For European healthtech founders, the United States is often seen as competitive and capital-intensive - a later stage market for mature products rather than a space for development. But demand from US health systems for European breakthroughs is increasing.

US healthcare spending accounts for nearly 20% of GDP or around $5.3 trillion - larger than the entire GDP of Germany. It is operationally decentralised and under constant pressure to improve outcomes while reducing cost. That tension creates a demand signal for solutions that optimise clinical performance and enhance decision-making, and ultimately make advanced therapies deliverable at scale.

AI models in cardiology are predicting heart failure and arrhythmias upstream of acute events. Oncology platforms are operationalising biomarker-first treatment pathways and integrating radioligand therapies into clinical workflows. In gastroenterology (GI), AI-assisted endoscopy is improving adenoma detection rates and standardising procedural quality. These infrastructure technologies go beyond incremental improvements, structurally reshaping how care is delivered.

In this month’s Bulletin, we look at how European innovations can scale in the US healthcare market via our programme with Northwestern Medicine. Also in the Bulletin:

• Converging on patient care - why we need a cohesive approach to life after diagnosis

• Lasers, geology, and sovereignty - Europe’s startup mining opportunity

• Survey: Take part in the Tech Nation 2026 Report

• Investing in Nebuly

• Events

• Open cohorts

• Job Openings

The Transatlantic Opportunity for European HealthTech

What makes the US particularly compelling is its receptiveness to systems based solutions particularly across clinical optimisation, business insights & predictive analytics, clinical decision support, precision medicine & advanced therapies, and quality, safety & reliability.

Hospitals are investing in predictive analytics to reduce readmissions in heart failure. Oncology centres are deploying decision support systems to navigate increasingly complex treatment algorithms. GI departments are adopting AI-enhanced imaging to improve detection rates and reduce variability. Advanced therapies, from CAR-T to targeted radiopharmaceuticals, require entirely new operational layers to be safely and efficiently delivered.

The common opportunity is in building the systems that allow those therapies to reach patients consistently and safely.

This represents a unique advantage for European founders. Many are building deeptech-first solutions in AI, robotics, and advanced analytics, in environments that demand rigorous evidence and clinical validation. When those technologies meet the scale and capital intensity of the US market, the growth trajectory can accelerate dramatically.

This is the thesis behind our Northwestern Medicine Healthcare Accelerator. Offering $150k capital and a 16 week programme to accelerate US market entry across Northwestern Medicine’s clinicians and 11 hospitals in Illinois. Founders will visit Chicago to scope pilots with NM senior leadership whilst connecting into local healthcare ecosystem payers, Government programs and US investors. All with the chance to work with the London Clinic in the UK, a recent NM partnership.

Healthcare innovation is going to be defined by infrastructure as much as by new therapies and drugs; and for European healthtech, the US is the platform on which systemic innovations can be scaled.

Learn more about the programme

Converging on patient care - why we need a cohesive approach to life after diagnosis

Neurodegenerative illnesses are global by definition. They cut across borders, income levels, age groups and health systems. In recent years, they have blurred those boundaries even further, with more than three billion people, nearly half the world’s population, estimated to be affected by a neurological condition.

Yet despite the scale of the issue, the response remains largely siloed. Research, innovation and care models are often confined within nations, disciplines or disease categories. All while people living with these conditions navigate fragmented systems every day.

The opportunities to converge globally by industry, technology and medical practice are huge. With a $60bn market cap for patient care tech, and with strides being made around the world in different and adjacent areas to neurological care, the issue comes down to focus.

If we want to meaningfully improve outcomes for neurodegenerative conditions, we need to shift our focus. Not just toward better treatments, but toward better lives after diagnosis.

Read more

Lasers, geology, and sovereignty - Europe’s startup mining opportunity

Europe invented modern mining and then forgot how to do it. To be fair, most of the high-grade deposits in Europe were already worked hard by the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, a lot of operations were chasing deeper seams and lower grades which pushed costs up. The industry moved elsewhere and extraction became something that happened in Australia, Chile, Africa.

The good news is that Europe has more than 800 medium to large hard-rock deposits for 30 critical raw materials across 33 countries. These are deposits that could support domestic supply, but are currently uneconomical to mine with today’s technology.

In our latest blog post our Mining and Deeptech Investor Jack Kennedy looks at European startup innovations in mining:

Read Jack's feature

Survey: Take part in the Tech Nation 2026 Report

The Tech Nation Report has been the UK’s state of the nation report on the technology industry since 2015.

Your survey responses will directly inform our 2026 report and help shape Tech Nation’s policy recommendations for government to strengthen the UK’s position in the global AI race.

The survey takes 2 minutes to complete. Responses will be anonymised and will not be attributed to individuals or their organisations.

Plus, you’ll have the chance to win £1,000 in cash, a personal invitation to our Future Fifty Forum, and a bespoke support package for your business.

Complete quiz

Investing in Nebuly

Introducing Nebuly - one of the latest companies to join our Fastweb + Vodafone Investment Programme.

Unlike traditional apps, conversational AI leaves no clear trail of clicks or page views, and fewer than 1% of users leave feedback. That makes it incredibly difficult to measure performance, user satisfaction or ROI.

Nebuly is building the analytics layer for the AI era.

Their platform gives organisations a real-time, privacy-first understanding of how people interact with AI, helping teams quantify productivity gains and identify opportunities for automation.

As AI becomes the primary interface between businesses and users, understanding those interactions will be as essential as web analytics was for the internet and mobile apps.

Read more about the investment

Events

Third Derivative Data Center Decarb Series - Innovations in Southeast Asia

​As data centre demand accelerates across Southeast Asia, driven by AI, cloud expansion, and regional digitalisation; ensuring access to clean, reliable energy at speed is becoming a defining challenge. This session will explore solutions enabling data centres in the region to scale efficiently while reducing emissions and strengthening grid resilience.

The session will then feature startup pitches and live Q&A with innovators working across clean power, storage, cooling, and materials.

Register

Founders Factory in Toronto for the PDAC 2026 Convention

We will be hosting TD Bank Group, Orion Industrial Ventures, Unearthed Solutions and CleanAI for “Venture-Backed Exploration: How AI, New Technologies & Business Models are Redefining Critical Mineral Discovery & Supply”.

The event brings together miners, investors and founders to explore how critical minerals are moving beyond a question of geology, becoming a data, software and automation challenge.

Discussions will range from the impact of capital, AI and emerging technologies and business models on mineral exploration, to some of the exciting developments in the market to date.

We look forward to the founder presentations and networking - and a chance to connect builders, operators and investors working at the intersection of AI and the energy transition.

Join waiting list

Founders Factory and Innovate UK Hospital to Community Accelerator Pitch Day

Last week we marked the close of our Hospital to Community Accelerator, delivered in partnership with InnovateUK, with a Demo Day showcasing the progress of the cohort.

Over the previous 12 weeks, founders worked closely with our partners and industry specialists to develop early-stage innovations designed to move care closer to patients and into the community. The programme focused on practical implementation, exploring how new technologies can operate in real healthcare settings.

The afternoon brought together clinicians, operators and investors for startup pitches, a panel discussion and open conversation about adoption pathways across the NHS and wider care systems.

A big thank you to the founders, partners and healthcare professionals who joined us and helped shape the conversation around the future of community-based care.

• Sensore — automated pressure ulcer prevention mapping

• Papcup — non-invasive cervical screening

• Arcus Dental — digital dental check-ups from home

• Punto Health — AI-powered dementia management platform

• Auracare — AI triage for primary care providers

• Dotplot — at-home early breast cancer detection

• Myonerv — wearable device to monitor and treat stroke-induced paralysis

• Circe — clinical group therapy platform for women

• William Oak — integrated diagnostics for nutritional deficiencies

• Lifeyear — an operating system for cardiac care

The discussions reinforced a consistent theme across the programme on shifting care from hospital to community requires more than new technology. It requires solutions that fit clinical workflows, support overstretched staff and deliver measurable improvements in patient outcomes.

Open cohorts

• MSWA Multiple Sclerosis & Neurological Care Accelerator - Applications close Feb 28th

  For early-stage ventures harnessing AI, robotics, wearables, and digital health to address multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, motor neurone disease and acquired brain injury. Apply here.

• Blue Action Accelerator – Applications open
  For early-stage ocean and blue economy ventures, supporting founders building solutions across maritime, shipping and supply chains, coastal resilience, conservation, and ocean infrastructure. Apply here.

• HSBC Industrial Innovator Programme - Applications close March 13th

  From industrial waste and critical minerals to maritime logistics and materials circularity, the programme focuses on themes where innovation can drive real environmental and commercial impact. Apply here.

• Northwestern Medicine & Founders Factory Accelerator — Applications close March 31st

  A US hospital-embedded programme helping European healthtech startups pilot and scale solutions across clinical optimisation, decision support and advanced therapies within real care pathways. Apply here.

Job-openings

🏥 Co-Founder: Healthcare Studio – Founders Factory (London / Europe / Remote)
Co-build a healthcare venture from day one with Founders Factory, tackling systemic challenges across remote monitoring, care optimisation and health infrastructure. You’ll receive €275k pre-seed funding, hands-on venture studio support and access to leading healthcare partners to validate and scale your idea.
Apply here

🔧 Founding Engineer – Konduit (London / Hybrid)
Join Konduit, a venture backed by Aviva and Founders Factory, building the infrastructure layer for real-time insurance capacity allocation. As Founding Engineer, you’ll architect and ship the core platform, shaping the technical foundation of a category-defining marketplace.
Apply here

🦾Venture Studio Lead – Founders Factory (Berlin, Hybrid)
Act as co-founder across new studio ventures, validating concepts, defining go-to-market strategy and preparing startups for spin-out and scale. You’ll operate at the intersection of product, commercial strategy and founder hiring to turn ideas into investment-ready companies.
Apply here

🧱Venture Builder – Founders Factory (London, Hybrid)
Work hands-on with founders to take ventures from 0→1, shaping product strategy, building MVPs and driving early validation. This is a fast-paced studio role focused on momentum, experimentation and building companies that can scale.
Apply here

🚀 Digital Ads Freelancer – Byway (London/Remote)
Reporting to the Head of Paid Growth, you will be the engine room of Byway’s through-funnel marketing strategy. Your work will directly support their 2026 goal of scaling international markets and diversifying into YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest. Byway is a first-of-its-kind travel technology that uses miles of local expertise to route trips by land and sea optimised for your enjoyment. We are a 100% flight-free travel company and B Corp.
Apply here

Modern naval and security operations require technologies that can operate for long periods without human presence, remain resilient in harsh and contested environments, reduce logistical dependency, and deliver persistent situational awareness across vast ocean spaces.

