- Sprints closed its fifth fund at the €725M hard cap, nearly 40% above its last.
- More than half the capital is already deployed, according to Henrik Persson.
- It follows the $3.6B sale of Fin, a Sprints holding, and higher valuations for Revolut and Vinted.
Sprints took about a year to raise its fifth fund, and more than half of it is already invested. The London growth investor closed at its hard cap of €725 million, Bloomberg reported. That is roughly 40% more than its previous fund,which closed at €525 million.
Endowments, foundations, pension funds, and family offices supplied the capital, said co-founder and managing partner Henrik Persson. The money is going into new companies and existing portfolio holdings across marketplaces, financial services, and software.
Where the portfolio stands
Sprints first backed Vinted and Revolut in 2018. It led Vinted’s €50 million round that August and joined Revolut’s $250 million Series C. Bloomberg describes it as Vinted’s biggest shareholder, and Dealroom reported that it sold part of both stakes in secondary deals in 2025.
Both valuations have moved since. Revolut was reported at $115 billion in a secondary share sale launched in July, up 53% from $75 billion in November 2025, although Revolut confirmed only that a sale was underway. Vinted reached €8 billion in April through an €880 million secondary led by EQT, a 60% rise from its 2024 valuation.
Not every holding rose that far. Checkout.com’s $12 billion buyback valuation in September 2025 came from an independent assessment under US 409A accounting rules, not from investors buying shares, TechCrunch reported. It sits about 70% below the $40 billion Checkout.com reached in a 2022 round. Sprints also bought a 35% stake in Flightradar24 in September 2025, a deal reported to value the Swedish flight tracker at about $500 million.
The cleanest exit is Fin. Sprints invested in Intercom, now Fin, in February 2021. Salesforce signed a deal on June 15 to buy the AI customer service company for about $3.6 billion and completed it on September 10.
Why Sprints skips foundational AI
Persson said Sprints has not backed any foundational AI company because most have yet to build a business model.
That does not make Sprints an AI sceptic. Fin’s customer service agent resolves an average of 76% of support interactions end to end, Salesforce says, and Sprints lists Planhat, an agentic customer platform, among its companies. Its AI exposure sits in applications rather than in model developers.
Persson’s July letter to investors explains the style. He wrote that only about 1% of the roughly 35,000 European startups that have received venture funding became unicorns, and that Sprints runs a concentrated portfolio screened with a quality checklist.
Why liquidity matters to the fund’s size
The 2025 backdrop explains why the number stands out. PitchBook counted €12 billion raised across 148 European VC funds, the weakest year on record, with no close above €1 billion and only three above €500 million.
The largest, Sofinnova Capital XI at €650 million, is smaller than Sprints’ new fund, although the two follow different strategies. PitchBook said distributions need to pick up before fundraising can recover.
Highland Europe followed the same sequence. It announced a €1.1 billion Fund VI on July 30 after reporting more than €1 billion of liquidity in 2026. Lakestar closed its $300 million Resilience I defence fund on July 17, and Tapestry VC, another Fin investor, closed an $80 million third fund on July 1.
Fin-sized exits are not the norm.TFN Prime reported on October 12 that more than one in five European venture-backed companies sold with a disclosed price since the start of 2025 went for less than a year of revenue, according to ScaleX Invest.
Sprints has the capital and has already spent more than half of it. Its investors will want to know whether the purchases it makes from this fund end like Fin or like the sub-revenue sales ScaleX counts.
