Leyla Holterud on Vintage’s London Expansion and Europe’s Venture Inflection Point

Vintage Partners

In 2025, Vintage Investment Partners opened a London office to ramp up its footprint in Europe.

With $4.8 billion in assets under management, and an arsenal of tenured investors, the firm is doubling down on its efforts to nurture Europe’s tech ecosystem.

“We have separate vehicles for each investment strategy, but they operate as part of one interconnected platform, Each investor on our team works across strategies while developing deep expertise in specific sectors”  Leyla Holterud, Partner and head of Vintage Investment Partners’ London office, told European Women in VC. Vintage invests across funds and Growth stage companies via its Fund of Funds, Secondaries and Growth strategies. “Insights generated through one part of the platform can inform the others, giving us a broader view of the venture market and multiple ways to act.”

The platform also includes Value+, a dedicated team that “works to connect large enterprises with the innovation economy,” Holterud said. Through its complimentary scouting and matching service, Value+ helps corporations identify emerging technologies and startups addressing specific business challenges. These interactions also give Vintage insight into where enterprise demand is developing.

Investment thesis

Vintage has an expansive reach globally; it focuses on the U.S., Europe, and Israel as its core markets. It’s also been amplifying its outreach in Europe over the last ten years, Holterud said.

While the firm maintains a generalist stance, it does have a keen interest in enterprise software and AI. It also backed bioscience and hardware companies on a selective basis. “The fund portfolio spans emerging managers through to established venture platforms, and everything in between,” Holterud added.

Vintage, like many of its counterparts, likes to make market maps for its corporate LPs and partners who are interested in what’s happening in certain industries – and are looking for tech solutions.

“We manage capital on behalf of primarily large institutions, including pension plans, insurance companies, corporations, and sophisticated family offices,” she noted.

Ultimately, the fund’s north star is “to back the most talented venture investors that have accessed the best founders,” Holterud told EWVC. ““We believe there is a flywheel effect: relationships, reputation, and the value a VC brings compound over time, creating access to the founders building generational companies.”

Case in point, Through its fund investment strategy, Vintage has backed leading European venture managers including Seedcamp, BlueYard, Creandum, Point Nine and 83North, among other great ones. Seedcamp has backed the likes of Wise, Revolut, and Synthesia; Creandum has spearheaded the charge in the Nordics with investments into Lovable and Klarna; and 83North counts a slew of software exits amongst its portfolio, including Wolt, Celeno and Ebury.

Alongside its fund investments, Vintage has backed European Growth companies including Klarna in fintech, RobCo in autonomous industrial robotics, and Wolt in local commerce and delivery. These investments reflect the breadth of its activity across Europe, supporting companies as they scale internationally.

Europe’s inflection point

Holterud notes that we are at an inflection point in European venture. The firm wants to use this energy to propel their search for the next fund managers that will find the continent’s best decacorns.

“Being an entrepreneur has become cool in Europe,” she said. “It’s important because the more someone is excited about building a company, it also brings more diverse talent which enables us all collectively to maximise the chances of interesting ideas.”

She points to Spotify, Klarna, Vinted, and Synthesia as the promising blueprints of this generation. These companies are already minting founder factories, which is stimulating an entrepreneurial spirit across the region. Working in such growth-stage upstarts has given top talent in Europe a chance to “work in a fast-paced company and see problems they really want to tackle, because they’ve gotten the tools and experience of how they could approach that.”

Holterud sees a key bottleneck that could be tackled to elevate Europe’s technological potential. “For young companies, it’s the way corporations purchase new technology and experiment with it,” she said. Europe sees more resistance to the adoption of new tech, but there is less friction in this process in the U.S. It can transform the way an upstart scales and grows, she added.

There is also a narrative that Europe lacks late-stage venture capital, Holterud said. But Vintage has noted a spike in US investors swarming to the continent in recent years.

“Europe is a bridge to the US, and this is super important in the age of AI,” she said.

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Leyla Holterud is a partner at Vintage Investment Partners. Before joining Vintage, she held roles at Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, and worked in venture capital and growth equity at StepStone Group. 

Founded in 2003, Vintage Investment Partners is a global venture capital platform managing $4.8 billion and focused exclusively on venture. Its Fund of Funds, Secondaries, and Growth strategies bring together deep relationships, proprietary data, and signals from enterprise demand, giving Vintage a broad view of the venture market and multiple ways to act on it. Through Value+, Vintage connects the managers and companies it backs with a network of hundreds of leading enterprise leaders.