These requirements are pushing defence organisations toward a specific class of solutions: systems that are autonomous, modular, energy-efficient, low-signature, and increasingly electrified.

In this issue of the Startup Bulletin, we explore how a new maritime architecture is emerging, shaped by defence requirements but proven through commercial use.

Also in the bulletin:

• Programme openings - round-up

• Designing mining tech for a future we can’t predict with Thunderstone

• Future of work: How AI is diluting management and elevating builders

• Investing in RemoteSolar

• Acquisition highlight: Acre

• Job openings

How Defence Needs Are Shaping Maritime Technology

The defence industry is an increasingly critical market and commercial testing ground for the next generation of maritime technologies seeking validation, real-world application, and pathways to scale.

These dynamics - driven by electrification, distributed systems, and modular energy - are reshaping how power, autonomy, and infrastructure are delivered across the ocean domain.

Backed by our Blue Action Accelerator, ACUA Ocean’s Multi-Role Offshore Support (MROS) uncrewed surface vessel is a clear example of this pattern in action.

With support from the UK Department for Transport’s Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition, MROS is being developed as a 43-metre uncrewed vessel with both civilian and naval applications. While it is positioned commercially for offshore logistics, inspection, and energy infrastructure, its underlying design choices reflect defence-led requirements.

Navies are increasingly seeking medium-sized uncrewed platforms that can:

• Remain on station for weeks without resupply

• Operate safely without crews in high sea states

• Support surveillance, seabed operations, and logistics

• Integrate new sensors, vehicles, and mission systems without redesign

Commercial offshore operators want many of the same things, albeit for different reasons: reduced operating costs, improved safety, and higher utilisation.

Read the full article

Programme openings - round-up

• Mediobanca Fintech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 6th
  For fintech and enterprise startups building solutions for financial services, with a focus on digital banking, data, risk, and next-generation client experiences. Apply here.
  
  

• Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 8th
  For industrial and climate startups tackling mining and materials challenges, focused on safety, productivity, decarbonisation, and real-world deployment. Apply here.

• Canada only: Blue Action Accelerator (non-equity) – Applications close Feb 15th For ocean and maritime startups from Canada or those looking to enter the Canadian market focused on securing first pilots and real-world deployments. Apply here.
  
  

• Western Australia Nature Tech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 15th
  For nature, climate, and industrial startups working on environmental regeneration, land and sea stewardship, and scalable technologies for Western Australia. Apply here.

  
  

• MSWA Multiple Sclerosis & Neurological Care Accelerator - Applications close Feb 28th

  For early-stage ventures harnessing AI, robotics, wearables, and digital health to address multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, motor neurone disease and acquired brain injury. Apply here.

• Global: Blue Action Ocean Tech Accelerator – Applications close Feb 28th
  For early-stage ocean and blue economy ventures, supporting founders building solutions across maritime, coastal resilience, conservation, and ocean infrastructure. Apply here.

• HSBC Industrial Innovator Programme - Applications close March 2nd

  From industrial waste and critical minerals to maritime logistics and materials circularity, the programme focuses on themes where innovation can drive real environmental and commercial impact. Apply here.

Designing mining tech for a future we can’t predict with Thunderstone’s Eric Wasson Burns

One of the most uncomfortable truths about mining is that no one actually knows what the demand curve will look like 10, 20, or 30 years from now.

We talk about lithium, nickel, copper, rare earths, materials that are clearly critical today, but history shows us that material demand shifts quickly. Technologies change. Chemistries evolve. Entire supply chains are disrupted by breakthroughs no one saw coming.

Inversely the back-bone of all this: mining, dependable supply depends on certainty.

Assets are developed with 20–40 year horizons. Capital is deployed based on assumptions that must hold for decades. Infrastructure is optimised for specific ores, grades, and processing routes. When demand shifts, mining can’t respond quickly. That’s why the industry experiences violent boom-and-bust cycles, stranded assets, and geopolitical fragility.

One of the hardest questions we kept running into was deceptively simple: which commodity do you build for?

If you optimise for one metal and the world moves on, you’ve built an elegant dead-end.

Read Eric's Feature

Future of work: How AI is diluting management and elevating builders with Founders Factory’s Chief People Officer, Farah

For the past decade, the startup obsession with scaling meant building larger teams, creating additional layers, more meetings, and celebrating headcount milestones like they were strategic wins. We made things bigger when they didn’t need to be, because big looked successful and complexity made it feel important.

The truth? Hiring isn’t proof of success, it can be a symptom of inefficiency. It shows where we’ve run out of leverage and the need to borrow capacity from elsewhere.

We’ve entered a completely new era, one defined not by how many people you manage, but by how effectively you can amplify the people (and tools) you have. This shift, toward leaner, flatter organisations feels like a long-overdue course correction.

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something deeply satisfying about this shift. Fewer hierarchical layers. Small teams, finally building at the speed of their ambition.

Read Farah's Feature

Investing in RemoteSolar with Vonovia: Making Solar Accessible to Renters

Energy prices are too high, and the people who would benefit most from cheaper, cleaner power are often the ones least able to access it.

RemoteSolar builds that missing layer by unbundling solar parks and rooftop systems into modular units households can rent from 1 kWp upwards. Tenants or apartment owners subscribe to a share of a solar asset with no upfront capex and no project risk. When that capacity generates electricity, they’re billed for that portion at a fixed margin (around 1 cent per kWh plus taxes and fees), with any extra usage covered via a dynamic tariff linked to spot prices.

Read more

Exit highlight: Acre acquired 🎉

Congratulations to Justus Brown and the Acre team on the acquisition by ClearScore Group.

Acre began life as a Founders Factory studio venture: built from the ground up solving fragmented systems, admin-heavy workflows, and the time spent on busywork instead of delivering value to clients.

A major milestone for a platform that’s become core infrastructure for mortgage advisers across the UK.

Job-openings

🤝 Partnerships Lead: Founders Factory (Singapore)

Be the point person for FF & HSBC’s Industrial Innovation Programme, covering senior stakeholders across commercial banking, innovation banking and the private bank. Support the Future Industries Partnership portfolio companies with commercial opportunities in the region, primarily with corporate business development and funding connections

Apply here

🛠️ Founder & CEO: Malcolm - The AI Insurance Protocol (London/Remote)

Backed by Founders Factory and Aviva, this is a rare opportunity to found a category-defining B2B Insurtech from day one, with pre-seed backing and deep operational support. This is an opportunity to build the AI-native insurance rails that safely quote and bind insurance at scale.

Apply here

🛠️ Founder & CEO: Coreo - AI-Powered Sales Infrastructure (Milan/Hybrid)

Alongside our corporate partner Fastweb, we’ve signed off COREO solving a critical, unsolved problem. E. Enterprises can find SMEs but they struggle to book meetings with the real decision-maker and convert intent into revenue. This is a chance to build a category-defining B2B platform at the intersection of AI, sales infrastructure, and compliance with real customers, pilots, and revenue pathways already in motion

Apply here

Across our programmes, founders are building solutions that are transforming critical sectors such as energy, materials, manufacturing and infrastructure. These technologies go beyond reducing emissions - they reshape cost structures, improve efficiency and reinvent how industrial systems are designed, built and operated.

Impact at this scale is never achieved in isolation. It depends on founders willing to build in challenging, complex spaces; partners prepared to engage; and investors aligned around a long-term view of where durable value will be created.

To everyone who has supported Founders Factory this year across all our programmes - from mining tech in Perth, to financial services in Milan - thank you. 2025 has been a year defined by remarkable progress.

We’re pleased to share a selection of highlights in this end-of-year wrap, and even more excited about what we can continue to build together in 2026.

Henry Lane Fox
Co-Founder & CEO

–

2025 in Numbers

• Founders Factory backed 63 startups

• Global portfolio now totalling 450+ companies

• 8 startups built in our Venture Studio

• 7 new programmes and partnerships launched

Press Round-Up

• Founders Factory was named the UK’s #1 startup hub in the FT European Startup Hubs report.

• Scan.com, Xapien, Tembo and Byway featured in the Sifted 100 of the UK & Ireland’s fastest-growing startups.

• Wired’s Hottest 100 Startups in Europe featured 4 Founders Factory portfolio startups: Tembo, Byway, Shop Circle, Scan.com

• Team members featured in publications including Entrepreneur UK, CNBC, Health Tech World and Metal Tech News.

• Announced 7 new programmes across global media:

  • MSWA MS & Neurological Care Accelerator

  • CODE Tech Founders

  • HSBC Future Industries Partnership

  • The R3sidency

  • Blue Action Canada in partnership with COAST

  • Hitachi Construction Machinery Mining Challenge

  • Innovate UK Hospital to Community Accelerator

Portfolio Highlights

Industrial & Climate Tech

• Endolith announced a US$13.5m Series A to scale its biological intelligence platform for critical minerals recovery.

• Monolith was acquired by CoreWeave to expand its AI Cloud for Industrial Innovation

• Dronamics selected for up to €30m in equity investment from the European Innovation Council to expand its cargo-drone airline.

• Durin raised US$3.4m pre-seed to build automated drilling rigs for mineral exploration.

• SeaStock moved from R&D to commercial operations, raising A$3.4m, commissioning its Henderson module, and signing global supply agreements.

• AGRA secured A$600k funding and completed its pilot facility, showing indoor farming economics can now rival field-grown production.

• Hades Mining raised €5.5m pre-seed to develop its laser drilling system to unlock deep geothermal energy and critical minerals.

• Ceto raised US$4.8m seed to build a data intelligence platform for commercial shipping insurance.

• Tattva awarded a £650k Innovate UK grant to develop and commercialise carbon-sequestering biomaterials for construction.

• Brineworks received a US$1.8m European Innovation Council grant to scale its direct ocean capture technology for e-fuels feedstock.

• AtmoCooling raised US$2.6m pre-seed to turn deserts into agricultural and climate resilience hubs.

• ACUA Ocean launched its first unmanned surface vehicle, USV Pioneer, as part of ongoing sea trials for large-scale ocean data collection.

• GridShare closed its latest crowdfunding round, enabling retail investors to co-own new solar farms.

• Oxwash was acquired by Elis to drive carbon-neutral operations

Nature, Oceans & Biodiversity

• TreeTrack made the 2025 Foresight 50 and joined the Perth Landing Pad for its UAV-enabled post-wildfire restoration work.

• Fremantle Seaweed closed a A$2.2m community raise and achieved its first commercial agreement.

