Passion Capital is a specialist fintech and enterprise risk pre-seed fund based in London. Since the launch of its first fund in 2011, Passion has backed over 110 startups at pre-seed and seed, with 5 unicorns emerging from the portfolio so far, including GoCardless, Monzo, and Marshmallow. Currently investing out of its fourth fund, the firm is backing founders all across Europe, building in fintech and enterprise risk.
Fund strategy overview
Geography: Europe
Preferred industries: fintech and enterprise risk
Investment ticket: £400k–500k
Company stage: pre-seed
Product type: tech
Product stage: no product required
Revenues: no revenues required
Q&A with Will Orde, Partner at Passion Capital
What are the 5 main things you look for in a startup?
The most important thing is the founding team. We’re looking to back charismatic visionaries with a chip on their shoulders, a hefty dose of grit, and serious ambition. Founding teams with genuine lived insight into the pain point they’re tackling and prior experience of what good looks like for a startup are a big plus.
What disqualifies a startup as your potential investment target?
Revenue. Quick answers aside, we're laser-focused on backing founders on day one, too much traction already, and we’re unlikely to be the right investor.
What, in your opinion, differentiates the best founders from the rest?
The path to building a category-defining business is never straightforward; without a hefty element of grit and perseverance, they’ll never get through the tough moments.
What startups should take into account before making a deal with a VC fund?
Taking on funding is a long-term commitment, and it’s really hard to get rid of an investor once they’re on your cap table — do your homework, talk to founders they’ve already backed, and make sure you’re taking money from the right people.
What is your approach to startup valuation and preferred share in the company?
Valuation at pre-seed is an art, not a science, trying to balance not over-diluting the founders early on with not raising at too high a valuation that sets an impossible bar to clear at the next round. At the end of the day, it’s more important to have a motivated team of founders than to extract the best possible deal.
How do you support your portfolio companies?
We offer high-touch support to our founders as they work through the common challenges that all early-stage founders encounter — from first hires to getting pricing and go-to-market strategy right. We have experience from seeing over 100 founders go through the same process.
What are the best-performing companies in your portfolio?
Passion has a strong track record in the fintech space, as seed investors in GoCardless, Lendable, Marshmallow, Monzo, and Tide — all of which have gone on to achieve unicorn status.
What are your notable lessons learned from investments that didn’t work out as expected?
It’s natural for investments to fail, particularly at the early stage, but it’s most painful when it's due to founder issues, whether that be founders falling out with each other, big egos struggling to delegate, or not managing to hire great talent to join the team.
Stress testing the founder relationship and ability to sell the vision before we invest is crucial.
What are the hottest markets you currently look at as VC, and where do you see the biggest hype?
We think that there’s a massive opportunity in fintech as AI opens up the opportunity to automate and improve areas of financial services that SaaS and mobile have hardly touched. We’re spending a lot of time around the office of the CFO, fraud, and how payments will need to evolve for the agentic era.
In your view, what are the key trends that will shape the European VC scene in the coming years?
The market is still contracting after the heady days of 2021–2022. With typical investment periods of 3-5 years, we’re only just getting to the point where VC’s that can’t raise their next fund will drop out of the market. That means it will remain hard for founders to raise funding, particularly those with solid but not exceptional traction.
I’m expecting founders to pursue a wider variety of funding journeys as they build their businesses with seed-strapping and other lower burn paths, becoming more common and potentially leading to results just as rewarding for founders.
