Sofina

Sofina was founded in 1898 as the “Société Financière de Transport et d’Entreprises Industrielles” (Financial Company for Transport and Industrial Enterprises), originally an engineering conglomerate active in the energy and transportation sectors.⁠[1]

In 1910, Sofina held its initial public offering and became a listed company.⁠[1]

In 1938, Sofina opened its Luxembourg office.⁠[1]

In the 1950s, the Boël family entered Sofina’s share capital. Sofina has carried out investment activities since 1956 and has paid stable and regularly increasing dividends since then.⁠[1][2][3]

Between 1965 and 1970, Sofina transformed from an engineering conglomerate into an investment company.⁠[1]

In 1978, Sofina made its first investments in venture capital and growth capital funds in the United States, beginning its private funds investing (today’s Sofina Private Funds business); it has since built partnerships with its core managers spanning decades and multiple fundraising cycles.⁠[1][4][4]

In 1988, the Boël family shareholding was reinforced following the acquisition of the stake held in Sofina by Société Générale de Belgique.⁠[1]

In 2005, Sofina made its first investments in venture and growth capital funds in India and China.⁠[1]

On August 31, 2007, Union Financière Boël SA and Société de Participations Industrielles SA formed a concert relationship regarding their Sofina shares; Mobilière et Immobilière du Centre SA joined on July 1, 2013. The consortium of these three companies is Sofina’s reference shareholder.⁠[5][5]

Harold Boël joined Sofina in 2004 and has been chief executive officer since 2008.⁠[3]

In 2010, Sofina Growth, Sofina’s direct growth investment business, made its first investment. The business backs founder-led, rapidly growing companies in its focus sectors, prioritizing Western Europe, Asia (India, China, and Southeast Asia), and the United States, typically participating in Series B and later rounds as either lead investor or follower.⁠[6][6][6][6]

In 2011, Sofina shifted its strategy toward growth investing and greater international exposure. The same year, the SofinaBoël Fund for Education and Talent was created at the initiative of the descendants of Gustave Boël and Sofina; it supports young talents through scholarships and targeted financial assistance, operates with the operational support of Belgium’s King Baudouin Foundation, and has an annual budget of €1.3 million.⁠[1][3][3]

In 2012, Sofina made its first investment in e-commerce.⁠[1]

In 2014, Sofina opened its Singapore office and reinforced its Sofina Growth business, mainly in India, China, and the United States.⁠[1]

In 2016, Sofina Growth invested in ByteDance, held through HSG Co-Investment 2016-A. As of June 30, 2026, ByteDance was Sofina Direct’s largest holding by fair value and the second-largest underlying company exposure within Sofina Private Funds, and it was the only company whose combined exposure exceeded 5% of the fair value of Sofina’s look-through portfolio.⁠[3][7][8][8][7]

By 2017, more than half of Sofina’s portfolio was invested outside Europe.⁠[1]

In 2019, Sofina signed the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (UN PRI); its shareholders’ equity exceeded €7 billion that year. At the time, the top 20 fund managers in Sofina’s portfolio included Atomico, Bain, Battery, General Atlantic, Insight, Lightspeed, NEA, Sequoia (United States, India, and China), Silver Lake, Thoma Bravo, and Tiger Global, among others.⁠[1][9][9][9]

In 2020, Sofina created the Sofina Covid Solidarity Fund, a €20 million commitment from Sofina and some of its employees, managed by the King Baudouin Foundation, to address the pandemic’s impact on healthcare and education; over three years starting in the summer of 2020, the fund selected 15 projects from more than 150 proposals, and it has since been completed.⁠[1][10][11][10][10]

The same year, Sofina invested in Salto Systems, a Spanish electronic access control company.⁠[3][7]

On September 23, 2021, Sofina issued €700 million of senior unsecured bonds with a 7-year maturity and a 1.000% coupon, maturing on September 23, 2028.⁠[1][3][3]

In 2022, Sofina made its first investment in a B Corp certified company.⁠[1]

2023 marked Sofina’s 125th anniversary (the history timeline on its website lists the milestone under 2024). That year, Sofina’s net asset value was stable at about €9 billion; the same year it invested in Mistral AI, a French company specializing in open-weight large language models.⁠[11][1][11][3]

On January 16, 2024, Sofina dissolved its Executive Committee and replaced it with an Investment Table, a Portfolio Table, and an Operations Table under the supervision of a newly formed Leadership Council: the Investment Table decides on new and follow-on investments, while the Portfolio Table is responsible for portfolio monitoring and exits. The Leadership Council is a consultative committee that meets monthly to support the CEO and has no decision-making power of its own.⁠[11][11][3]

In 2024, Sofina’s net asset value rose to €10.305 billion and its net result (group share) was €1.36 billion; in its annual report it announced that it would open an office in London.⁠[10][10][10]

On September 24, 2025, S&P Global Ratings assigned Sofina an “A-” long-term issuer credit rating with a stable outlook; Sofina said the rating reflected its conservative financial policy, low financial leverage, and strong liquidity management.⁠[3][3]

On October 7, 2025, Sofina completed a rights issue of about €545 million, issuing 2,446,428 new shares at €223 per share.⁠[3][3][3]

On November 13, 2025, Sofina issued €600 million of senior unsecured bonds with an 8-year maturity and a 3.707% coupon, maturing in 2033. Sofina said the bond issue and the rights issue together brought about €1.15 billion of additional capital and would increase its annual capital deployment capacity by approximately 5% to 15%.⁠[3][3][3][3]