• Earthly launched nature capital fund to scale high-integrity restoration projects in WA

• North Australian SeaCulture expanded into Indonesia to partner with BRIN and adapt its seaweed-processing tech to Gracilaria ponds.

• Jack Fertility raised £500k to make male fertility testing simple and stigma free.

• Tidal Moon’s Professor Michael Wear received the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledge Systems.

• Ocean Ledger closed US$975k pre-seed to deliver high-resolution coastal risk and environmental impact analytics.

• Vycarb closed a US$5m seed to deploy sensor-powered, water-based CO₂ capture and storage at industrial and coastal sites worldwide.

Fintech, Proptech & Insurance

• Meshed raised an oversubscribed £950k pre-seed to build the UK’s first AI-native insurance broker for SMEs.

• Nila raised US$2.4M, turning remittances into tangible care for families

• Wallround closed a €4.2m oversubscribed seed round to digitise and streamline energy-efficient building renovations.

• Roomix raised £850k to expand its custom furniture and home projects platform.

• Conveyd raised £2.5M to cut UK home buying times from months to weeks

AI, Cyber & Enterprise

• Shop Circle announced a US$100m Series B (total funding US$245m) as well as being named in Sifted’s Rising SaaS 100 as one of Europe’s fastest-growing software companies

• Synthesized raised a US$20m Series A to help enterprises cut QA coding costs, speed development and enhance security.

• Valarian announced US$7m in new funding to build secure data infrastructure for highly regulated industries such as defence.

• MatNex partnered with Viridien to build one of the most powerful supercomputers for materials discovery.

• Fantix sold its adtech business to Life360 to power targeted ad solutions, sharpening its focus on enterprise AI.

• BuiltAI studio venture BuiltAI raised US$6m seed to scale its AI financial modelling and underwriting platform for global commercial real estate investors.

• Falkin raised £1.6m pre-seed to embed AI-driven scam prevention directly inside banking and customer-service journeys.

• Johix raised US$350k to advance its SME alternative finance platform.

Founders Factory Ecosystem

• Hosted two Residency Weeks for our Mining & Nature Tech cohorts in Perth, Western Australia

• Co-hosted an Industrial Transformation roundtable at London Climate Action Week with HSBC and Third Derivative

• Ran Demo Days across our global programmes, including Blue Action Canada in Vancouver

• Hosted “Building in Berlin: Zero to One in 2025” featuring Wefox founder Julian Teicke and Carolin Gabor

• Hosted a Maritime Decarbonisation panel (with J.P. Morgan and Blue Action) and our inaugural Industrial Transformation Summit (with Rio Tinto and HSBC) at New York Climate Week

• Founders Factory and our mining tech ventures joined the global community of leaders, innovators and investors at IMARC

Share

AI agents dominated the conversation in 2025. Anthropic and OpenAI rolled out frameworks and best-practice playbooks, while developers everywhere began sharing early personal prototypes.But in reality many projects were stuck in pilots, came up against issues of scale or failed to make it to deployment. In this month’s editorial, Tech Lead Jack Howell and Product Director Jacob George share what we’ve learned from 14 months actually deploying agentic systems in highly regulated spaces like insurance and finance.

The crucial lesson for product leaders in agentic AI is that generic frameworks do not work. Specialised functions and industries require specialised agents, embedded in workflows often with a human in the loop. Specialised beats general. Integrated beats standalone. The Agent Revolution is underway, it’s just quieter and more operational than the hype suggests.

Also in the newsletter:

• MSWA MS & Neurological Care Accelerator - Applications Open

• Applications open for Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator Cohort 4

• LANDCROS Startup Challenge by Hitachi Construction Machinery applications open

• Investing in Qi4M’s agentic AI ecosystem OrcheXtra

• This month’s raises

  • Vycarb

  • Falkin

  • Endolith

• Understanding the US-Australia Mining Framework

• Oxwash acquired

• Finding product-market fit with Lapis

• Jobs round-up

Venture building with AI Agents

At Founders Factory we’ve already solved a lot of the pain points around agentic AI and built AI agents to deliver outcomes we think will re-shape industries such as fintech and insuretech. By focusing on industry-wide use cases, we’ve steered away from building AI agents for niche problems, ensuring we’re always building for scale, and therefore facing the challenges I mentioned head-on, rather than avoiding them. This ensures that the AI agents we build will have a high level of adoption, deliver on the promised outcomes and handle the high-volume environments we’re building in.

We’re not just building software anymore; we’re developing goal-based systems that require continuous human feedback, immutable release snapshots, and conversation-level regression testing. Traditional software gives the same output for the same input. Agents reason creatively within boundaries. This fundamental shift demands new development methodologies: declarative programming for agent behaviors, continuous quality assurance through annotated conversations, and test suites that simulate thousands of real customer interactions.

These agents include:

• Agents for Time Efficiency with JointlyAI

• Agents for Search & Personalization with Project Delorean and Warren

• Agents for Resource Efficiency with Project Konduit

Read the full article

MSWA MS & Neurological Care Accelerator applications open

🏥 We’re proud to share a landmark partnership with MSWA to support breakthrough technologies for people living with MS and other neurological conditions.

Together, we will fund and commercialise global health tech startups developing cutting-edge solutions across:

🧠 Multiple sclerosis
🧬 Parkinson’s, MND, Huntington’s
🤖 Robotics & AI for neuro-care
📡 Wearables & remote monitoring
🩺 Post-stroke & acquired brain injury care

Alongside MSWA CEO Melanie Kiely GAICD, the launch was supported by WA Premier Roger Cook and Minister for Medical Research Stephen Dawson MLA - underscoring the state’s national leadership in neurological care and medical innovation.

“This is the world’s first startup program focused on MS and neurological conditions – and it’s awesome that’s happening in Western Australia.”

– Rohan Silva, Chair WA, Founders Factory

Applications are open now, welcoming founders using frontier technology to transform neurological care.

Apply now

Applications are now open for Cohort 4 of the Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator

Along with our partners Rio Tinto, we’re backing breakthrough technologies across critical minerals, low-impact extraction, and resource efficiency.

To date, we’ve backed 18 companies from 1,500+ applications across the US, Europe, and Australia. This cohort, we’ll invest in six more pre-seed and seed-stage companies operating across:

⛏️ Smarter exploration
🌱 Lower-impact extraction
🔁 Waste, water & materials recovery
⚙️ Autonomy, robotics & digital infrastructure

If you’re building at the edge of industrial technology, from critical minerals to mine-to-mill optimisation, we want to hear from you.

🕒 Applications close February 2026

Apply now

LANDCROS Startup Challenge by Hitachi Construction Machinery Applications Open

💡 Applications are open for Hitachi Construction Machinery’s LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge.

We’re partnering with Hitachi Construction Machinery to launch the LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge. A global, open call for startups building the future of the mining industry.

This year’s challenge invites founders to submit solutions across three core themes shaping the next generation of industrial innovation:

🔸 Smarter Machines – accelerating autonomy, connectivity, and intelligence in heavy equipment.
🔸 Smarter Mine Sites – improving efficiency, safety, and data-led decision-making across operations.
🔸 Low Impact & Sustainable Mining – enabling more circular, lower-carbon, and environmentally responsible mining systems.

Up to 10 startups will be selected to pitch in Brisbane, Australia, on April 16, 2026, in front of global industry leaders and investors. One winner per theme will go on to collaborate directly with Hitachi Construction Machinery, with support from Founders Factory’s global venture team.

The competition is building the bridge between industrial technology and intelligent mining, helping startups scale solutions that make mining smarter, safer, and more sustainable.

🚀 Applications are open until January 20, 2026.

Apply now

Investing in Qi4M’s OrcheXtra: The Agentic Ecosystem to Manage Investment Cycles with Precision

Qi4M, the company behind agentic AI ecosystem OrcheXtra, helps financial institutions manage investment cycles with precision and coordination.

In most banks and asset managers, bringing a product from concept to client still means fragmented tools, siloed teams, and slow information flow. OrcheXtra changes that by connecting data, processes, and people through a network of specialised AI agents, generating context as well as core information.

Born out of the MBSpeedUp programme with Mediobanca in Milan, OrcheXtra is embedded in real workflows, helping teams move faster, stay aligned, and communicate with clients using a single source of truth.

Read the full story

Portfolio raises 🚀

A big month for fundraising across the Founders Factory portfolio:

Vycarb
Brooklyn-based Vycarb, an alumnus of our first Mining Tech Accelerator with Rio Tinto, raised $5m seed funding to scale its water-based CO₂ removal and storage technology. Its system transforms existing water infrastructure into distributed carbon storage, helping decarbonise heavy industry and coastal assets.

FALKIN
Digital safety startup FALKIN secured £1.6m pre-seed to help banks and credit unions move from fraud detection to scam prevention. By embedding AI-powered “safety rails” inside banking and customer-service journeys, FALKIN helps stop AI-enabled scams at the point of persuasion, not just at the point of payment.

Endolith
Biological intelligence company Endolith, part of our Mining Tech Accelerator with Rio Tinto, completed the first close of a $13.5m Series A. Endolith uses AI-guided microbes to recover copper and other minerals from low-grade ore and waste streams, offering a capital-light, lower-impact path to unlocking new critical mineral supply.

Understanding the US-Australia Mining Framework

The United States and Australia signed a landmark common policy framework for mining and processing critical minerals and rare earths. The framework signals a shared commitment to building diversified and sustainable supply chains for the raw materials powering clean energy, defence, and advanced technology.

At Founders Factory this framework mirrors some of the work we’re doing. Across both territories, we’re working with governments, corporate partners, and entrepreneurs to accelerate the technologies that will make this framework a reality.

Read on to see what this new framework aims to do:

Read more

Exit highlight: Oxwash acquired 🎉

Sustainable laundry startup Oxwash, one of our early accelerator ventures, has been acquired by European textile services leader Elis. From a single “lagoon” in Oxford to pioneering carbon-neutral industrial laundry at scale, Oxwash has shown how data-driven, low-impact cleaning can transform a legacy industry. The acquisition will help bring Oxwash’s technology and circular model to laundry operations across Europe.

Finding Product–Market Fit: The Lapis Approach to Rethinking Market Focus

When a startup is built around a powerful piece of technology, deciding to focus on a specific industry can determine whether the technology becomes viable in-market.

Lapis’s Knowledge Bank, backed by Founders Factory and Mediobanca through our MBSpeedUp venture studio reimagines how information is stored, retrieved, and applied inside financial institutions. It does this succinctly by crawling databases, selecting the right information, and highlighting what’s important to those who need it.

