Danby joins Royal Bank Ventures

Royal Bank Ventures, the technology venture capital fund of Royal Bank of Scotland, launched earlier this year (see evcj March 2001, page 10), has appointed Mark Danby as director.

Danby is one of three appointments to be made in a team of nine investment executives spread across London and Edinburgh. He will report to Bill Troup, managing director of Royal Bank Ventures.

Danby was co-founder and chief operating officer of Thinkventures, the venture capital fund focused on the development of early stage technology software companies. He was previously at Freeserve, where as general manager,. he built and ran the business until its flotation on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in August 1999. He subsequently became the chief operating officer of Freeserve.

The growing Royal Bank Ventures team will lead transactions in the UK and initially co-invest in continental European deals. The plan is to invest around GBP150 million over the next three years, all of which will be booked against the bank’s balance sheet, leaving the team to focus on investing rather than fund raising. Investments typically range from GBP1 million to GBP10 million covering early stage investment through to pre-IPO.

Royal Bank Ventures first investment was as leader of a syndicate of investors to finance the GBP5 million first stage venture capital funding of Stortext, a virtual document storage and management company that converts documents into digital form and provides secure online access and retrieval.