Piton Capital

Founded in 2010, Piton Capital is a venture capital and growth equity firm headquartered in London and investing in businesses with network effects. We make investments ranging from €200k to €20m and since inception have invested in over 50 businesses, primarily in Europe.

Piton focuses exclusively on network effects businesses as this provides one of the few moats or forms of defensibility to achieve dominance. A commonly used example of this is the telephone network, where the usefulness of the network increases exponentially with the number of users (or nodes) to whom you can connect. Network effects provide an “unfair advantage” that enables a winner in a respective market to achieve dominance and as a result sizeable multiples of relative market share in comparison to its competitors. Examples of this are seen in many established technology businesses such as Google, Amazon (marketplace, data used for recommendations, search data network effects, user-generated reviews), Facebook, Apple (iOS operating system), Microsoft (MSDOS and Windows operating systems), Alibaba (B2B marketplace) and Tencent.

Marketplaces are forms of network effects, there are however several other examples of businesses that aren’t marketplaces but include data network effects (including machine learning and AI), businesses that rely on user-generated content, as well as SaaS businesses with the potential to layer network effects around it. We evaluate and invest in businesses that exhibit the phenomenon that occurs when a product or service improves with more users.