Here’s how founders, Pietro Arina and Davide Ferrari deliberately narrowed their focus to a precise, high-value product for investment professionals 👇

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Job-openings

COO & Co-Founder: AI-powered Agritech (Milan)

Build a hardware/software platform that’s already saving nurseries 20% on water, energy, and pests. You’ll lead ops, product, and science integration alongside a top team of agronomists.

Apply

Founding Engineer: AI Financial Coach (London)

Build the brain behind Warren. You’ll work on RAG, agents, and evaluation loops, taking LLMs from idea to production in a space where trust and precision really matter.

Apply

GTM Co-Founder: AI Proptech (Berlin)

Reinvent property management with Immoly, Germany’s first AI-native platform for landlords. In partnership with Vonovia, Europe’s largest residential real estate company.

Apply

Each role comes with equity, salary, and a chance to co-found a business with unfair advantage.

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By 2040, the number of people living with major conditions such as diabetes, cancer, and heart failure is expected to rise by almost 40%. In the UK this growing burden threatens both the National Health Service (NHS) and the wider economy. Continuing to rely on hospital-centred care isn’t sustainable; we need a shift towards community-based, preventative models that keep people well for longer.

The question is how to make that shift. It starts with rethinking the entire care pathway; moving from reactive treatment to proactive, technology-enabled models that meet people where they are. Across the UK, we’re already seeing what’s possible: virtual wards, remote diagnostics, and AI-driven monitoring are helping patients receive care at home while easing pressure on hospitals.

In this month’s newsletter we look at how startups and outside innovation can relieve the burden on the NHS and its central infrastructure.

Also in this month’s newsletter:

• Apply for the R[3]sidency with Coinbase, Fabric Ventures and Animoca Brands

• Meet the Rio Tinto cohort

• Founders Factory at Italian tech week

• Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

• Perth Residency Week with our Nature and Mining Tech Cohorts

• Jobs round-up

How Do We Move Healthcare from Hospital to Community?

At Founders Factory, we’re exploring this transformation through our Hospital to Community Accelerator, delivered in partnership with InnovateUK.

Through previous accelerators, we’ve seen firsthand how these innovations can improve outcomes, lower costs, and reduce pressure on primary and acute care systems. The opportunity now is to scale what works, bridging the gap between innovation and adoption through real-world pilots, strategic partnerships, and sustained investment.

Applications are now open for founders who are demonstrating that community-based care isn’t just feasible but effective too. The programme supports startups developing technologies that bring care closer to patients; from predictive analytics that prevent hospital admissions to workforce tools that free clinicians to focus on care.

Apply here

The Hospital to Community Accelerator is a 10 week, non-equity programme designed and delivered in partnership with InnovateUK, part of UK Research & Innovation.

The accelerator supports up to 10 early stage health tech startups working on remote monitoring, at-home diagnostics, new community care models, and digital tools that ease hospital pressure.

The R[3]sidency with Coinbase, Fabric Ventures and Animoca brands, is now open

Applications are officially open for The R[3]sidency.

Created in partnership with Coinbase, Fabric Ventures and Animoca Brands, The R[3]sidency backs ambitious founders building early-stage startups in Web3 and AI.

Successful applicants receive £230k cash investment and an intensive 16-week accelerator programme, including access to the combined industry networks and expertise of the partners.

Apply to the R[3]sidency

Meet the latest cohort from our Mining Tech Accelerator

We’re proud to introduce you to our latest cohort of mining ventures, backed by Rio Tinto and Founders Factory through our Mining Tech Accelerator.

This cohort of startups are introducing new technologies focused on reducing the impact of mining activities and accelerating rehabilitation efforts. The six investments are:

• DNAir - Nature & biodiversity monitoring

• Foray - Ecosystem restoration technologies

• FAST Metals - Turning mine waste into profit

• Hades - Next generation subsurface drilling technology

• Namu Robotics - Pioneering reforestation with autonomous robotics

• Spoor - AI monitoring that helps wind energy grow responsibly

Over the past 18 months Founders Factory and Rio Tinto Ventures have reviewed over 1,500 startups globally to select 18 investments - including this current cohort.

Many of these accelerator participants have secured research agreements with Rio Tinto and its various business units across the world.

Learn more about the programe

Founders Factory at Italian Tech Week

The Founders Factory team and startups from our Fastweb and global accelerator programmes convened in Turin alongside the most influential founders, investors and corporates in technology – with headliners including Jeff Bezos and Ursula von der Leyen.

Special moments included:

• Founders Factory Co-Founder & Executive Chair Brent Hoberman on stage, discussing raising capital as a young founder and comparing the performance of European and US VCs

• FF portfolio in the room: Monia, Nebuly, Tetto, Claro AI, ShopCircle were connecting with partners and future customers

• Studio Lead for Italy, Alberto Mucci, joined a dinner for exited founders on betting against trends and challenging the view that European entrepreneurs trail competitors

• Founders Factory Investor, Edoardo Gentili, hosted The Venture Convivio Dinner with Italians in VC community – co-hosted with Base10 Partners, Italian Founders Fund Eurazeo, Rancilio Cube SICAF- 200 of the best founders and investors worldwide

• ShopCircle’s Luca Cartechini joined the panel for Edoardo’s dinner sharing insights on LLM wrapper features and the importance of slow hires.

Our Sector Director Andrea Guzzoni joined Exceptional Ventures and Paolo Pio’s HealthTech lunch; ElevenLabs’s networking aperitivo and B Heroes drink and deal event.

Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

We had an energising New York Climate Week last month with the Founders Factory team, our partners, and an incredible community of industry leaders, entrepreneurs and investors.

Across two days, we convened vital conversations and showcased pioneering startups tackling some of the hardest-to-abate sectors: mining, shipping & supply chains and agriculture.

On the Wednesday, together with J.P. Morgan, alfa8 and Blue Action, we co-hosted The Maritime Decarbonisation Challenge: Who Pays, Who Builds, Who Waits?

On the Thursday, downtown at Nine Orchard, Founders Factory hosted our inaugural Industrial Transformation Summit. Leaders from Rio Tinto, HSBC, Orion Resource Partners , Vimson Group, Nestlé, TELUS Global Ventures (TGV), Superorganism, Prologis, A.P. Moller - Maersk and ZEBOX joined us to explore the technologies and market dynamics enabling more efficient and nature-positive solutions for the mining and shipping industries.

And a huge thank you to our partners Rio Tinto, HSBC, Blue Action and The Government of Western Australia.

On the ground in Perth for Residency Week with our Mining and Nature cohorts

This month marked a major milestone for our Mining Tech and Nature Tech Accelerator cohorts, halfway through their programmes with Rio Tinto and the Government of Western Australia.

Every six months, these founders join us from around the world in Perth for an intensive week to accelerate product–market fit, build commercial partnerships, and connect directly with industry.

We explored and tested several themes with founders to ensure they could push their concepts from lab to market, including:

Regulation & scale: Engaging with WA government leaders on regulatory, trade, and biodiversity priorities to unlock pilot and market-entry opportunities.

Customer validation: Refining business cases and pressure-testing propositions with potential customers and industry leaders.

The in-person collaboration gives founders and our team the space to develop ideas, validate assumptions, and build globally scalable businesses.

🗞️ Jobs round-up:

Nursy - is the first AI-powered assistant designed for nurseries and specialty crop growers, integrating hardware and software to increase productivity, cut resources waste, and strengthen climate resilience (Milan, Italy)

• Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder

Durin - automated drilling rigs to accelerate mineral discovery and reduce exploration costs (Los Angeles, US)

• Senior web-developer, CA

Terra AI - AI for mineral exploration to reduce drilling costs and improve accuracy (Palo Alto, US)

• Software Engineer, Remote, US

Rainstick - agriculture & nature restoration using electrical fields to mimic the natural effects of lightning, boosting seed yields faster and more sustainably (Cairns, Australia)

• Senior Robotics and Automation Engineer, Queensland, Australia

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Heavy industries such as steel, chemicals, and manufacturing are among the hardest sectors to decarbonise. Reducing their environmental impact is one of the greatest challenges in the climate transition, yet many of the technologies that could expedite change have struggled to achieve market adoption.

Industrial firms often operate with high capital intensity, limiting funds available for the kind of upfront investment that new technologies demand. In many cases, it isn’t just about swapping in lower impact equipment - it requires a wholesale rethinking of processes, supply chains, and business models. That scale of change has kept promising solutions on the sidelines.

Future Industries Partnership, our new programme delivered in partnership with HSBC and Third Derivative/RMI, aims to change this. In this edition, we profile the first cohort of startups selected for the programme - deploying a broad range of impactful technologies, from the replacement of carbon intensive building materials, to modular, energy efficient air-conditioning.

Also in this month’s newsletter:

• Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

• Fundraising round-up

• WA new cohort

• CODE

• UKRI Innovate UK launch

• Jobs roundup

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⚡️ Scaling heavy industry startups with HSBC and Third Derivative

In June we launched the Future Industries Partnership in collaboration with HSBC and Third Derivative. A three-year philanthropic programme to accelerate climate technologies in heavy industry across Asia and the Middle East.

During the 18-month accelerator these startups will receive technical and commercialisation support, 1-2-1 mentoring, partner match-making and innovation showcases to guide their projects to success. Namely, reducing the emissions and environmental impact of heavy industry.

Here’s a look at the first cohort:

Carbon Signal – Cutting building audit times from months to minutes with high-fidelity energy intelligence.

Greengine – Creating scalable micro-algae based carbon capture for big industries and institutions.

HYDGEN – Modular electrolyzers producing ultra-pure green hydrogen directly on-site.

NoPo Nanotechnologies – Single-walled carbon nanotubes driving efficiency in batteries, polymers, and electronics.

Ocean – Bamboo-based building materials for low-carbon, climate-resilient construction.

Octolife – Affordable, modular AC delivering low-emission cooling at scale.

Renkube – Creating Motion-Free Optical Tracking boosts solar yields by up to 40%.

Rewind Turbine – Fully recyclable, modular wind blades for wind turbines simplifying logistics and cutting costs.

Torus Robotics – Building ultra-efficient axial flux motors reducing energy use in HVAC systems.

🌆 Founders Factory at New York Climate Week

Find us across multiple events at next week’s New York Climate Week.

The Maritime Decarbonisation Challenge

On the 24th September we’re convening a closed-door roundtable of shipping companies, charterers, cargo owners and port authorities to debate who pays, who builds, and who benefits from maritime decarbonisation. The discussion is hosted in partnership with J.P. Morgan alfa8 and Blue Action.

