Seedcamp Divests From Its TransferWise Stake

Seedcamp, which was an early investor in London money transfer startup TransferWise, has sold off a piece of its stake in a secondary offering.

According to a report by TechCrunch, TransferWise was recently valued at $1.1 billion, propelling the company into unicorn status. With the stake sale, TechCrunch said 80 percent of Seedcamp’s second fund of €5 million has been returned to investors. Even with the stake sale, Seedcamp still has the majority of its shares in the startup and is still bullish on the future for the company.

“Seedcamp sold a small minority of our stake in TransferWise,” Seedcamp Cofounder and Partner Reshma Sohoni said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are holding onto the large majority of our stake because we, like the founders, believe they are just getting started. This is a company that’s barely six years old and is a unicorn.”

According to a Sky News report last week, Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley VC firm, increased its stake in TransferWise by buying a bunch of shares from angel investors. The names of the investors were not disclosed.

“We actively wanted to sell part of our stake, so we worked on this over time but completed the transaction end of 2016,” Sohoni added. “There are three ways to get a billion-dollar exit — M&A, IPO, secondary. We want to show that, in Europe, the secondary, which is the least talked about, is a very viable way to do exactly that. Getting money back into the hands of our angels and VCs so fast should inspire them to take even bigger risks. 100-million or 200-million exits are great, but billion-dollar and 10 billion-dollar exits just became possible.”