Nov 30, 2023

Hussein Kanji, founding partner of Hoxton Ventures Sebastian Nevols for Forbe You'll be asked to sign into your Forbes account. Got it B eyond the investment he would ultimately make in her cybersecurity startup Darktrace, what Poppy Gustafsson most remembers about pitching Hoxton Ventures partner Hussein Kanji was the phone he was carrying back in 2015. “It was some weird thing that he stitched together,” Gustafsson said of the device, which was frankensteined together from iPhone and Blackberry parts. Kanji had been a diehard Blackberry user. Adding that handheld’s keyboard to his first iPhone seemed to him a no brainer improvement. After leading a $2 million seed round into Darktrace, Kanji remained on the company's board for several years, carrying that bespoke handheld with him to meetings, an emblem of his do-things-my-own-way mindset. Darktrace went on to go public on the London Stock Exchange with its 2021 listing heralded as the event that “ salvaged London’s tech IPO dream. ” Darktrace today has a market cap of $2.9 billion. Before he invested in Darktrace, Kanji made a bigger, riskier bet. In 2005 he walked out of a comfortable job at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington state, and moved to London to become a venture capitalist and bring Silicon Valley-style seed investing to Europe. It was a controversial decision at the time. “People literally told me, ‘You used to be smart and then you moved to London and now we’re not sure about you anymore,’” Kanji said. Ten years on, and with three billion-dollar exits under his belt at Hoxton Ventures, the early stage VC firm he cofounded with fellow American investor Rob Kniaz, that bet is paying off. “When we started, no one believed in Europe and our job is knowing when to suspend disbelief,” said Kanji, who makes his debut on the Midas List Europe today. With $370 million in assets under management at Hoxton, Kanji writes checks to startups that typically wouldn’t tick the boxes for traditional European investors. Hoxton Ventures’ portfolio contains eclectic picks that range from Really Clever, a startup that’s trying to make leather out of mushrooms, to Phagos, a company that’s developing a virus that eats disease-causing bacteria, along with more traditional companies like Druid AI, an enterprise AI software startup. He makes other kinds of unorthodox bets too: Take the London-based piano keyboard maker Roli, which had filed for bankruptcy after raising $75 million in funding, and was abandoned by its earlier investors. But Kanji saw an opportunity and invested $6.85 million for a total pivot to a music lesson platform. “It requires some courage to say ‘$100 million has gone down the drain, but it hasn’t all gone down the drain,’” Kanji said. “I’m probably too outspoken and with personality differences, I was an odd man out.” Hussein Kanji It hasn’t been a smooth journey for Kanji or Hoxton Ventures, but he feels comfortable talking about failure. The first fund took a grueling three years to raise. Hoxton dropped one of the original partners after he stopped turning up for meetings. Worse, one of Hoxton’s star investments, Babylon Health, imploded in August 2023, two years after going public. The native New Yorker was raised by a single mother, who was a schoolteacher in Queens. He attended acclaimed Stuyvesant High School before heading to Stanford, where he caught the startup bug. In 1995, he started web-based design startup Studio Verso which was acquired by KPMG for $ 15.5 million in 1999. His second venture, Whispersoftly, a startup that contextualized webpages, failed little more than a year later; Kanji now calls it “ a dumb idea .” Five years and other short stints later, he landed at Microsoft, developing speech recognition products for business customers, where he jokes 30% of the company that worked at the middle management level should have been fired because they were “dead weight.” In 2005, Kanji walked out of that job to join the London outpost of American venture firm Accel while earning an MBA at London Business School. As an associate, he gained experience working on seed investment deals at Accel like display fintech startup OpenGamma and social games developer Playfish. He was laid off in 2009, the same year he started Hoxton Ventures. “I’m probably too outspoken and with personality differences, I was an odd man out,” he said. That’s not the only time Kanji’s “no-bullshit” personality has ruffled feathers. He’s clashed with the founders of some of his most prominent investments, including Will Shu, the founder of Deliveroo that Hoxton invested $850,000 in at the seed stage and listed with a $10.4 billion valuation in 2021. And he regularly sounds off on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where his sarcastic tweets standout in the self-congratulatory echo chamber of VC broetry. See: A recent quip that the free coffees offered by a rival fund were the only liquidity on offer. “I’ve told him that Twitter is his biggest enemy,” said Kamil Tamiola, CEO and founder of Peptone, an AI drug discovery startup backed by Hoxton Ventures. Kanji said he’s often excluded from the “ cool kids parties ” in the European VC scene, and on those rare occasions when he is invited he’s sometimes dress-coded out of London’s fancier clubs. Kanji was among a group of tech VIPs who were forced to make an emergency dress shoe run because of one location’s strict no sneaker policy. “Europe does feel clubby. I don't think I'm in the club,” he said. “Social status, the family that you're from, the high school you went to, where you play squash, matters here more than in the U.S.” The no-filter approach is appealing for some founders. “It kind of cuts through a lot of the nonsense,” said Patrick Pinto, cofounder of mushroom leather startup Really Clever. It also speeds things up when it comes to writing checks. “It was the most shockingly streamlined investment process I have gone through,” said Peptone’s Tamiola. A trio of billion dollar exits for Kanji, and a string of other major Europe listings, have won rival American VCs on his thesis. Public market investors have proved harder to please. Deliveroo’s $2.6 billion stock market value is just 75% of its March 2021 IPO. Short sellers have stalked Darktrace while the fraud trial of Gustafsson’s former boss Mike Lynch over HP’s Autonomy buyout also overshadows the cybersecurity business. Telehealth startup Babylon Health filed for Chapter 11 just 26 months after going public in a $4.2 billion blank check merger in 2021. Kanji had pressed founder Ali Parsa to sell. “It was unfortunate, it would have been a fund returner for us, but it collapsed down to zero,” says Kanji, who named a boardroom after the startup. Now as Hoxton Ventures approaches its 10 year anniversary, Kanji is doubling down on his original strategy of Silicon Valley-style investing in London — with some tweaks. His cofounder Kniaz has transitioned away from the firm to launch his own deep tech fund. And Kanji has hired three Silicon Valley veterans, Payton Dobbs, Bryan Gartner and Charles Seeley, to grow Hoxton from a boutique to a more ambitious VC firm. In the years since the launch of Hoxton, named after the fund’s original office in a once trendy area of London, a string of American venture capitalists like Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightspeed Europe and Andreessen Horowitz have set up shop in Europe. Despite competition from these new imports, and American investors of his own vintage like Passion Capital’s Eileen Burbidge, who also debuts this year on the Midas List Europe, Kanji still thinks there’s space for Hoxton’s “anti-thematic” bets on bold founders and technologies. The view from Hoxton’s eighth floor office now shows a London radically different from the one that Hussein set up shop in over a decade ago — a city that’s home to over 37 unicorns worth over $170 billion. “Ten years ago, most people were very cynical. There were very few companies coming out of Europe. If you look today, it's very clear that Europe produces really large, valuable tech companies on a repeatable pattern,” he said. MORE FROM FORBES