Industrial Transformation Summit

This New York Climate Week, on the 25th September, Founders Factory hosts its inaugural Industrial Transformation Summit with partners HSBC, Rio Tinto and Blue Action.

The summit will feature panels on mining ventures, supply chain transformation and aligning incentives between nature and industry, with expert insights from industry leaders, entrepreneurs and deep tech investors. 12 startups from Founders Factory’s global portfolio will present in our Startup Showcase.

💸 Fundraising Round-up

Meshed

🤖 Meshed raised an oversubscribed £950k pre-seed round to build the UK’s first AI-native insurance broker for SMEs.

Backed by Haatch, Exponential Science and Aviva (via Founders Factory), Meshed is rebuilding the insurance broking stack to deliver more efficient, cost-effective solutions.

Founded by Mark Costello (CEO), Vincent Liu (CTO) and Jake Wells (COO), the team are keen to connect with brokers, underwriters, engineers and builders with the vision to transform the insurance industry.

WALLROUND

🏠 WALLROUND closed a €4.2M oversubscribed seed round to digitise and streamline energy-efficient building renovations.

Led by Revent with participation from GGF and Vonovia, the funding will help WALLROUND, expand operations across Germany, enhance automated planning workflows and grow its tech, product, and operations teams.

Founded in 2024 via the Founders Factory & Vonovia Venture Studio, WALLROUND is fixing renovation’s outdated and fragmented processes by unifying property analysis, planning, procurement, and QA into one platform.

Congrats to co-founders Lukas Steinhilber (CEO), Tatiana Wotzasek (CPO) and Henning von Oesen (MD).

Hades Mining

🔥 Emerging from stealth, Hades Mining announced a €5.5M pre-seed round to build Europe’s first vertically integrated, tech-enabled mining company.

Founded in 2025 by Dr Max Werner, Björn Dressler and Dan Gengenbach, Hades Mining aims to reduce Europe’s >90% reliance on external sources for critical minerals by unlocking geothermal energy at scale.

Backed by Founders Factory and Rio Tinto through our Mining Tech Accelerator, the round is led by Project A with participation from Visionaries Tomorrow, Viessmann Generations Group and a network of strategic angels.

🚀 Congratulations to the Hades team!

Meet the Western Australia Gov Nature Tech Accelerator Cohort 3

We’re excited to announce the latest cohort for the WA Nature Tech Accelerator, in partnership with the Government of Western Australia.

From methane-busting seaweed and wildfire-detecting sensors to modular insect farms and ecosystem listening tech, these six pioneering companies are redefining how nature and innovation intersect to drive sustainability and economic diversification in Western Australia and beyond

The cohort includes:

• Quenda (WA) – Zero-emission, solar rovers for land rehabilitation

• Fremantle Seaweed (WA) – Growing seaweed to cut livestock methane by 80%

• North Australian SeaCulture (WA) – Native seaweed farming & processing

• Pyri (UK) – Passive ground sensors for early wildfire detection

• Flybox® (UK) – Modular insect farms turning food waste into animal feed

• Synature (CH) – Bioacoustic tech to measure ecosystem health

Read about the accelerator here

🌍 CODE Tech Founders Programme

This month, we welcomed a new cohort of Saudi Arabia’s most entrepreneurial companies to London for the third edition of CODE, run with the Ministry of Communications and IT of Saudi Arabia and Imperial Enterprise Lab.

Over six weeks, founders will be immersed in London’s ecosystem, gaining access to world-class expertise, connections, and intensive company-scaling support from the Founders Factory team.

👏 Huge congratulations to all the CODE founders selected.

Innovate UK Accelerator launch

You can now apply for the Hospital to Community Accelerator, a 10 week, non-equity programme designed and delivered by Founders Factory in partnership with innovateUK, part of UK Research & Innovation.

The accelerator supports up to 10 early stage health-tech startups working on remote monitoring, at-home diagnostics, new community care models, and digital tools that ease hospital pressure.

Open roles:

• Senior Full Stack Engineer - Xapien - play a key role in shaping the core Xapien platform as they grow rapidly.

• Tech Co-Founder - Tetto Assicurazione (LLM-Powered Home Contents Insurance) (Milan) – Tetto Assicurazione aims to revolutionise the Italian insurance market with a mobile-first, AI-powered home and contents insurance subscription service.

• Senior Software Engineer - Mae - An opportunity for someone who is passionate about maternal health equity to build and shape key features of Mae’s platform

• Growth Venture Builder - Founders Factory (Berlin) - 6 months, German speaker. We’re looking for a well-rounded, hands-on Venture Builder to help launch a new startup in the climate space with Vonovia, Europe’s largest residential real estate company.

• Founder & CEO at AI-Driven Property Manager Voltigo (Berlin) - ​Voltigo taps into a multi-billion-euro opportunity — serving an underserved market with long-term user relationships and recurring revenue models based on energy usage, carbon savings, and future green lifestyle services.

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How heavy industry interacts with our natural environment has come under increasing focus over the last few years.

Governments—from the EU through to Australia—have introduced legislation designed at encouraging ‘best available techniques’ when it comes to emissions and their impact on air, water, and land.

So what are these best available techniques? As with any innovation, startups are best positioned to introduce transformative, even radical new processes to industry. Investing in Western Australia’s nature tech ecosystem, we’ve seen how startups are transforming the intersection between nature and industry—from the materials they use to the lasting impact it leaves.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• Our top recommended reads this month

• Highlights from our global portfolio

• Opportunities, jobs, events in tech

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🏭🌳 Four startups intersecting nature & industry

SeaStock

The problem: Cattle are the largest source of agricultural GHG emissions. Methane from their digestive processes contributes around 14% of all human-induced emissions. Previous attempts to solve this have proved ineffective or marginal at best.

The solution: Nature holds the solution—specifically, in seaweed. Asparagosis seaweed is a naturally occurring seaweed in Western Australia: when introduced to cattle diets, can reduce methane emissions by up to 90%.

SeaStock, a Fremantle-based startup, manufactures marine science solutions to produce and extract compounds derived from seaweed and algae. Beyond agriculture, their solutions promise to transform industries including cosmetics, food, and pharmaceuticals.

Call to Country

The problem: Businesses around the world often come into contact with Indigenous communities—particularly where industry intersects with Indigenous lands and heritage. Organisations increasingly recognise the importance of engaging first hand with these communities to ensure social and environment compliance.

These solutions, however, are often fragmented and inconsistent. This ranges from isolated cultural awareness training to tokenistic, compliance driven exercises, rather than true integration and engagement.

The solution: WA-based, Indigenous-led startup Call To Country are building a cultural competency platform to help businesses map their organisational needs to industry best practice approaches in order to strengthen cultural capability. Their technology platform aims to act as a ‘cultural coach in your pocket’ for on-demand advice and support.

Rainstick

The problem: The agricultural industry is facing an existential crisis—declining crop yields, erratic weather, and tightening restrictions on pesticides. The search for chemical-free, scalable methods to boost agricultural productivity continues…

The solution: Farmers and agricultural businesses should turn to nature—lightning, in particular. Rainstick has developed synthetic lightning—specifically, a Variable Electric Field Treatment (VEFTTM) technology, which uses 50,000 frequencies across 9 waveforms—to stimulate biological and electrochemical changes in seeds, enhancing germination, resilience, and overall crop performance. It also has the potential to stimulate agriculture in a number of harsh or hostile conditions, such as environments impacted by industry or extreme weather.

Co-founded by Darryl Lyons, the descendant of the Rainmaker tribe in Australia, this technology taps into age-old Indigenous wisdom around weather and agriculture.

Nitronic

The problem: Nitrogen fertiliser production currently relies largely on the Haber-Bosch method: a highly energy intensive method that consumes about 1-2% of the world's energy supply and is responsible for approximately 1.8% of global carbon emissions. Decarbonising agriculture critically starts with addressing this huge problem.

The solution: Nitronic have developed a new method for sustainable nitrogen fertiliser production, using non-thermal plasma technology. A method that significantly reduces energy requirements compared to the Haber-Bosch process.

—

Applications for our latest Nature Tech program are now open. If you are interested, or know an appropriate startup, find out more & get in touch here.

Find out more

📚 Our recommended reading list

• No Rivals: The Founders Fund Story (The Generalist)

• Why Did Microsoft Invest In OpenAI? (Ed Zitron)

• Shipping is one of the world’s dirtiest industries – could this invention finally clean up cargo fleets? (The Guardian)

🚀 Highlights from our Global Portfolio

• Dronamics were selected for equity investment of up to €30M by the European Innovation Council, as they look to expand their groundbreaking drone airline across Europe

• Tattva received a £650K Innovate UK grant as they develop and commercialise a novel carbon-sequestering biomaterial for construction

• Shop Circle were named in Sifted’s Rising SaaS 100 Rankings, among Europe’s fastest growing and most promising software companies

• We hosted a roundtable breakfast event on Industrial Transformation, as part of London Climate Action Week

• In Berlin, we held an event titled ‘Building in Berlin: Zero to One in 2025’, featuring a stellar panel of Julian Teicke, founder of wefox, Carolin Gabor, ex-MD of finleap, plus Founders Factory CEO Henry Lane Fox and Chief Studio Officer Claire Morris

📍 Opportunities, jobs, events

• The Tech Nation Report 2025, out now: https://report.technation.io/download

Jobs

• Content Lead @ Founders Factory—opportunity to shape, define, and own FF’s content and thought leadership strategy. Find out more here

• Commercialisation Lead @ Founders Factory—support our early-stage portfolio to define and execute their go-to-market strategies, build early customer traction, and lay the foundations for scalable sales. Find out more here

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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Achieving that scientific breakthrough might feel like definitive success. But really, that’s only the beginning.

Proving that your technology can work is one thing; being able to sell it into large companies and disrupt major industries is a whole challenge of its own. This is particularly true in heavy, highly regulated industries—like mining—where safety and reliability often comes first.

Liz Dennett, founder of Endolith, has faced this challenge head on. Scaling deep tech out of the lab and selling to corporates, she says, is one of the hardest things she’s ever done—and that’s coming from someone who climbs mountains in her spare time.

In today’s Startup Bulletin, Liz shares her insights into disrupting heavy industry, and the four things that have found her some success in this regard.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• 📚 This month’s reading list

• 🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio

• 📍 Opportunities in tech (events, jobs, etc)

Subscribe now

Endolith’s Liz Dennett: On disrupting heavy industry

Liz Dennett, founder of the biointelligence startup looking to transform copper recovery, shares what she’s learned about disrupting a heavy industry like mining

Start with an immediate problem

When I joined Cemvita (the forerunner to Endolith), I was coming in with a strong view to the potential of microbes as an application to numerous areas in the mining industry and its value chain.

