Talent-Fest. The Founders Factory Showcase, 1 May 2019

To a packed investor crowd at the wonderfully quirky Ham Yard Hotel in the middle of London’s Soho, Founders Factory show-cased those within its portfolio raising in the range 2-20m: whether that be seed extension, Series A, Series B, or as Wil Harris, founder of entale suggested on stage, a Series A minus.

Doing something globally unique, Founders Factory is a venture builder and accelerator, that is inverting all the usual tropes about what can and can’t be done with forward thinking corporate support. By aligning incentives, optimizing for talent and doing things that don’t scale  - like deploying across its portfolio a seventy person operating (not services) team and running 100% bespoke programmes (no batches, no one-size-fits all, no final-term demo day) - in just two and a half years since final close of its first funding round, Founders Factory has a maturing global portfolio to be proud of, is developing internationally (Founders Factory Africa has been announced, new territories coming soon) and is demonstrating its ability to build world class opportunities. From its venture building studio, in just those same couple of years, twenty companies have been built and achieved funding, just this year Acre raised a seed $6.5m while only today, Karakuri announced a $9m seed.

The event exploded from the off, with Paul Christensen, founder of Previse - announcing their imminent opening of their Series B round. The Bessemer & Augmentum backed company, that uses Artificial Intelligence to enable corporate buyers to safely ensure they pay all their suppliers instantly, is flushed with success after the successful deployment of its solution to some serious enterprise clients.

Next up Flourish, the data-storytelling engine, who’s star CEO Duncan Clark, has not only proven his ability to both put a world-class product together with an eye-popping roster of first-rank clients but also single-handedly pushed the bar for pitch presentations to awe-dropping heights.

Joyeeta Das from Gyana then dazzled in demonstrating their own deep-tech location-based and human mobility insights platform in the context of the Ham Yard Hotel itself! Did you know, in January 2019 it had a huge 26,600 visits… we’re not surprised its a brilliant space. Be quick if you want to invest in Gyana, their Series A is filling up quickly.

Next was the brilliant Venetia Archer from Ruuby. Her killer-insight in ensuring the success of their high-end on-demand beauty service was to solve for freelance beauty therapist work-flow management & online booking software. This prevents dis-intermedation while inspiring loyalty on both sides of the marketplace. And its working, a whopping 25% of the user base are Super Users.

The ‘Boris-bikes’ for mobile phone chargers - ChargedUp then got the audience all charged up, with founder, Hugo Tilmouth, celebrating hundreds of venues featuring their hubs, tens of thousands users, national roll-out and, best of all, a massive brand campaign with Guinness meaning we can all get a free Guinness! Nice work, team.

Over from Tel-Aviv, co-founder of Howazit, Roy Weiner, helped us understand just why their AI-led consumer communication platform has hundreds of customers, is driving MRR in the tens of thousands with tiny churn, by showing that for one of their international-brand clients, they’d reduced customer complaints by 50%, had seen 53% return rate from previously unsatisfied customers and a 19% uplift in coupon redemptions.

Bringing the first half to a close, was Steph Madgett from Slick, who has finally cracked the code in how to aggregate and bring-online into a monster purchasing bloc, the small salons that make up a massive 70% of the market. A single platform is needed to create an efficient b2b (those that want to sell to salons) and b2b2c market (those that want to sell through salons to end-users). It’s a massive opportunity.

Opening the second half was Ben Prouty from Shepper whose beautifully simple but brilliantly powerful company enables an army of human capital to make inspections of massively distributed assets. With a tonne of clients including JCDecaux, L’Oreal and HostMaker they have already completed tens of thousands of inspections.

More friends from Tel-Aviv, we next had Yotam Idam (did you know he used to be a world-level competing surfer?) from WeTrip helping us to understand that the opportunity in package travel booking was to make it fully flexible, with each element being owned by each member of the party, so that elements can be swapped in and out - automatically and in real time. They’ve started with Ski-packages and their growth is awesome - triple digit% YoY.

More international flavour was delivered by Berkley-alum Bala Chandran who’s US based Lumo had been seeded with a $1.7m non-dilutive grant from NASA & whose core IP is machine learning algorithms that account for weather, air traffic control, historical data, network effects to become  the trusted source of accurate global flight delay forecasts. Or - as Bala succinctly but it - right now it is the only trusted source! And boy is it trusted, by a bevvy of top names from Microsoft, to GE to Jet Blue amongst a host of others.

And yet more world-class international talent took the stage when Andi Hadisutjipto show-cased her brilliant Riviter, and how its deep-tech zeitgeist-hunting AI can spot what’s coming next months ahead of the human conscious, with tens of massive brands finding their tool irreplaceable - key to staving off existential threats from the likes of Amazon’s private label products.

In the hottest of hot-spaces, Wil Harris presented entale - the product that is finally re-inventing the podcast experience. Loved by its many thousands of users & creators, it’s a product so good, that Apple featured it as the number one way to experience podcasts - above its own app - and it won the ‘Best Functional Visual Design Award’ and the Webbys. Not bad for an audio product :)

Svilen from Bulgaria’s Dronamics - a company that features NASA trained 15 aerospace engineers, is IATA’s first and only strategic partner for Drones worldwide and is building the most fuel-efficient cargo aircraft ever built (the appropriately named, The Black Swan) - wowed the audience, not only with the length and intensity of his beard., but in helping it understand that the Dronamics is not just an aircraft but - together with massively distributed DronePads  - a whole ecosystem.

Spatial computing is on the verge of becoming the ubiquitous tech platform, as big as mobile, as big as the web. Yet there is not obviously a category-defining company. Sam Huber helped us understand why Admix is perfectly primed to be that company. It is creating the ultimate market network for creators in the VR, AR & XT space and has seen rocket-ship growth across all the important metrics.

Finally, Riya Grover demonstrated how their intelligent batching and predictive analytics is the secret to Feedr’s cloud canteen product which is providing fresh, personalised and beautiful food to urban offices - while supporting independent vendors. Since the launch of Cloud Canteen, Riya demonstrated Feedr’s impressive MoM growth. Clearly it’s a product that is resonating. Given how it solves problems for all stakeholders, from the individual, to the company to the vendor, we can see why.

As a testament to the quality of the presentations, the breakout sessions were packed, with a lively investor crowd in deep discussions with the founder teams.

The Founders Factory look forward to doing it all again at the same venue on the 23rd May, when we will be showcasing some of our pre-seed to seed portfolio.

If you are a start-up founder who would like to scale your business within our world-class accelerator, or an ambitious individual keen to build a start-up with us or an investor please visit

FoundersFactory.com. If you are an investor, keen to attend our next Showcase on 23 May, please contact me on [email protected] .