The Schiehallion Fund, managed by Baillie Gifford, seeks capital growth through long-term minority investments in later-stage private businesses that have established products, are ready to scale, and are viewed as having transformational growth potential as well as the potential to become publicly traded. The fund targets a NAV total return of approximately 3x over rolling 10-year periods.
1. The Schiehallion Fund provides quality access to the private growth asset class.
The Schiehallion Fund offers a compelling path for shareholders to gain exposure to the significant amount of growth and innovation occurring within private markets. The market for scaled, later-stage private companies expanded materially during the 2010s as businesses remained private for longer and continue to do so. Currently, there are more than 1,600 private companies valued at more than $1bn, creating a vast investible universe, which is not accessible to most investors. The Schiehallion Fund can tap into this opportunity set thanks to Baillie Gifford’s growth investing heritage spanning more than a century, coupled with an unconstrained global generalist mindset. More than 80% of Baillie Gifford’s private deals originate from within its proprietary sourcing network. Baillie Gifford started investing in private markets in 2012, and by 2019, it had built sufficient scale and confidence in its private markets expertise to create a dedicated private growth portfolio by launching the Schiehallion Fund.
2. The Schiehallion Fund can run winners beyond an IPO.
The fund has the flexibility to continue holding companies once listed, allowing the portfolio to keep benefiting from the growth potential identified by the managers. Over time, realisations from the listed portion of the portfolio become the primary source of funding for new investments in the next generation of private growth businesses. Other potential exit routes include private trade sales, as well as using the emerging private secondary market to trim or exit some positions. Since inception, the fund has reinvested close to $400m of portfolio realisations into new opportunities.
3. The company’s portfolio is gathering pace.
The continued maturation of Schiehallion’s several successful investments, while they were still private, has allowed it to benefit from the asymmetry of returns inherent to growth investing, with its largest portfolio positions (such as Bending Spoons, SpaceX and Anthropic) having driven recent performance. The portfolio typically comprises around 50 positions diversified across regions, sectors and investment themes, including many applications of AI and innovations in the fields of finance, manufacturing and health. The fund has seen significant progress across its next generation of potential winners, including the likes of ByteDance, Vinted, Anduril and Revolut. The fund currently has weighted top-line growth across its portfolio of around 50%, significantly ahead of the Nasdaq 100 index. In addition, more than half of the portfolio is currently profitable, with only a small part of the portfolio invested in companies with a cash runway below two years.
4. The recent change in listing segment put the company on the radar of more investors.
The Schiehallion Fund was initially offered only to a small number of institutional investors, and subsequently to UK wealth managers and other professional investors. But in December 2025, the fund completed a change in listing segment on the London Stock Exchange, moving from the Specialist Fund Segment to the Main Market’s closed-ended investment funds category. This also made Schiehallion eligible for index inclusion for the first time, and the fund was subsequently included in the UK 250 index in March 2026. Together these developments have broadened access to Schiehallion to a wider range of potential shareholders, including retail investors.
Published 26 August 2026