The problem is—industry doesn’t reward future potential. It rewards immediate results and impact. So the most important decision I made was to get our team to sit down and figure out where we could have the most immediate impact on the climate transition—not in ten years time, but right now.

This brought me back to a conversation I’d had during my PhD, about the most important resource for the future of humanity. Copper—a critical element for the transition to clean energy—always cropped up. So I brought these two things together—microbes, an organism that can radically improve metal recovery, and copper.

That mantra keeps popping up for me—cash is king, focus is queen.

Show you understand—and care

You’re often told in technology to not shy away from being an outsider, a disruptor. But things work a little differently in heavy, highly regulated industries. These companies are risk averse and safety always comes first: anything that changes too radically without the right checks and balances might result in injury or worse.

I’ve tried before blundering in as an outsider: but you’re much more effective in showing that you understand the industry, that you’ve taken time to listen and hear their problems, empathise with what they value, and demonstrate how you think they can move forward.

Tap into insider knowledge where possible

One of the best advantages you can build, and a great way to demonstrate understanding and nuance, is through tapping into insider knowledge. This may be industry experts, or even people who work at the types of companies you are trying to sell to.

This was a huge advantage of the Founders Factory Mining Accelerator, which gave us senior level access to Rio Tinto, giving us strong insight into the dynamics of selling to the mining industry, and potential problems to be solved at these multinationals.

Footnote: For many founders, speaking to ‘insiders’ will take place through the discovery phase, where you should speak to as many industry professionals to start to build an image of your ideal customer profile and the problems you are solving for.

Incremental gains aren’t enough

Scaling and selling deep tech is incredibly hard. You can’t pin success on a 10%-20% improvement. Your product should not just be the better option, it has to be the easiest possible choice, a solution that can easily adapt to existing systems and demonstrate radical improvements.

I keep reminding myself that to succeed, ”Market adoption has to be inevitable”.

This has been excerpted from our recent founder spotlight on Liz Dennett, which you can read in full here:

Read full article

📚 This month’s reading list

• AI Eats the World (Benedict Evans)

• Forget SEO, the hot new thing is ‘AEO’ (Business Insider)

• The Art of Evals: How Figma Put People at the Center of Its AI Product (First Round Review)

🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio

• We announced the launch of the Future Industries Partnership, a philanthropic initiative funded by HSBC to fund new technologies focused on decarbonising and upgrading heavy industries like steel and cement. We’ll be providing hands on operational support to those companies involved

• We hosted twelve startups from our mining and nature tech accelerators in Perth for a week of in-person programming, networking, and partner engagement, culminating in an opportunity to pitch to a room of industry leaders and investors

• Endolith, the mining biointelligence platform, published the results from its testing with Think & Act Differently (BHP’s innovation arm), demonstrating significant advances in copper recovery from low grade ores—essential for meeting the growing demand for copper

• Valarian announced a further $7M in funding, bringing their seed funding to $20M. They’re building infrastructure for secure data management, focused largely at highly regulated industries like defense

• Our team visited Vancouver to host the culmination of our first Blue Action Canada program, featuring eight startups innovating in the blue economy space. This included programming as part of Web Summit, being held this year in the British Columbia capital

Opportunities in tech

📆 Events

• SLINGSHOT by SWITCH (October 29th - 31st)—SLINGSHOT is a global deep tech startup pitching competition, part of the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH), taking place 29th to 31st October 2025. Find out more and register here

📍 Jobs

• Founder & CEO at Capita—we’re looking for an entrepreneur-in-residence to lead the strategy & build of our latest fintech concept, an AI-powered financial companion for ‘emerging affluents’

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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To Dan Secretan, AI isn’t a replacer, it’s an enhancer. A “super strength”.

The proof is in the pudding. In teams which are using Xapien’s LLM-based background checking platform, researchers are now known as ‘strategic analysts’, advising the business on how to proceed based on Xapien’s research.

The story of Xapien is a great example of building ahead of a wave, becoming a category leader in a technology as it reaches maturity and widespread application. In this month’s newsletter, we look at the four steps that have brought Xapien to where it is today.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin

• Our recommended reading from this month

• Highlights from our global startup portfolio

• Opportunities, roles, events

Subscribe now

Building Xapien in four steps

Xapien’s founder Dan Secretan shares the four key steps that brought his business to where it is today:

1. Identify a growing problem

My co-founder Shaun and I had spent many years combined working in financial crime, law enforcement, and security, seeing how technology can be applied to empower these sectors.

As the internet hit the mainstream, the types of threat and risk we saw emerging was unlike what we were seeing before. As business became increasingly globalised and online, it was harder than ever to understand who you were doing business with: and our due diligence systems weren’t adapting to keep up with it.

It was in dire need of a context layer—something you could map on top of existing systems to increase understanding, context, and accuracy.

2. Harness an evolving technology to solve it

We quickly identified two technologies—or technology phenomena—which could solve this. Shaun’s background was in open source intelligence, using the wide range of publicly available information on the internet to enhance decisions or data. I, meanwhile, was already seeing the potential of AI, in particular the lesser known technology of large language models (LLMs).

The combination of these two things could be gamechanging. There was so much information on the internet (news articles, blogs, reports) that could help you truly ‘know your customer’ better than ever before. LLMs fed on this information could provide comprehensive, and more importantly, accurate background checks.

And thus, Xapien was born.

3. Find your first buyer to start generating revenue

Given my background was in financial crime, we set out to target a huge industry: financial services. I had seen even just a glimpse of the money these organisations spend on background checks and due diligence: and if we could capture even just a fraction of this trillion dollar market, and make progress, we could see huge benefits.

The catch? Financial services are incredibly hard to sell to. They have slow sales cycles and procurement processes, especially given the rigidity of their existing due diligence systems. So we had to look elsewhere—one, to build confidence with other potential customers, and two, to start generating revenue.

What quickly transpired was that there we had a blindspot to an entirely different category of companies who used background check technology—philanthropic donations. Everyone from universities, to museums, to arts organisations, all investing money in understanding where the money they are being given is coming from. The additional context that Xapien provided meant that checks were tailored and nuanced to each company's needs.

One such example—a cancer charity, who wanted to flag donations from tobacco companies.

4. Balance future & present to develop your product

We've found significant benefits in separating core product development from exploratory research and development.

We have two distinct teams: an engineering team focused on building specific product components, and a smaller research team dedicated to exploration and experimentation with new models to discover advancements. The collaboration between these teams allows us to consistently deliver, while ensuring we are still pushing the limits of what we’re able to do.

Read more

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• Vertical AI: beware what you wrap (Matt Brown)

• The Next AI Wave Will Be Social, Not Solo (Every)

• All At Sea (BLLNR)

• The Truth Behind UK Startups (Entrepreneur UK)

🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory’s global portfolio

• We announced our new Crypto & AI Accelerator, backed by Coinbase, Animoca Brands, and Fabric Ventures. Read about it here in Sifted

• We closed our next six investments for our Mining Tech Accelerator, including Durin (fully automated drill rigs), Terra AI (AI modelling for exploration), and Rock Zero (zero waste lithium extraction). Check out our full cohort here

• We also announced our latest Nature Tech Cohort, featuring six startups from Australia, the UK, and Canada. Check out the full cohort here

• Ceto announced $4.8M in seed funding, as they build out their data intelligence platform for commercial shipping insurance

• Lucy Adams, co-founder of Martee AI, was named in the latest Forbes 30 Under 30, in their social impact category

• Durin, the automated drilling rig startup, announced their $3.4M seed round, led by 8090 Ventures with investment from a16z, among others

• Gridshare launched their latest crowdfunding campaign, offering the chance to invest and co-own a newly constructed solar farm. Learn more here

📍 Opportunities

Roles

• Founder Engineer at Ditto—AI-powered social network. Learn more here

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Today marks our 50th edition of the Startup Bulletin. It’s official—we have more editions than James Bond books, Harry Potter books, and Game of Thrones books combined.

Over the past four years, we’re shared insights on everything from launching a crowdfunding campaign to coding your MVP, from low carbon cargo drones to autonomous wind-harnessing yachts. All with the central mission of putting the thoughts of the best of the startup ecosystem into the hands of those currently in the weeds, building.

As we mark the big half century, we reflect back on some of the trends we’ve picked out over the past 50 newsletters, and what it’s taught us about the long and often bumpy road of starting your own business.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• This month’s reading list

• Highlights from our global portfolio

• Opportunities, events, roles & more

Subscribe now

🔎 Startup Bulletin at 50: Four trends we’ve spotted

The deep tech vibe shift

When we launched the Startup Bulletin, our content largely reflected the types of investments we were making—largely consumer facing, software businesses. Take our first ever newsletter on crowdfunding (#1), a practice usually reserved for startups looking to get their product into the hands of eager users, who they can bring in as early ambassadors by investing.

Deep tech, as the name suggests, occupied the peripheries of investors' minds. Considered capital intensive, unscalable, complex, investors steered away from these types of investments.

If there’s been any huge shift in venture we’ve noticed over the last fifty editions, it’s been the vibe shift around deep tech. We detailed our thoughts about this shift here (#40)—in short, those willing to enter into the risk of building a deep tech company are rewarded with creating category-defining, groundbreaking technologies, on top of which many applications can be built. The rewards—financial, social—are huge, and investors are catching on.

One great example is in #45, our profile of DRIFT Energy (#45), who are building not one but two deep techs into one product—an AI routing algorithm to follow optimal sailing conditions, on board an autonomous sailing vessel that harnesses wind and converts it into green hydrogen.

The rise of the Venture Studio

Writing a newsletter ‘for founders, by founders’ is convenient in that it largely guides itself—working closely with founders, we’re largely attuned to what founders are looking to read about.

We’ve seen an interesting shift in terms of the type of support that founders are looking for. An abundance of AI has meant that startups can operate much more lightly on their feet. Capital alone is not enough to navigate these uncertain waters; expert, operational support (not just advice) from a very early stage is key.

Our Venture Studio model, which we launched eight years, is swiftly gaining popularity in the market. We shared a primer on Venture Studios here (#36), detailing our unique (at least we think so) support model that derisks concepts before attaching a founder, coupling them with a comprehensive support package that includes a hands-on venture builder, corporate expertise, and bespoke functional support.

