London-based Notion Capital closed a $130 million growth vehicle squarely aimed at addressing Europe’s endangered follow-on funding gap, and it’s designed to offer later-stage firepower for the B2B founders whom it has supported for more than a decade.
Focused on investing in 12 growth opportunities across Europe, including follow-ons, it has a free rein on new market prospects with capacity to lead internal and external rounds.
- Why Europe’s follow-on funding gap matters for startups
- Strategy and sectors in the spotlight for Notion’s fund
- Deals already underway as Notion begins deploying capital
- Team and governance shaping Growth Opps III leadership
- Fund structure and LP mix across regions and institutions
- Competition and how founders benefit from local growth capital
Growth Opps III is an extension of the London-based firm’s existing assets under management, which now exceed $1 billion (£797 million), as it looks to take advantage of dynamic European market dynamics.
Why Europe’s follow-on funding gap matters for startups
Europe’s shortage of growth capital, particularly at Series B and beyond, has long been a bottleneck to promising startups achieving their potential. The figure is still well below the 2021 high and the proportion involving U.S. participation has fallen from 22% to 20% compared with 2022, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech. That pullback has left founders scrambling to cobble together smaller syndicates, and to tolerate extended fundraising timelines, at the very moment they crave velocity and certainty.
Domestic institutional money has yet to completely backfill the void. Surveys from the European Investment Fund indicate a recovering, but selective, hunger for late-stage venture even as industry bodies like Invest Europe and the British Business Bank keep pointing out time after time how pension funds only dedicate a sliver of assets to venture and growth equity. Policy initiatives like France’s Tibi program and the U.K.’s Mansion House Accord are aimed at unlocking even more long-term savings to finance productive assets, but that money dribbles in.
Strategy and sectors in the spotlight for Notion’s fund
Notion’s thesis is to get in front of founders the moment scaling itself becomes execution-critical. The firm will focus on the application layer of AI, where productivity and workflow efficiencies are most clearly felt, rather than capital-intensive model infrastructure. You can expect it to shape up similarly to Notion’s SaaS, cloud and fintech deep roots but with AI-native capabilities and new industries where Europe has an upper hand in networks, such as energy, supply chain logistics and defence-adjacent software influenced by the increasing rise of digital sovereignty requirements.
To maintain investment discipline, follow-on decisions will be made by growth partners who are dedicated, rather than the early-stage team.
That division is designed to “bring the kind of robust objectivity insiders can’t provide” to insider rounds, while allowing the same partners to pursue non-portfolio growth opportunities. Check sizes will be flexible to anchor or co-lead rounds with European and international co-investors.
Deals already underway as Notion begins deploying capital
The fund has begun deploying. Upvest, the Berlin-based startup that is working to make it as easy as possible for developers to build their own investment apps, has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The team has backed Kraken Technologies, the Octopus Energy spinout that offers an operating system for retail and grid-scale operations, as utilities look to go electric.
Healthcare infrastructure is another theme. Nelly, which makes software and embedded financial services for medical practices, represents a larger push into regulated industries where European startups can make more of an advantage through compliance and stewardship of data — both areas that have proven to be differentiators in the era of AI.
Team and governance shaping Growth Opps III leadership
Growth Opps III is led by current partner Stephanie Opdam and new hire partner Jessica “Jess” Bartos, formerly a principal with Salesforce Ventures. (To the extent you think Notion’s strength is its go-to-market, remind yourself Notion has been around less than 10 years and has moneyball’d a ton of what it thinks about into its GTM model.) The combination arrives with a mix of Notion’s long-standing founder community network blended with fresh growth-stage pattern recognition from a corporate venture perspective — handy when Europe’s software champions stride from product-market fit to repeatable go-to-market.
Fund structure and LP mix across regions and institutions
It is euro-denominated and domiciled in Luxembourg, a format that minimises currency friction for eurozone founders and many continental LPs. Notion says around 85% of funds are committed by institutions, and the capital is spread across continental Europe, the U.K., MENA and the U.S. Though there was no real Paris-prompted outperformance on the recent push to mobilise pensions, it expects future vehicles will grow as those programs mature.
Competition and how founders benefit from local growth capital
Should domestic pensions and sovereign pools enter the mix, competition for European growth deals will be reinvigorated — a net positive for founders looking for options and terms that are more in their favor.
Notion’s counter is proximity: a large early-stage portfolio, an active platform team and long-running relationships that begin years before companies reach scale. That pipeline can shorten diligence cycles and lower signaling risk for insider-led rounds.
The larger issue is that Europe’s upcoming wave of category leaders will require steady, local growth capital as AI transforms software delivery and procurement. With Growth Opps III, Notion is gambling that Europe’s strength in vertical SaaS, fintech infrastructure and regulated markets will be good fits for application-layer AI — and that a homegrown investor can retain those winners on the continent as they scale.
