Barclays Ventures

What is Barclays Ventures?

Barclays Ventures, a corporate venture capital arm based in London, England, United Kingdom, specializes in seeding early-stage companies. With an emphasis on nurturing innovative business models for the future of banking, they connect communities and develop new business lines, both financial and non-financial.

Barclays Ventures operates under the premise that the banking industry is now facing significant transformation due to the advancement of current and emerging technologies.

The team at Barclays Ventures, led by CEO Ben Davey, has an independent mandate to identify, incubate, and scale ideas that meet customer needs while fostering a disruptive mindset that leverages Barclays' established distribution capabilities and customer base.

Davey, who brings experience both from mergers and acquisitions and as Barclays Group's Head of Strategy, has helped cultivate a start-up-like environment within the venture unit. This approach involves a multi-disciplinary team comprised of developers, designers, data scientists, marketing and strategy professionals, and M&A experts, half of whom have investment experience and coding capabilities, and includes 15 founders and co-founders.

Barclays Ventures actively explores several themes and captures opportunities through organic build-outs, commercial partnerships, and venture investments. Committed to early-stage companies with disruptive ideas, they aim to co-develop customer propositions and invest in these ventures, thereby positioning themselves to share more progress as they achieve further developments.

What they say:

We aim to accelerate the growth of new business lines and customer propositions.

What we look for: We invest in blockchain and information technology, focusing on disruptive innovations.