Climate remains our biggest challenge—but how we’re solving it is changing

It’s certainly not news that we’re now closer to solving the climate crisis today than we were four years and fifty SB editions ago. Attitudes to climate tech differ depending on who you speak to, and the challenges that climate tech founders (#34) faced two years ago certainly haven’t gone away.

One thing remains true—that finding better ways to manage our population and the Earth’s resources remains top of the agenda. This stretches to everything from how we discover and excavate natural minerals to how we create energy to how we construct our built environment.

The next industrial revolution—to find smarter, more efficient, and cleaner ways to do business—is happening in front of our eyes, and we’re excited to feel as close to it as we do.

Drawing trends between successful founders is futile

Launching the Startup Bulletin, I (naively) thought it would help me get into the consciousness of a founder and understand what was in the DNA for successful entrepreneurs. The more founders I speak to, the more futile I realise this is.

We’ve spoken to everyone from Canva’s Melanie Perkins (#33) to Calm’s Michael Acton Smith (#31), as well as our own portfolio including Scan.com’s Charlie Bullock (#43) and Dronamics’ Rangelov Brothers (#25).

Advice pings back and forward—knowing when to pivot versus knowing when to stick to your guns; following fast moving waters versus being wary of hype. So trying to find a common thread can truly be like searching for that non-existent needle in a haystack.

But don’t worry, we’ll keep trying to find it over the next 50 editions too.

📚 This month’s reading list

• Ben Thompson interviews Sam Altman (Stratechery)

• Michiaki Matsushima speaks to Yuval Noah Harari on AI (WIRED)

• Hyperlegibility (Not Boring)

• PLUS one to listen to—Byway’s Cat Jones on Radio 4’s You and Yours

🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio

• Founders Factory was named the UK’s top ranked startup hub, according to the Financial Times European Startup Hubs ranking. The annual list of incubators and accelerators ranks 150 organisations across Europe, with Founders Factory placing fifth overall

• We kicked off our second cohorts for our Mining Tech and Nature Tech Accelerators, with twelve new startups across both programs. See more details on these cohorts below

• Shop Circle announced their latest $60M Series B funding round, as they grow their suite of e-commerce tools. The latest round, led by Endeavor, brings their total funding to $245M

• We saw four companies featured in the Sifted 100, ranking the UK & Ireland’s fastest growing companies—Scan.com (#13), Xapien (#38), Tembo (#48), and Byway (#61). This places us in their top ten investors of fast-growing companies

• Atmcooling announced $2.6M in pre-seed funding, whose evaporative cooling technology aims to transform deserts into agricultural and climate resilience hubs

• Brineworks received a $1.8M European Innovation Council grant, to help supercharge their direct ocean capture technology that turns seawater into a scalable feedstock for e-fuels

• Ocean Ledger closed $975K in pre-seed funding. They’re providing high-resolution geospatial analytics for coastal risk assessment and environmental impact analysis

• Fantix, the enterprise AI startup, sold their adtech business to smart technology company Life360 to help power smarter, targeted advertising solutions

• ACUA Ocean launched their first unmanned surface vehicle, the USV Pioneer, in Plymouth as the ocean data collection company continues to undergo sea trials

📍 Opportunities

Events

• Women in AI Drinks (Wednesday 9th April, London)—a chance to meet likeminded founders, investors, and operators working in the AI space

Roles

We’re hiring for several roles in our Venture Studio, including for EIRs and entrepreneurial product designers:

• Founder & CEO at Delorean (AI Agent Insurtech)—lead strategy & build of our latest Aviva Fintech venture

• Founder & CEO at Tetto Assicurazione (LLM-Powered Home Insurance)—lead strategy & build of our latest Fastweb Studio venture

• Venture Builder (Product Lead/Product Design Engineer) at Founders Factory London—join our Venture Studio team in London

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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The gender finance gap is real.

Women are less likely to hold bank accounts, they’re less insured, women-owned businesses are less likely to get access to credit. Despite radical transformations over the last decade, women still have worse access to financial services than men.

You can trace a clear link back to the underfunding of women-led fintech startups—receiving around 2% of VC funding. This is leading to fewer women-led companies, with fewer women-oriented (or at least, personalised) financial products on the market. How can fintech promise to widen access to finances to all, when half the population is so underrepresented?

To mark International Women’s Day this week (March 8th), we’re taking the opportunity to highlight four women entrepreneurs who are leading the way in fintech’s transformational decade.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• Highlights from the Founders Factory portfolio

• What we’ve been reading this month

• Opportunities in tech

Subscribe now

💸 Four women transforming fintech

Solving financial advice’s data problem

⭐️ Nicky Sevel, CEO & co-founder of Woven

It’s not so much a case of whether AI can disrupt wealth management—it’s more a case of how. Data is the major blocker here, given that most advisors work with fragmented or incomplete data siloes and therefore can’t properly leverage data.

This is the problem that Woven is solving, with founder Nicky Sevel at the helm. Nicky’s career has seen her bridge roles across wealth management, from financial planning to solution designing. Woven is in fact her second business in the space, having previously founded Neeshe, aiming to democratise financial advice to financial advice for women.

The business was recently named in Sifted’s 14 Wealthtech Startups to Watch.

You can listen to her recent appearance on the Women Talking Money podcast here

Disrupting data collection & upgrading the gig economy

⭐️ Lindsay Forster, CEO of Shepper

Lindsay Forster leads Shepper, the smart asset checking business. The concept is simple: their community of ‘Shepherds’, now numbering over 200,000, completes tasks set by organisations (consumer, media, real estate, etc) ranging from data collection to asset checking to quality testing.

The business has quickly become a thriving community enabling people to earn flexible, extra income, as well as provide support and training to others on the platform.

Lindsay describes the opportunity she sees attached to Shepper: “At the centre of all this, we’re trying to help our Shepherds succeed personally and professionally. Working for Shepper doesn’t require any specialist skills or qualifications: we give all the training in our app to get them started.”

Read our profile of Lindsay, alongside Shepper founder Carl Ameln

Providing financial coaching for all

⭐️ Alisha Chowdhury, CEO & founder of Kiro

Personal finance advice is ordinarily the preserve of the super wealthy. Advice for young millennials and gen Zs, meanwhile, is few and far between—anything that does exist is largely online and can be hard to decipher or trust.

“Over 75% of Gen Z say they’re stressed about their personal finances. Most turn to friends, family, or social media platforms like Reddit for financial guidance, but these sources often lead to poorer economic outcomes,” Alisha said in an interview with Poets & Quants.

That’s what drove Alisha to found Kiro, the first AI-powered financial coach aimed at connecting young adults to personalised financial resources. Their partnership model sees them offering Kiro’s white-label solution to credit unions, building societies, and pension providers, ensuring that customers have 24/7 access to a financial coach within their existing platforms.

Bringing due diligence on-chain

⭐️ Cindy van Niekerk, CEO & founder of Umazi

Umazi is a startup that uses distributed ledger technology to accelerate corporate identity verification and due diligence for cross-border trade and working capital optimisation. It’s designed to reduce the time and cost of verifying partners, suppliers, and other corporate entities.

Cindy founded the company off the back of her experience of consulting for the banking industry, having managed projects at the likes of JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Barclays. One experience stood out to her: “The bank, like all the others I previously contracted at, distributed communications to their clients to help them become compliant with the latest regulation. One client sent us a photo of his desk with the comms strewn across his desk. I was taken aback by the lack of client consideration.”

The aim is to enhance trust, transparency, and compliance across financial services.

Read last year’s IWD newsletter:

Women leading the climate revolution

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• Don’t Call It Deep Tech (Cantos Ventures)

• The Humane AI Pin never had a chance (The Verge)

• The Next 10 Years Will Be About the AI Agent Economy (NFX)

• Vibe Coding: The New Way We Create and Interact with Technology (Patrick Chan via AI Monks)

🚀 Highlights from the Founders Factory community

• Shop Circle announced a $60M Series B as they look to advance the next generation of e-commerce software. The round was led by US firm Endeavor and Italian fund Nextalia

• Claro AI, who helps SMEs deploy small language models from unstructured data, closed €650K in pre-seed funding

• Matnex announced their partnership with Veridien to launch the world’s largest and most advanced supercomputer for material discovery, backed by investment from the likes of Samos Investments, Ada Ventures, and MDOne, among others

• Metalchemy won the PITCH trophy at Web Summit Qatar. The nanotechnology startup builds in antibacterial properties into food packaging, aimed at reducing food waste

• Vycarb were named in Forbes’ list of 5 Environmental Startups Leading the Way in 2025, highlighting their technology for water-based CO2 removal and storage

Opportunities

💼 Roles

• Founder & CEO at Project Delorean (reimagining insurance infrastructure with AI)—we’re looking for an entrepreneur-in-residence to lead strategy and build of our latest Aviva Venture Studio project

• Tech Co-founder & CTO at Regeno (financing transition to regenerative agriculture)

• Tech Co-founder & CTO at MietMagie (neobank for renters)—must be based in Germany

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.

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Interviewing DRIFT Energy’s founder Ben Medland last year, I asked him why he thought the oceans got a fraction of the attention that the wider environment does. His answer:

“It comes down to mind share and proximity. People have sympathy for the ocean, but they rarely interact with it. The people who do, really get it. But there are so many problems in the world right now, that we’re often distracted by what's in front of your eyes.

“The ocean is hidden.”

The blue economy receives less than 3% of total climate investment, according to a recent report by JP Morgan. The statistics are striking, for something which covers more than two-thirds of our planet, and stores 50x times more carbon than the environment.

Shipping is one such critical focus area. While aviation is far more carbon intensive than shipping, the overall impact of the shipping industry massively outstrips aviation—accounting for 3% of global GHG emissions.

Solving for shipping means solving for the oceans. Solving for the oceans means solving for the planet. So is the shipping industry open to decarbonisation? In this month’s Ocean Special Startup Bulletin, we look at various solutions that are disrupting the shipping industry to make it cleaner and more efficient.

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• Our top recommended reads

• News from our portfolio

• Opportunities, jobs, etc

Subscribe now

🚢 Can shipping go emissions free?

Four startups transforming, disrupting, and decarbonising the shipping industry

Armada

The problem: Shipping uses a popular technology called ‘air lubrication’ to help boats travel more efficiently. In essence, these are machines which release a thin layer of microbubbles across the hull of a ship, to reduce friction with sea water.

This technology is not without its flaws though. Most systems rely on compressors, energy intensive machines that can even increase the drag on ships when not in operation. Their efficiency is disputed (many estimate they lead to between 0 and 7% in fuel savings), and are also limited to certain conditions (they have limited efficacy in stormy seas).

