EXCLUSIVE: “The American Dream” – Hussein Kanji, Hoxton Ventures in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

There really is still only one market to aspire to, if you want fast growth and not be punished for it, says Hussein Kanji,Co-founder of Hoxton Ventures

The world may be reeling from Trumponomics, but for the tech sector, the sun hasn’t set on Silicon Valley.

EU startups still aspire to cash in on the US market, enticed by the eternal lure of California and the heady success of 2010s’ tech stars, including the company formerly known as Facebook, the app formerly known as Twitter, as well as Uber, Stripe, et al. Yet scaling into the US can be a tricky process, even for Series D companies. German digital bank N26 withdrew entirely from the US in 2021. British neobank Monzo gave up its US banking licence application the same year and has downsized its ambitions there.

And, with the current administration’s increasingly isolationist policies, EU fintech startups might be wondering how on earth they get a foot in the door.

Enter Hussein Kanji, Co-founder of Hoxton Ventures, a UK-based VC focussed on early-stage tech companies in Europe with dreams of following in the footsteps of US tech darlings and expanding into the region.

Kanji – a self-professed ‘proud New Yorker’ – has helped a queue of European startups achieve their American Dream for more than 10 years.His company writes first cheques for seed-stage tech companies across Europe from its Oxford Street offices in London – which is a stone’s throw away from Google, naturally.

As a Stanford grad with a background in the Silicon Valley startup scene, Kanji leverages his experience in leading US tech companies in order to open doors for ambitious European entrepreneurs, helping them win a seat at the table with the right stakeholders to forge a commercial path across the Atlantic. Having been involved in three entrepreneurial ventures within the Bay Area startup community – and come away with an honest analysis of his own abilities – Kanji decided to pursue a career in VC.

“As American VC and billionaire John Doerr said ‘If you can’t invent the future, the next best thing is to fund it’. And, since I’m not a very good inventor or a very good engineer, this side of the job is the best contribution I can make towards building the next generation of tech products,” says Kanji.

Before throwing his hat into the investor ring, he was encouraged to work at an established company. After four years ‘growing up’ in Microsoft’s ranks to reach senior management in the early 2000s, Kanji set off across the Pond for an MBA at London Business School. The VC hopeful then joined Accel – a global venture capital firm immortalised in VC lore after a relatively early investment in Facebook resulted in the most lucrative return in venture capital history.

This experience in London also opened Kanji’s eyes to the opportunity of investing in EU startups in their earliest stages to grow them into tech giants. The caveat was they had to have the ambition to buy into the US market early on.

“When I left Accel, there was almost nobody doing early stage investment in Europe,” he says. “There were obviously going to be good companies from this side of the Pond that could scale up but nobody really wanted to finance them back then. So, when you see an opportunity like that, your entrepreneurial instincts kick in.”

Kanji became one of the founding partners of Hoxton Ventures in 2013 Fast-forward to today, and Hoxton’s positioning remains largely unrivalled.

“There are only a handful of big US firms that can offer the same thing that we do. And most of them don’t do first cheques or cheques into early-stage companies,” says Kanji.

Start here. Scale there.

It’s this unique Silicon Valley mindset, combined with a European-focussed investment thesis, that has informed the three pillars of the Hoxton Ventures playbook.

First, any startup it backs must adopt a ruthless US-focussed go-to-market strategy as a priority to scale fast. That’s because, regardless of which administration is at the helm, the US remains one of the world’s two biggest markets, and when the alternative is the unfamiliar business culture, language and regulatory framework of China, it offers a much more accessible path to greatness. The second is that Hoxton taps into the well-established landscape information of California to help spot companies in Europe with the potential to be best-in-industry.

“If you don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s very hard to compare and contrast,” says Kanji. “So a lot of our connectivity out on the West Coast is to help us do what we call ‘calibrate’. Usually, if you have a good insight as to what’s going on in the US, you have a good proxy of what’s going on in the rest of the world as well.”

The third is to tap into an experienced team with ‘scaling knowledge’. That is, teams that have know-how acquired through building the previous generation of tech companies in Silicon Valley.

“You may think you’re looking at ‘great’, but then you meet someone who’s an early product manager at Stripe and you really understand what great could look like”

“You need to be plugged into that network to figure out how to level set. You may think you’re looking at ‘great’, but then you meet someone who’s an early product manager at Stripe and you really understand what great could look like,” says Kanji.

Hoxton’s thesis has paid off. Its investment approach has resulted in more than 16 exits in 10 years – including three IPOs from a pool of 17 investments in its first fund alone. Two of those – Darktrace and Deliveroo – floated on the London Stock Exchange, while Babylon Health floated in New York.

Dysfunctional markets and cultural differences

These experiences working with the London Stock Exchange weren’t without challenge. Hoxton spent three years supporting the board to list Darktrace in the UK. It debuted on the London Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of £1.7billion in 2021. The company is now private again following an acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2024, which Kanji speculates was due to it being undervalued by the public markets at the time.

“You wouldn’t buy something in the public markets at a premium unless you believed it was undervalued and that you could either grow it into something much bigger or relist it at a higher valuation. I think they’re going to grow it and relist it in America where valuations of comparable companies are just much, much higher.”

Deliveroo was also removed from the London list in May 2025 when US-based DoorDash made a successful £2.9billion bid for the company, which had also had a hard time convincing traders of its worth.

Profitability v growth

Kanji’s experiences provide an insight into the more fundamental differences in the investment cultures of the US and UK, including the UK’s propensity to value dividend-oriented businesses that prioritise profitability over growth.

“As a result, these high-growth companies – that would probably dip into unprofitability or sacrifice profitability for growth – tend not to get as much of a premium as in the US, where people are much more forgiving about profitability in the short term because they’re trying to optimise for growth in the long run. That’s just a cultural mindset. And I think that tends to plague the UK economy.”

Regardless of whether you subscribe to ‘growth at all costs’, rapidly-growing companies do command higher valuations at IPO in the States. It’s therefore understandable when UK companies choose to list there. But that, ultimately, puts the UK’s strategic position in the global innovation economy at risk – including its position as the second biggest fintech hub in the world.

That said, in the current climate of uncertainty created by Trump, fintech juggernauts are weighing up their choices. Klarna has already postponed its US IPO listing. Monzo will only commit to being ‘IPO ready’ by the end of the year. And much speculation revolves around UK-headquartered neo Revolut, the most valuable tech company in Europe, which was frequently criticised for prioritising growth over profit, although latest figures put it firmly in the black by £1billion.

Kanji observes that the neobank’s IPO – and the valuation it commands – will serve as a ‘witness test’ for what the UK public markets prioritise – growth, or profitability. He’s sensing change, though, not least because former Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson, who led the company during its IPO, is now the UK’s Investment Minister. And he’s optimistic that the country can be ‘a really world-class engine for producing great companies’.

Hoxton stands ready to help.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #35, Page 39-40