We were the 1st investors in Howbout and they were our 1st angel investment (Q1 2020). In fact they were called Zyng at the time!

We met them at a FinTech North London pitch event.

Update: We were happy to lead follow-on too (Q1 2021). Round included crowd-funding and Sameer Singh from Atomico’s scout programme. and we also did a follow-on raise into Howbout in Q2 2022.

Howbout is a social calendar app built around you and your friends’ social lives. It's overhauled the calendar for Gen Z and added a social graph on top of it. As of Q323 The company has scaled to 1.3+ million users (90+% organic & 50% WAU / MAU), has 1.5 million+ events made on it monthly.

Algbra were our 1st FinTech investment and we closed it in Q1 2021.

Zeiad and Fizel explained their goal of (eventually) offering a full service ethical banking solution. One of the ironies of the digital age is that it is very un-inclusive if you are either socio-economically disadvantaged (don’t have a smart phone let alone an iphone etc) or do not want to buy vanilla products (start-ups need scale to make unit economics work, so they only offer vanilla products to vanilla customers).

Since investing, we’ve seen some incredibly exciting and prominent new investors come in.

We invested in Q4 2021. Konvi is a marketplace for funds dedicated to alternative assets (collectibles). Allowing retail investors in the EU to buy shares in SPVs which own a specific alternate asset class such as watches, wine, whiskey etc… Something we’ve seen be very successful in the US with companies like Rally Road.

Konvi has solved all the regulatory issues of allowing retail investors to buy shares in the SPVs that would own the assets, while protecting their funds but making the administrative burden cost effective for a start-up. This solution works for NFTs too and the entire tech stack has been built in-house.

We invested in Aisle 3 in Q4 2021. They have identified the problem of how difficult it is to search and find the cheapest retailer for a specific product and how there is consumer demand to solve this problem.

Aisle 3’s solution is a proprietary and in-built one that leverages AI, ML and machine vision to be able to scrape the required data from retailers and present a single clean results page that overcomes the lack of standardized product data feeds.

From this it easy to see the possibilities in terms of both embedding Aisle 3 in other platforms or adding FinTech capaiblities into Aisle 3.

Quiver is another Q4 2021 investment in the e-commerce space. Quiver is an API driven delivery solution for e-commerce firms that gives instant, pre-checkout delivery price and timings, that in-turn drives higher conversions, was compelling and the unit economics of each delivery were enough to make the decision.

As the majority of commerce shifts to online channels, retailers will constantly strive for solutions that both differentiate them and drive higher conversion rates. We believe Quiver can do both and through a very simple integration.

The Aura Fertility team identified a B2B gap in the market around regulatory / mandatory psychological support for couples going through IVF, that all clinics in the UK and US had to provide.

Their platform offers clinics a turn-key solution to this regulation, which would give their IVF couples with a cutting-edge tech solution providing them not only support but also a community of others going through the same scenario.

We happily invested and support their successful crowdcube campaign and then saw the recognition they got from Virgin and Holly Branson.

We also did a follow-on investment in Q4 2022.

End of Q2 2021, we made our 2nd investment in the social space in Lapse. Lapse was brought to our attention by Sameer Singh and the Atomico seed fund which was a co-investor in Howbout.

The idea (invite-only virtual disposable camera app - no reviews / edits) resonated immediately and the founder’s experience was both exceptional and relevant (which was later proven by how viral the app went).

The app launched end of Q3 2021 with a waitlist of 150k people, which in turn took it straight to the top of the app store.

As such only 5 months later (Q4 2021), we happily participated in their seed round led by Octopus and Google which achieved an amazing increase in valuation!

As a huge and long time fan of B2B marketplaces, it was great to start off 2022 with investing into Bunsen, which is in the school supplies space and was the first investment which Amir scouted himself.

Bunsen itself is a rare breed solo founded business, so it’s good that founder Alex is one of the most impressive human beings you will meet.

The space itself is clearly nascent in terms of disruption and as such, we had no hesitation in investing.

We look forward to seeing how Bunsen develops post-launch.

Our investment in Yurtle is our first foray into InsureTech and employee benefits. Yurtle is the first UK based insurance offering supporting family/informal carers, through both a policy that pays for back up care in emergencies and a network of resources that helps family carers thrive at home and at work.

With our ever aging population, this is rapidly becoming a mainstream area of concern and Yurtle offers employers a way to protect their employees and themselves from unnecessary productivity drops and turnover.

We invested in Push That Button at the end of Q3 2022 with great co-investors including Ant & Dec, Founder/CEO M&C Saatchi Performance, Founder/CEO deltaDNA (acquired by Unity), Co-Founders of Aquila Insight (acquired by Dentsu). Also our AdTech advisor Fintan Gillispie joined the round too.

