Securities and shareholder litigation, recovering losses on behalf of investors after corporate fraud, accounting failures, or a sudden collapse in share value, is one of the oldest verticals in litigation finance, predating much of the commercial funding industry built around Burford's 2009 model. Deminor, founded in Brussels in 1990, built its original franchise specifically around organizing and funding minority shareholder recovery actions in Europe, well before "litigation finance" was a recognized asset class.
The scale achievable in this vertical can be enormous: Deminor was involved in securing two of Europe's largest-ever securities settlements, roughly €1.4 billion in the Steinhoff case and €1.3 billion in the Fortis/Ageas matter tied to the 2008 financial crisis, recoveries that would have been effectively impossible for dispersed individual shareholders to pursue without an organizer and funder aggregating claims and fronting costs.
Shareholder litigation funding typically works by aggregating many individual claims into a single coordinated action, which both achieves the scale needed to make litigation economical against a well-resourced corporate defendant and gives the funder a diversified claim base rather than dependence on a single plaintiff's outcome, conceptually similar to the portfolio logic used elsewhere in litigation finance, just applied at the level of many claimants in one matter rather than many matters for one claimant.