Now let's move on to our next company. Joining us now, we have Ben Wilkinson, CEO of Molten Ventures. Ben, thank you so much for giving us your time this afternoon. Let's just jump straight into these questions.
Molten Ventures is a venture capital investor across Europe. We invest in companies at the Series A and Series B stages. Our main capital entity is listed. Molten Ventures is listed on the London Stock Exchange here in London. We have invested in the nine years that we've been listed over £1 billion of capital into the venture capital ecosystem, and we've returned over £700 million in that period. The nine years that we've been listed is building on a track record that we have of almost 20 years now as a firm investing in this market. We have different pools of capital, which we deploy into the same ecosystem of investment opportunities.
The biggest pool of capital is the listed vehicle, and that's an evergreen balance sheet, which gives us the benefit of holding our winners for longer and making sure that we can accrue the value to our shareholders. We're also active managers on the companies that we invest into. We sit on the boards of those companies and give them the benefit of our broader network and of our experience. The way that we invest is also differentiated. We can invest directly into the companies, but we can create value for our investors by investing in secondary opportunities, which means that we can buy out funds that may be at a later life and means that we can buy out later stage assets, which still have growth within them on that journey.
As part of that platform, we've also invested in seed funds, which gives us access to underlying companies across the whole European ecosystem. We would consider ourselves to be generalist technology investors. We'll have four broad pillars of end users, enterprise, and consumer, and deep tech and hardware, and also into digital health. What we would say below those four broad pillars is that we're capturing subsectors of markets. Fintech would be a big prominent subsector. We'll also be focusing on AI, which sits across all of these sectors and is an enabling technology. We will also be investing in cloud-native businesses, cybersecurity entities. Digital health, as I mentioned, sits across quite a lot of these enterprise and consumer use cases. Energy transition and climate change are big things that we've been investing in.
There's quite a lot of tools in the venture capital skill set in terms of managing risk. One, of course, is portfolio selection and the triaging of many thousands of opportunities that come through every year, down to just 10 to 12 new deals that we tend to do, maybe up to 15 in any given year. That vintage creation is a key part of that portfolio creation as well. We then sit on the boards of the companies in the portfolio. That gives the boards of those portfolio companies the access to our network and also our experience, but it gives us some governance and oversight in those businesses.
By having roughly 100 companies in the portfolio now, we have a variety of vintages, but we also have a variety of different technology subsectors and different stages of maturity, and that's what our investors are buying into when they buy a share in Molten Ventures. The other factors of risk management that we see and are always enabling within our companies are looking at the capital structure of how we invest. Some of our capital is pooled, and therefore we'll have some of it coming from the PLC balance sheet, some of it will come from the EIS funds, and some of it will come from the VCT funds, always into the same deals. It's the same quality of deals across those funds. It's just applying the filter of maturity for the applicable product. Finally, we'll invest in preference shares.
That means that we have some downside protection in our investment structures, but not limiting the upside from when the companies perform well. Molten Ventures has a through-the-cycle target of 20% annual returns. We've been outperforming this over the nine years that we've been listed. We have seen our companies showing strength over the last couple of years in particular, and growth has started to come back in through the NAV with the growth of those underlying businesses. What we've also had to prove is the value that we hold them at in their books, and also to ensure that our shareholders see liquidity coming back through the realizations of those companies. That's been a really strong area for us. We delivered £135 million of returns last year, all at and above the holding value. In this financial year, we've delivered a further £60 million coming back already.
I think those are the proof points that our public market investors need to see to ensure that they can understand and believe in the value of the portfolio. Molten Ventures has, in the nine years that we've been listed, grown the underlying portfolio to £1.4 billion. That's come from equity raises, but also come from the strong performance that we've had. We target 20% returns in the portfolio. We call that a through-the-cycle target, but this is a per annum number that we're trying to deliver, and we've actually outperformed that over that period of time. The key to the underlying value of the portfolio being demonstrated is coming through realizations. Last year in FY25, we had £135 million of realizations coming through at and above our holding value.
I would say that this is an area that we've been performing very well at, and it's a differentiated strength of us as a firm. That's been further demonstrated this year with an additional £60 million of value coming through. If we look at where Molten Ventures is now with its different pools of assets, actually our AUM number is much higher than the £1.2 billion that we have on the public balance sheet, with an additional £400 million of funds that we manage alongside, principally with EIS and VCT funds. One important thing that we've talked about is vintage creation. Quite often, the companies that are the most valuable in our portfolio now are companies we invested in several years ago. A great example of that is Revolut. We invested in Revolut in 2018, and we initially put £7 million of capital to work.
That value has now increased to £157 million as the March period ends. That is a great example of the upside potential of venture capital and the outsized returns that can come when the investments compound growth over long periods of time. Another example I will draw on is M-Files. We invested in that company back in 2012. We'd sat with that business as it scaled out of the European ecosystem and became really a dominant player in the U.S. market in their area of document management and storage and the compliance that goes around those metadata files. Eventually, we sold out of M-Files last year, making ourselves a 7x return, ultimately seeing great value delivered to all of the shareholders and the management team. We very much welcome the work that the government have been doing and other bodies around unlocking pension capital into UK innovation.
We think that's crucial for pension members to get access to additional growth that they're not currently seeing in those pension pots, but also for supporting the innovation ecosystem that exists within the UK, particularly around AI and life sciences and the other technology areas that we're advanced within. For Molten Ventures, that's clearly an area of benefit where we can put more capital to work for longer durations and ensure that the growth of those businesses is supported at the right time in their journey and keeping those businesses within our European ecosystem. I think what we're seeing right now is a generational shift in technology. Clearly, the technology waves of the past, be they PCs or moving into SaaS cloud computing, have driven new waves of innovation, and we're seeing that now. What is definitely true, though, is that those waves of innovation are shortening and also overlaying.
We're seeing quantum coming on top of AI. I think that's a great opportunity for venture capital investors, particularly within Europe where we have strong technology ecosystems, to benefit from the growth and the disruption that's coming. I think the first benefit of Molten Ventures is the depth that we have within our market in terms of the track record that we've generated, but also the nearly 20 years that we've been investing in this ecosystem. The brand is very strong, and that drives good proprietary deal flow to our teams of experts. In addition to that, an investor into Molten Ventures buys into 100 companies in day one.
They're getting access to the growth of those underlying businesses, and it's supported by the governance structures of a listed entity, but also the breadth into the private markets that allows us to invest in different structures, be that direct investing or also creating value through secondaries and the benefits we see with the fund of funds. At Molten Ventures, we make more possible by backing innovation in Europe to create value for the future. Thank you for your attention and for joining us today.
Ben, thanks very much for your time today. Before we move on, if you'd like to be automatically invited to future updates from Molten Ventures, then please respond to the poll now, and we'll make sure that you stay connected with the company.