Push That Button is a social widget that combines competitions with digital rewards (inc. voucher codes) to drive sales, increase ad engagement & capture unique first-party data amongst Millennials & Gen-Z.

PTB has solved the regulatory issues of running competitions on social media, & enables Talent/Brands to run legally-compliant competitions across multiple social touch points.

Set for launch Q4 2022, we are excited to this one evolve: 'See It. Push It. Win It'.

FROW is building the cultural marketplace for Gen Z, focusing initially on the vinyl record market. Their first feature, the shoppable livestream, has been adopted quickly by leading vinyl dealers, record stores and collectors. FROW believes in the "slow culture" where Authenticity, Spontaneity and Engagement are compatible with technology.

FROW approached us directly through this website and as it was an area we had been exploring in general, we were instantly interested. We actually met up with one of the founders (Seb) while we were all on holiday in France and we ended up investing early Q4. We are very excited about the co-investors;: Arnaud Massenet (Net-A-Porter co-founder), Sébastien Borget (The Sandbox co-founder), Francois Callens (Depop COO), Moody Jones (Empire Records) and one that is under NDA!

Homefans is a marketplace where sport fans can connect, plan and book sports trips and experiences hosted by fully-vetted locals.

We were introduced to founders Luke and Daniel by Sameer Singh who said he was investing on behalf of the Atomico seed fund.

We invested in Q4 2022, a period in which the firm went cash-flow positive after incredible growth. As such we have very high hopes for 2023 and Amir personally would like to go on their Belgrade Derby experience.

Tim and Will from DRPCRD contacted us via this website but Tim used to work with Claire while at Mindshare. This gave us the comfort into the kind of founder he would be.

DPRCRD is a creator economy platform helping brands automate their social content creation. Brands struggle to create the amount of social video content that platforms such as TikTok require, because they don’t have the budget, resources or expertise to make good video content themselves.

DRPCRD allows brands to team up with social media creators, set briefs, receive submissions and process payments automatically. The platform has been built in-house and integrates with the WhatsApp API to make the experience as easy and seamless for creators as it is for brands

IDWise is a disruptive eID&V & e-KYC start-up focused on Emerging Markets.

Amir met the founders Baha and Sakher while at Callsign. After working on a number of deals together, Amir gained confidence in the product and their sales process. In Q4 2022 Amir then joined as a board advisor and then in Jan 2023, after seeing ARR grow 5x in 10 months, we invested directly.

We are very confident in IDWise’s ARR continuing to grow at the same velocity and their disruption of the legacy IDV vendors who cannot compete on speed, accuracy or price and the founder’s ability to innovate which was a key reason why a previous venture (ID Scan) was bought by GBG.

After passing on the opportunity to invest in a large number of home food delivery services, we finally found one we believe in: HomeCooks.

HomeCooks model of being a marketplace of independent small batch chefs, allowing mixed order boxes with centralised, frozen driven logisitics, is one that we believe can scale and will work.

The centralised and frozen logisitics model is one that has been displayed to work and profitable by ButcherBox brilliantly.

As always we were delighted to co-invest alongside Sameer Singh.

Our first US investment is in GlobalComix, an opportunity we were introduced to by the lead investor Ishan Sinha at Point72 Ventures.

GlobalComix is a subscription service that allows consumers to get access to comic books digitally. The company is the only product in the market that gives consumers the ability to consume content from large comic book publishers and user-generated comics.

The market is large and growing. There are 500M readers, 1M+ creators, and annual spend on comic books is ~$25B globally.

PS Amir is an avid collector of Marvel Silver Age Key Comics!

Omada is a FTP sports prediction app. Users can use their daily free coins to guess the right scores on a selection of matches and aim for the top of the rankings to win diamonds. The app also allows users to challenge their friends and compare their results.

We were introduced to Omada by Julien at Felix Capital and were delighted to hear Akin (who we consider to be the best gaming investor in Europe) was investing too. After meeting Adrien, we were easily convinced to invest in Omada’s 1st investment round and happy to see people like Harry Stebbings and 20VC also joining the cap table. This is our first EU investment.

We were first introduced to Sooper Books by Leila Zenga at Kindred Capital. We then also got a very strong recommendation from Henry de Zoete, which made us very eager to meet with Simon and Charlene.

Like all great ideas Sooper Books was built for themselves and their at the time due baby. So a site was built by a storyteller and illustrator couple offering free audio books. What made Sooper Books get national attention was the Covid lockdowns and schools nationwide finding out about the site and telling parents about.

We are proud to support their continued mission.