Ascension has spent the past 7 years building a UK Seed VC where the start-ups / founders that we back sit at the centre of everything, through providing a strong support infrastructure (the creation of a mentor network and frequent ecosystem events) and treating them with humility, honesty, conviction, speed, and integrity in all interactions. Ascension believes that building such an ecosystem will attract the best start-ups, co-investment deal-flow, and therefore deliver the highest returns for its investors. Ascension has achieved four recent exits and 45+ initial investments are currently valued at >200%.
Key Investment Features
The Fund focuses on technology companies raising their pre-Series A funding rounds and bridges the equity gap between Seed (SEIS round) and Series A (institutional round), what Ascension terms ‘Seed+’. Ascension focuses on 7 key markets:
Commerce
DeepTech
Digital Health
FinTech
New Work
Sustainability
Next Gen Media
Most target investments operate as early-stage scalable, IP rich and tech enabled businesses. Ascension focuses on three key elements of any potential business: the quality of the team, the robustness of the technology vs. competition, and the market size/potential of the product.
At the stage where the Fund invests (Seed+), the founding team is the most important consideration – if the team is strong and combines a mastery of the problem they are trying to solve with a keen eye on commercial opportunities, Ascension will consider an investment. Typically, the team would have at least two co-founders with complementary skills sets: CEO (‘front of house’) and CTO (‘back of house’)
The Ascension team next focuses on the quality of the technology underlying each product, as well as its ability to create a moat around the market opportunity versus current or future competition.
Additionally, the investee target will have a compelling business model capable of rolling out in a large market with global potential. Once confidence in the team, product and market is established, analysis is conducted to discern whether there is a clear route to market for the distribution of the product and to decide where Ascension can add value