Concept Ventures closes £88M fund as Europe's largest pre-seed VC

Summary

Concept Ventures has closed an £88 million fund, making it Europe's largest pre-seed venture firm by fund size. Reese Chowry, who leads the London-based firm, says the strategy is deliberately narrow: no sector focus, no chasing product-market fit signals that don't yet exist. Every bet is a people bet.

The firm maps founders into four archetypes it believes produce most unicorn outcomes — first-time founders out of big tech, founders who came out of existing unicorns, second-time founders, and PhD spinouts. Each partner specialises in one group. The underwriting process runs to roughly five hours of founder time, and Concept leads approximately 90% of its rounds, typically writing $1 million checks at the pre-seed stage without waiting for co-investors.

LP base

Roughly 80% of the new fund's institutional LPs are American, a deliberate shift Chowry frames as a structural advantage. His view is that US multi-stage firms eventually participate in every major European exit, but are rarely comfortable backing companies at the earliest stage. Concept's pitch to those LPs is that it makes conviction early, before the risk profile is legible to larger funds.

Sourcing logic

Chowry singles out talent leaving high-concentration employers — he specifically names Palantir, from which Concept backed three ex-employees in the previous fund — as a reliable sourcing channel. The broader thesis is that a second wave of European founder ambition is underway, seeded by the region's first generation of scaled companies. He names Spotify and Klarna as the first wave, and points to more recent examples including Granola as evidence that founders are now thinking at a larger scale, partly because they have more local role models to learn from.