Crystallising Our Future: A Chairman’s Note

This is the most consequential quarter we have had as a firm to date. This is easy to write, but it's the result of the compounding of clear, consistent, and long term investments we’ve made over the last two decades in people, platform, and purpose.

In Q1 2026, Phoenix Court is crossing the rubicon and formally transitioning from a founder‑led venture business to a shared ownership model. It’s a process we intentionally started in 2024 and is now backed by the first carried interest event of our first institutional decade. But shared ownership is the consequence of long term planning, it’s not the cause. The cause—the economic engine that makes everything else possible—is that Phoenix Court is operating at a level which puts it in elite company. We are in the 99th percentile globally at picking thoroughbreds and unicorns at seed, and the portfolio that engine has produced is now in extraordinary shape.

For the second year running, data from Dealroom evidences this from the outside. Among 4000 active VCs in EMEA—including Accel, Index and Sequoia—Phoenix Court is once again ranked #1 for picking thoroughbreds at seed, and 13th in the world for backing revenue-rich companies at seed, the only non‑US fund in the global top 15.

Coming into 2026, we have £2bn of recently audited unrealised NAV against £926m of cost and 109 portfolio companies operating across three clock speeds: fast (AI), stable (thoroughbreds), and long (science). 59 of them generate more than $25m in revenue, 35 above $100m, and 10 of our 12 Solar pilot companies above $200m. This is a world‑leading portfolio at all three speeds. In the next 90 days alone, we are looking at a pipeline of more than $2bn of follow‑on across the platform—fuel for founders to build, and the chance for us and our LPs to concentrate capital through Latitude, Solar and via co-invest vehicles behind the value drivers of the next decade.

Faculty, Melio and our Platform: The Engine Producing Distributions

We started to see in Q4 2025 with Melio, and now in Q1 2026, what 99th percentile picking and concentrating capital looks like when it compounds. With Faculty, we were Marc, Angie and Andy’s first institutional investors ten years ago and backed them at every opportunity over that decade - as we did with Matan at Melio. The Faculty exit to Accenture handily returned our 2015 fund—our first institutional vintage—and the first carried interest event of our institutional history.

Through LocalGlobe, we’re still holding unrealised positions in fund returners like Tide, Perk and Zego (also held in Latitude and Solar), and value drivers including AtBay, Canva, Cuvva and HiBob. Faculty and Melio are precursors to substantial future harvests—not standalone events.

Shared Ownership: Aligning Stakeholders Around the Engine

When Robin and I started Phoenix Court in 2015, we deliberately incorporated as a Ltd company rather than an LLP—to invest for the long term and align with founders, LPs, our team, and neighbours simultaneously. It has taken us eleven years to build the balance sheet and platform strength to crystallise that vision.

From 1H 2026 onwards, every Phoenix Court FTE will receive profit share, carry and equity—like the founders we back. As founders, our equity steps down meaningfully; Phoenix Court Works (PCW), our neighbourhood foundation, becomes the single largest shareholder, and our team the second largest.

We strongly believe this provides the basis for long term multi-generational alignment across all of our stakeholders and motivates us all to maintain and develop an engine that continues to produce 99th percentile outcomes so LPs, founders, our team, and ultimately our neighbourhood all win together. That is what “ecosystem first, business second” looks like when it is structural rather than rhetorical. We know this is the value system that drives and sustains the long term beneficiaries we all are motivated to serve.

Behind all of this—as you would expect in a Ltd—sits an open and transparent governance structure we have built very deliberately since 2024. The Phoenix Court Board is now formalised with two independent non‑executives who we’ve known for a combined 50 years, Diana Barran and Darren Shapland, alongside Robin and myself as Chair. A senior operating team—Rhian Saleh (Operations, Legal & Compliance), Paul Bishop (Finance), Ziv Reichert (Investing)—takes day‑to‑day responsibility, giving me more time to keep investing, working with value drivers and building out the next frontiers while maintaining strategic oversight at Board and investment levels. Deloitte issued clean audit opinions across the funds and the management company in Q1, with our valuations process in the top decile. The Stewardship Charter formalising all of this is adopted in Q2.

