2007 has been a very active year for us at Wellington Partners. By mid year, we had fully allocated the Wellington Partners III Technology fund’s investments among a portfolio of 19 companies and had decided to launch a new fund, Wellington Partners IV Technology. We are proud to have rapidly surpassed our initial target and closed the fund at € 265 million. We began investing from the Wellington Partners IV Technology fund after the summer, and have already completed a handful of very promising investments. At the same time, our Life Science colleagues are well on their way towards closing the WP III Life Science fund.

Just before year end 2007, we opened our new London office. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for Europe’s leading entrepreneurs to meet and engage with us in a location that has become the de facto center of gravity for venture capital activities in Europe. In recent years, all of us have been spending more and more time in London, meeting these entrepreneurs from all over Europe. So opening the office in Mayfair in addition to Munich became a natural step for us. As we have both lived in London in the past, the two of us are looking forward to once again making London our personal hub.

Frank Böhnke General Partner, London office

Many of our portfolio companies have made great progress over the past 12 months. Amazingly, close to one third of our active portfolio companies have started to look beyond organic growth and are now investigating their own potential acquisitions. In fact, five of these companies successfully completed at least one acquisition during 2007. This development is another key indicator that the European venture industry is maturing. We encourage entrepreneurs to think bigger, as size and speed do matter when building world-class companies.