Tim Levene
26 Nov 2025etn. Episode 12
Tim Levene: Augmentum Fintech, the UK's only listed fintech fund
Tim Levene, CEO and founder of Augmentum Fintech, recounts 26 years in UK/European tech — from the founding team of Flutter (which became arguably the UK's first unicorn via Betfair) to running the UK's only publicly listed fintech fund with 27 portfolio companies. He contrasts Augmentum's permanent, patient capital with finite 10-year funds, explains what winners like Zopa and Tide share — exceptional teams with great ideas, like his contrarian Interactive Investor bet later bought by abrdn for £1.5B — and describes messaging venture risk to ~5,000 retail investors while trading at a 50% discount to NAV. He closes by pressing UK pension funds, whose venture allocation he pegs at ~0.007%, to act on the Mansion House Compact with real capital.
Tim Levene: founding Flutter & the Betfair merger
Tim Levene tells the Flutter origin story: a first-of-its-kind UK juice bar (Crush) that was 'right too early,' a Vegas brainstorm with ex-Bain colleagues to build 'the eBay of betting,' buying Flutter.com from a Canadian garage band for $10K and Flutter.co.uk from future Spurs chairman Daniel Levy. They raised $24M on a 20-page PowerPoint at a $100M+ valuation in the dot-com boom, launched in April 2000 at 1% of projections, then merged with Betfair in 2001 and hit year-three plan in six months on network effects. After the interview, the hosts riff on how much wilder dot-com-era VC was compared with today's AI boom.