Inside Balderton’s ‘Built in Europe’ campaign: notes from our biggest Capital Comms Club yet

The morning after England’s last World Cup match wasn’t exactly prime territory for an 8am breakfast event. We half expected a room of sore heads (and perhaps a few no-shows). Instead, last week we got our biggest turnout yet for the fifth edition of Capital Comms Club, proof that when the topic is compelling, people will show up.

The topic was, indeed, a compelling one: Balderton’s ‘Built in Europe’ campaign, unpacked in a fireside chat with India Phillips, Brand and Comms Lead at Balderton, led by Clare Hunter, Head of Brand, Communications and Marketing at BACKED VC.

Why Capital Comms Club exists

Communities for investors and founders are ten a penny. During London Tech Week alone, we counted circa six separate run clubs aimed at founders and VCs, before you even get to the breakfasts and networking drinks. That said, there are very few spaces specifically for the people running comms, marketing and brand inside VC and PE firms. The “platform” side of the business, rather than the investing side.

Why is this community important? Well, communications, marketing and PR has always mattered, but the way it delivers value is changing fast. As AI-generated content is strewn across every feed, especially on LinkedIn, human-felt storytelling has become a genuinely scarce asset.

Anyone leading brand, comms or marketing right now is watching that paradigm shift play out in real time, and it’s exactly the kind of trend worth comparing notes on with peers who are living it too. That’s the whole point of the room. Capital Comms Club provides a space to share what’s working, share insights, and problem-solve together, rather than figure it all out by ourselves.

‘Built in Europe’: What’s it all about?

‘Built in Europe’ is the seminal campaign from Balderton, celebrating and elevating entrepreneurship across Europe, built on a simple, punchy call to action: build or join a startup in Europe.

The campaign rode the wave of optimism that’s been building across the European tech and VC ecosystem over the past year, and it did so by stepping out from behind a digital atmosphere. Balderton saw billboards across London, Paris, Munich and Stockholm, held hundreds of founder interviews street-side, produced a custom job board, and gained support from the likes of Revolut, Mistral AI, and Wayve. It’s been described as the first large-scale brand campaign ever run by a European VC firm.

The format certainly attracted the masses, but what stood out most during the conversation was the judgement behind it: the level of personalisation, the depth of relationships required to pull it off, and the deliberate choice to lead with a diverse set of founders. The execution matched the ambition, with genuinely impressive stakeholder management across five cities and hundreds of contributors.

This was a campaign that, whilst clearly benefitting Balderton, also gave back to the wider ecosystem. It’s precisely why it landed the way it did. It showcased genuine, human-felt storytelling.

We’d like to extend a massive thank you to India Phillips for pulling back the curtain, to Clare Hunter for leading the conversation, to Oliver Fitz-Gibbon for continuing to drive this community forward, and to Adrienne Little at And Rising for co-sponsoring alongside us at FieldHouse Associates.

We are already looking forward to the next one!