winners will be more geographically distributed than the last. Paris deserves a special mention. At the end of April we took over a neighbourhood restaurant for an intimate dinner with Paris founders including BaCta, Spore.bio, Taster, ZML and our newest investment there, Integral. Our simple message was that we're committed to them and this city for the long run. While we've been investing in Paris for over 15 years, the eclectic strength of ecosystem only sharpens our conviction that a deeper UK–France collaboration in science and technology is coming. Quantum, AI infrastructure and materials science all have natural bridges between our ecosystems and we are actively engaged in helping to build that bridge proactively.
Looking Forward
Q2 2026 won't be remembered the way Q1 will. It was quieter, more structural, more patient – exactly what building foundations and planting seeds should feel like. Governance is now real rather than promised, the team is aligned by ownership, and the capital we placed this quarter – from Munich to Boston to London – is exactly the kind of patient, long-clock-speed investing that compounds over decades rather than quarters. The long-term mindset we’ve described every quarter now runs through our operations. We enter the second half of the year with the engine in extraordinary shape and the foundations beneath it stronger than they've ever been.
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