In 2025, Sofina opened its London office. As of December 31, 2025, its net asset value was €10.843 billion, or €305.77 per share; its net result (group share) for the year was €113 million (€1.36 billion in 2024), and its average annual return for 2025 was -0.8%. At year-end its market capitalization was €8.8 billion, and it had 83 employees, including 33 investment professionals.⁠[1][3][3][3][3][3]

In 2025, Sofina fully exited GL events and First Eagle from its long-term minority investments portfolio and IHS, OrganOx, and 1stdibs.com from its Sofina Growth portfolio, and partially monetized its investments in bioMérieux and Lenskart. New long-term minority investments that year included Proeduca, a Spanish online higher-education institution.⁠[3][3][3]

In Sofina Private Funds, the main net movements of more than €10 million in 2025 were investments in funds of Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Battery, DST, Founders Fund, and TA Associates, and partial disposals of HongShan, Lightspeed, Oak, Sequoia, and Thoma Bravo funds. At the end of 2025, the portfolio had a fair value of €4.893 billion, of which venture capital accounted for 74% and growth equity for 22%, with total uncalled commitments of €1.329 billion.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

At the close of the annual general meeting on May 13, 2026, Charlotte Strömberg moved from vice-chair to chair of the board, and Catherine Soubie became vice-chair. Former chair Dominique Lancksweert, who served on the board for 29 years (six as chair), did not seek reappointment because of the age limit; Nicolas Boël, who served on the board for almost 20 years, also stepped down as a director at the same time. The meeting decided to pay a gross dividend of €3.66 per share.⁠[3][3][3][3][7][8]

As of June 30, 2026, Sofina had total assets of €12.908 billion and a net asset value of €11.534 billion, or €326.48 per share; its net result (group share) for the first half of 2026 was €857 million, compared with a loss of €394 million in the first half of 2025. During the half, Sofina generated liquidity through IPOs, fund distributions, dividends, partial sell-downs, and exits; after June 30, it signed an agreement to transfer its entire shareholding in Salto.⁠[8][8][7][7]

In October 2026, the London venture capital firm DIG VenturesDIG VenturesDIG Ventures is a London-based early-stage venture capital firm that invests mainly at the pre-seed and seed stages in enterprise software, AI, and cloud infrastructure companies in Europe (and also Israel), positioning itself as “operator-led.” It was founded in 2018 by MuleSoft founder Ross Mason, initially as his family office; it closed its first institutional fund (Fund II, $100 million) in April 2025 and announced the close of its $120 million Fund III in October 2026.Open the full entry announced the close of its $120 million third fund, with Sofina as one of the institutional limited partners; other institutional limited partners included Horsley BridgeHorsley Bridge PartnersHorsley Bridge Partners (HBP) is a private equity fund-of-funds manager headquartered in San Francisco, with an office in London. Since 1983 it has invested in third-party private equity funds, focusing on early-stage technology venture capital funds while also investing in growth buyout funds. As of October 2026, its regulatory assets under management registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were about $23.6 billion.Open the full entry, Granite, and a US university endowment. Sofina had also invested in DIG Ventures’ $100 million second fund, which closed in April 2025.⁠[12][13][14][15]

Sofina invests in two complementary ways: Sofina Private Funds commits to top-tier venture and growth capital funds, with commitments of €5 million to €50 million, and is active in North America, Asia, and Europe; Sofina Direct makes minority direct investments, with Sofina Growth investing €20 million to €100 million in founder-led businesses backed by top-tier venture funds, and long-term minority investments of €100 million to €300 million in closely held businesses with long-term owners. Its focus sectors are consumer and retail, education, digital transformation, healthcare and life sciences, and sustainable supply chains.⁠[16][16][16]

As of June 30, 2026, Sofina Direct’s ten largest investments were, in order, ByteDance, Cambridge Associates, Proeduca, Nuxe, Drylock, Cognita, Mérieux NutriSciences, VintedVintedVinted is a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) secondhand marketplace headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania. Founded in 2008, it began with secondhand clothing and later expanded into categories such as electronics and collectibles, and built its own shipping (Vinted Go) and payments (Vinted Pay) businesses. In 2019 it became Lithuania’s first startup valued at more than €1 billion, and a secondary share sale in April 2026 corresponded to an equity valuation of €8 billion.Open the full entry, Salto, and Cleo AI; Sofina Private Funds’ ten largest general partners were Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, HongShan, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Peak XV, Battery, Iconiq Capital, and Insight Partners; and the portfolio’s ten largest underlying company exposures were SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry, ByteDance, Stripe, AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, OpenAI, Databricks, Anduril IndustriesAnduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry, DoorDash, Ramp, and Prometheus.⁠[8][8][8][8]

Sofina’s shares are listed on Euronext Brussels (ISIN: BE0003717312, ticker SOF) and are included in the BEL20, BEL ESG, STOXX Europe 600, and MSCI Europe indices. As of August 19, 2026, within the reference shareholder consortium, Union Financière Boël SA held 22.414%, Société de Participations Industrielles SA held 24.778%, and Mobilière et Immobilière du Centre SA held 7.404%, for a total of 54.596%; Sofina itself held 3.849% as treasury shares. Sofina says its reference family shareholder has been active in business for five generations.⁠[3][5][17]

As of December 31, 2025, the Leadership Council consisted of six members: CEO Harold Boël, Xavier Coirbay, Edward Koopman, Amélie Lagache, Maxence Tombeur, and Giulia Van Waeyenberge, all serving since the council’s creation in 2024. Sofina is headquartered at Rue de l’Industrie 31 in Brussels and has offices in Luxembourg, London, and Singapore.⁠[3][3][18][3]

Sofina: Official website: https://www.sofinagroup.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sofina/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/sofinagroup (opens in a new window)⁠[2]