Venture+: Making the Engine More Powerful

If 99th percentile picking is the engine, we believe that Venture+ is what the next decade needs to make our platform more powerful for founders and the teams we back. We believe we’ve always been at the frontier of delivering value to founders since Seedcamp, and developing the platform team while at Index, but tomorrow’s founders need more than the table stakes of capital. Along with what we believe is a uniquely integrated approach to bringing the full team to the table when supporting our portfolio, we now have a Venture+ team who we will be announcing shortly. This gives both me and the whole Phoenix Court team real leverage and is already helping every part of our business “move fast and make things”.

This quarter's Venture+ work with a major Japanese conglomerate is a good illustration: an AI tool that mapped their 10 business units and 900 subsidiaries against our portfolio in weeks to support Asian expansion, which has already generated a live introduction between two portfolio companies and a subsidiary. Similar work is underway with a leading Korean automotive group and other strategic Asian and European corporates. We also extended an AI tool we had built for our work within photonics—spanning several portfolio companies—to support CST recommendations to Downing Street on HMG photonics strategy domestically and with an eye to New Palo Alto, the 4Alps cluster around Zurich and Munich where we are spending more time, and of course Asia where Japan and Korea are incredibly strong in this area. In just 90 days, our data infrastructure and AI tooling is delivering real value to founders and sovereign stakeholders. Venture+ is already producing applied R&D for what the best founders need today and tomorrow.

A Consequential Quarter for the Market

Beyond Phoenix Court, Q1 2026 may also come to be remembered as one of the most consequential quarters in tech history. Over the winter break we experienced first‑hand what the latest generation of AI tools can now do. An entire paradigm of software has shifted, and code is being democratised and increasingly written by machines and supervised by humans. As software development becomes cheaper, what is hard becomes more valuable—distribution, proprietary data, and increasingly, science.

We’ve seen this movie over the last decade with Faculty and our Q1 investments across the team, reflect this shift directly: BaCta (industrial‑scale fermentation), Simfinity (engineering simulation), digiLab (trustworthy AI for nuclear, defence and aerospace), and BioOrbit (microgravity‑manufactured protein crystals for cancer treatments).

While our existing investments are drinking from a firehose of over $2bn in follow-on capital, in Q1 we’ve made fewer new investments but as you’d expect each one deliberate—and each one chosen for the engine, not the headlines. We have an exciting line up in Q2 as well.

Going into 2026, political sentiment in the UK—as in many places in the West—was low, so ahead of the November Budget I wrote some notes to stress‑test my own optimism with data — published on 22 January as “Act I: The UK’s 150‑Year Moment”. As you all know, the argument is consistent thinking, not a hot take. In 2007 at The Next Web in Amsterdam I argued Europe needed to seed the growth of its new stars; in 2015 in London at Deloitte Fast 50, that until Europe could create $50bn unicorns it should focus on being the best place in the world for zebras. Almost twenty years on, the data finally backs the case: the UK is the world’s third largest innovation economy with over 1,800 colts and thoroughbreds today compared to fewer than ten in 2002, and £100bn+ of capital architecture finally in place. Sentiment is low but structure is strong. For our LPs, the structural case for backing UK‑rooted, New Palo Alto‑anchored seed and early‑growth investing has rarely been stronger.

Looking Ahead

Q1 2026 was a quarter of unusual density: a 99th percentile portfolio confirmed across three clock speeds, one of our best exits to date, cash to LPs and team, an institutionally‑grade governance architecture in place, and a market moment that confirms the long‑held thesis behind the platform. The engine is in extraordinary shape, and the structure now exists for everyone who helps it run—LPs, team, founders, neighbours—to share in what it produces.

Saul Klein

Co‑Founder & Chair, Phoenix Court