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Greensill Capital

Fintech/supply-chain financeUK
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $3.5 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
  1. 🦄
    Became a unicorn
    2018
  2. 📈
    Peak valuation
    $3.5 Billion ’19
  3. 💔
    Became a Unitard
    Mar 2021
  4. 💸
    Last valuation
    Wiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$1.7B
Total raised
$480K/day
Burned · 9.7y alive
Funding: Crunchbase News/WSJ
Current status
Insolvency administration (Mar 2021)

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2011–2021

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2011
Founded by Lex Greensill
A banker from a Bundaberg farming family builds a business paying suppliers early — then packaging those IOUs into investment funds.
FT
2018
Joins the unicorn club
General Atlantic's backing values the supply-chain financier above $1B.
FT
2019
The peak: SoftBank piles in$3.5B
The Vision Fund's roughly $1.5B takes the valuation to ~$3.5B; total raised reaches $1.7B.
FT
Mar 2021
Credit Suisse pulls the plug
Its credit insurance lapses and Credit Suisse freezes $10B of funds that bought Greensill's paper; the model dies in days.
FT
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021
Inside, almost no one saw it coming: Glassdoor reviews described a business run on the founder's word alone, and a dependence on a few big clients that staff said they discovered only as the administrators walked in — redundancy notices landing with barely any warning.
Mar 8 ’21
Collapses into administration — joins the Unitard Club 💔
From $3.5B to insolvent in about a week; $1.7B of investor money is wiped out.
FT
2021
The scandal goes to Westminster
The collapse ensnares former UK prime minister David Cameron, whose lobbying for Greensill fuels parliamentary inquiries, and leaves steelmaker GFG Alliance scrambling for financing.
FT
$3.5Bof peak value erased · 10 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Greensill Capital packaged supply-chain finance into investment funds, backed by SoftBank's Vision Fund at a valuation around $3.5B. When Credit Suisse froze $10B of associated funds and its credit insurance lapsed in March 2021, the firm collapsed into administration — a transcontinental scandal that ensnared former UK prime minister David Cameron and steelmaker GFG Alliance.

Source: FT; SoftBank Vision Fund-backed

Where they went

  • Lex Greensill
    Founder & CEO
    Joint Principal at Greensill Farming
    LinkedIn ↗

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-19. See our methodology.

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