The phone call from San Francisco came late on Saturday for Miki Kuusi, CEO and cofounder of Finnish delivery startup Wolt. Investors from Iconiq Capital, a secretive San Francisco-based family office that managed the wealth of Silicon heavyweights like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Reid Hoffman, wanted to jump on a plane the next day to meet face-to-face in Helsinki.
“They actually flew into Helsinki from San Francisco during a weekend with less than 24 hours’ notice,” says Kuusi, which helped Iconiq land the deal as lead investor in the startup’s $130 million round in 2019. “What really impressed us is they have this go-getter attitude,” he says.
Iconiq has now made the move to permanently close that gap between the Bay Area and Europe, opening an office in London headed by former Accel partner Seth Pierrepont. It’s only a small outpost for now, with Pierrepont’s team of six focusing on growth-stage deals, while venture, real estate deals and a family office that handles everything from buying homes, filing taxes and booking private jets for its ultra-rich clients are managed out of the U.S.
“Europe for us is not new, and we have always believed in the quality of founders and ideas coming out of the region,” says Pierrepont, who led Accel’s investment in Dublin-based no-code startup Tines and worked on its deals with Tel Aviv-based security company Snyk and Swedish telehealth operator Kry. “Opening this office means that we will have more exposure and coverage of Europe by having more boots on the ground.”
Iconiq is best known among investors for pre-IPO investments in companies like Uber, Datadog and Snowflake. It has also made a smaller number of savvy early-stage investments, including backing design startup Figma’s Series A round. Adobe proposed a $20 billion takeover of Figma earlier this month.
It has also seen success with a number of its European investments already. Wolt was acquired for almost 20 times the valuation that Iconiq invested in 2019 when it was acquired by DoorDash in November 2021 for $8.1 billion. The firm was also a significant early investor in Dutch payments company Adyen, which now has a stock market value of $40 billion. Iconiq also holds stakes in Belgian data platform Collibra and London-based fintech Primer.
Iconiq was founded in 2011 by former Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley bankers Divesh Makan, Michael Anders and Chad Boeding. Makan began working with Zuckerberg shortly after he moved to Palo Alto, adding a key name to the roster of future Silicon Valley heavyweights that invested with Iconiq.
The firm now works with 337 wealthy clients, according to its most recent regulatory filing. Its assets under management have exploded from $43 billion in November 2020 to over $80 billion today due to a boom in tech valuations and a number of IPOs during the pandemic. That’s even with the share price of some big Iconiq exits like Datadog down almost 40% from its stock market peak.
Only around 10% of Iconiq’s portfolio is based in Europe, but the firm was drawn by a crop of seasoned founders and executives that are starting new companies, says Matthew Jacobson, a general partner with Iconiq Growth. “You have repeat founders, a more experienced ecosystem, and it creates a very powerful dynamic that we are excited to invest in,” says Jacobson.
Iconiq faces competition from both local investors with a larger footprint, and a growing contingent of American investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Pierrepont’s former Accel colleague Luciana Lixandru, who now leads Sequoia Capital’s London office.
Iconiq’s operations are so sprawling that it has an expansive list of potential conflicts of interest. But that same, tight web of relationships might be its greatest selling point to potential founders, which was the case for Adyen. Adyen CEO and cofounder Pieter Van der Does raised an undisclosed amount from Iconiq in 2015.
“We got them on board because we were a European company with a global product, and now we are being seen as a global company,” says Van der Does. “They have a great network.”
The billionaires minted from a string of pandemic IPOs potentially has created a new crop of clients for the reclusive family office, which only expanded its website beyond a logo in 2020. At the very least, Iconiq’s ever growing network will likely prove a draw for new startup founders. “They promised that they would support founders and they lived up to that and opened their network to us,” says Van der Does.