The solution:

Armada has patented a new ‘passive air lubrication system’, using the ship’s forward motion to create a precise air-water mixture for lubrication which crucially doesn’t rely on air compressors. This system gives better overall performance and is adaptable to various conditions.

Their impact: It’s summarised best in their tagline—”The cleanest energy is the energy we never use.”

Brineworks

The problem: Electrification faces a huge roadbump when it comes to shipping. Instead, the industry (as will many ‘heavy industries’) will rely massively on the production of e-fuels (the likes of CO2 and hydrogen) for clean power.

The solution: Brineworks ingeniously tackles two ocean challenges. They draw on the ocean’s vast carbon store (as well as its near infinite supply of hydrogen) for the scalable and sustainable production of e-fuels, through saltwater electrochemistry.

The impact: Brineworks expects to be able to extract CO2 at less than $150/ton, well below current costs of $600-$1000/ton, while at the same cleanly powering maritime (as well as aviation). Moreover, their modular system creates the possibility for fuel production anywhere you find seawater.

Metal Light

The problem: While focus sits firmly on the ships themselves, we can’t ignore port infrastructure when it comes to wider decarbonisation. Port side power remains a huge issue, with ships relying on diesel engines to generate electricity even while docked.

The solution: Metal Light metal-air generators create sustainable and circular energy from waste metal. Once used, metal is oxidised, refined, and ultimately reused.

The impact: Standard shore power cable handling equipment can connect their metal-air generators to ships’ internal distribution, allowing them to turn off internal generators and run cleanly when docked.

Offshore Designs

The problem: ‘Hull fouling’ (AKA dirty ship hulls) has a huge impact on the efficiency and speed of vessels. It’s believed to add $30BN in costs every year to the shipping industry, not to mention the vast environmental impact.

The solution: Offshore Designs’ HullM8 robot is the first hull cleaning robot capable of cleaning a wide range of growth. This is done proactively, while ships are in ports to unload or refuel, rather than in a dry dock.

The impact: Proactive hull cleaning has a vast range of benefits for the shipping industry, not only offering cost savings but also reducing GHG emissions, preserving hull coatings, and reducing dry dock time.

—

These four companies are all part of our Blue Action Accelerator portfolio. If you’re building in this space, or solving other blue economy challenges, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more here

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• Gold rush: Why VCs suddenly love mining (Sifted)—featuring comments from our head of investments, Olivia Brooks

• What to watch in 2025 (The Generalist)

• The Five Stages of AI Agent Evolution (NFX)

• By default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI (LessWrong)

🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory & our portfolio

• We announced the launch of Blue Action Canada, with plans to initially back eight British Columbia-based startups innovating in the blue economy. Check out details of our first cohort here

• We kicked off our CODE Accelerator, a bootcamp bringing some of MENA’s top early stage entrepreneurs to London for six weeks of in-person programming and networking.

• Entrepreneur featured profiles of two stellar founders from our portfolio: Cat Jones, founder of Byway; and Gauthier van Malderen, founder of Perlego

📍 Opportunities in tech

Applications

• We’re welcoming applications for a number of our Accelerator programs. See below for details and deadlines:

  • Western Australia Nature Tech Accelerator (deadline February 14th)

  • Pico Media & Live Events Accelerator (deadline February 16th)

  • Blue Action Accelerator (deadline February 28th)

Jobs

• We’re looking for an Entrepreneur-in-Residence to lead Project Delorean—our latest insurtech startup in our Aviva Venture Studio. Find out more here

Other

• All Response Media have launched their TV Star Competition, giving startups a chance to win a fully-funded TV ad campaign worth £50K. Past winners include Calm, PensionBee, and Carwow—and this year, we’re on the judging panel. Find out more & apply here

• Tech Nation, supported by Founders Factory, has just launched the annual UK Founder Survey, which will directly inform The Tech Nation Report 2025 (and your chance to win £1000 in cash, an exclusive invitation to the Future Fifty Forum, and a bumper startup support package for your business). Find out more & complete the survey here

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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A glance at Europe’s biggest tech successes, the large proportion are in fintech.

Over the past decade, fintech has certainly received the most attention from entrepreneurs and innovators. In our own portfolio, we’ve seen ingenuity applied to the ways we…

…borrow & save to buy a house (Tembo)

…pay for & access digital health services (HealthKey)

…pay for care for relatives back home (Nila)

And that’s just the thin end of the consumer wedge.

And yet, in 2025, there are many problems to be solved. Huge populations remain ‘unbanked’, while traditional financial services are weighed down by outdated, cumbersome processes. Fintech remains a huge opportunity.

Instead of making predictions about where the market is going, we asked our team: “Where should founders be building in 2025?” In our first Startup Bulletin of the year, we shared some key excerpts on this below.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• Shout-out to our top recommender

• Top newsletters to subscribe to in 2025

• Opportunities in tech

Subscribe now

💡 Fintech’s biggest problems-to-be-solved

Crowdsourced from the Founders Factory Operations Team

Building the infrastructure for stablecoins

Despite the crypto market’s recovery, scepticism remains over the technology’s long term use cases. Stablecoins are gaining traction through major players like Stripe, PayPal, and Revolut—who are clearly interested in their application for seamless, borderless payments—entrepreneurs are still navigating challenges related to infrastructure, regulation, and building trust in these digital assets.

Founders have a chance to focus on building essential stablecoin infrastructure that supports their real-world application, whether that’s in managing cross-border payments, microtransactions, or embedded wallets to drive adoption. Simultaneously, there’s a chance to address regulatory challenges by developing platforms for global compliance, on-chain auditing, proof-of-reserves verification, and other tools that build trust in stablecoins.

Hyperpersonalisation for consumer financial services

Imagine we could go back and build banks, or even neobanks, with AI at our fingertips—how different might these look?

Many financial incumbents have struggled to properly integrate AI across their operations and services. There’s a growing demand for consumer-facing AI tools that cater to a tech-savvy generation seeking hyper-personalized and automated financial management solutions. Everything from paying your bills, to optimising your subscriptions, to investing your spare change—all managed by AI.

Founders have a chance to dive into niche areas where AI can deliver measurable value—that can not only accelerate processes but also simplify the output for the consumer.

Reorienting wealth creation for 2025

Traditional financial services have failed to adapt to evolving lifestyles and social dynamics, particularly in the context of wealth creation. Financial products remain predominantly individual-focused, while new collective approaches to wealth—shaped by changing family structures, rising social movements, and shifting preferences—are largely underserved. There is a gap in catering to diverse financial units such as modern families, investment groups, and individuals opting out of traditional family models.

Entrepreneurs can innovate by designing financial platforms that reflect modern collective dynamics. These might be tailored to evolving family structures, like platforms that account for interconnected financial needs (e.g. pensions and family caregiving), or tools that enable wealth creation for non-traditional units, like friend groups or colleagues.

Managing the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer

$84 trillion is set to change hands over the next two decades, fundamentally reshaping the financial landscape. Traditional financial institutions and advisors risk losing relevance as this new generation of high-net-worth individuals demands digital-first, impact-driven, and alternative investment solutions. Entrepreneurs must address the challenge of meeting these shifting behaviors, values, and expectations.

Founders should look at catering to this digital-first, mission-oriented younger generation. Develop investment platforms that prioritize impact-driven and alternative assets to align with their values. Or innovate in areas like digital wealth management, replacing traditional financial advisory services with scalable, tech-enabled solutions.

Read the full article

📣 Community Shout-Out

We’re starting this year by shouting out one of our top newsletter referrers: Lauren Schuivens, founder of Samavira.

Samavira is an online meditation community, hosting free and premium live and guided meditation courses for a range of different needs. Meditation is a particularly useful tool for entrepreneurs, offering increased productivity and focus, as well as grounding and relaxation in stressful situations.

Find out more & book your first free session here.

(Recommend the Startup Bulletin to your followers for a shout-out)

📩 Top newsletters to follow in 2025

• Every—long form, daily newsletter sharing in-depth insights into business, startup building, and founder experience

• Thinking in Bets—from the former professional poker player Annie Duke, on how to use probabilistic thinking and decision making in entrepreneurship

• UX Collective—a blog/newsletter featuring curated stories and insights on user experience (UX), visual, and product design

• The Beautiful Mess—a newsletter on product development, and various strategies for continuous improvement

📍 Opportunities in tech

Jobs

We’re hiring a number of roles to join our team & early stage startups in our Venture Studio

• Founder & CEO at Delorean (insurance meets agentic AI)—lead the strategy & build of our latest fintech concept backed by Aviva

• Growth / Marketing Hacker at MietMagie (rewards-based neobank for renters)—we’re looking for a freelance full-time growth expert to join our latest Vonovia concept. Role is remote, but you must be able to speak German and have good knowledge of the German market

• Partnerships Lead at Founders Factory Singapore—we’re looking for someone to help us launch our new deep tech hub based in Singapore & to raise capital from local investors and corporates

Get in touch with Raluca if you’re interested in finding out more about any of these roles

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.

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How will 2024 be remembered in tech?

Depending on what you’re reading, this is the year that AI began to fully realise its potential, or rather that it demonstrated the limits of its capabilities. That this was the year that web3 finally reached maturity, or that it merely flagged signs of another crypto bubble.

At Founders Factory, we’ve seen renewed faith that entrepreneurs can address the world’s biggest challenges; and more importantly, that investors are willing to fund this. Breakthrough science and technology will hold the keys to these transformational solutions—solutions that we may not understand or even exist yet.

Given all these, what do the fundamentals of building businesses look like in 2024? We reflect back on some of the best insights we’ve gathered from the best in the industry—future unicorn founders, top VCs, and of course our own operations team—to ask what we’ve learned about venture building in 2024.

Also in today’s Wrap Up Edition newsletter:

• Founders Factory: A Year in Numbers

• Best of the rest—2024 summaries & 2025 predictions

Subscribe now

💡 What we learned about venture building in 2023

…about becoming a founder

• Understand your ability to find shortcuts. There are many traits required to become a successful founder—high risk appetite, adaptability, magnetism—but one characteristic is a real indicator of success. “Great entrepreneurs find ways to make systems work in their favour. Faced with roadblocks and limited resources, they discover workarounds to the ‘rules’ or standard way of doing things, allowing them to unlock an unfair advantage wherever and as often as they can.” Read our full guide to essential founder traits for the other characteristics we look for.

…about raising investment

• Keep it simple when speaking to investors. As cool as your product is, investors look for precedent (that it’s feasible, and it's been done before). That’s what DRIFT founder Ben Medland told us: “Everything we’re doing has been done in aggregate, we’re just the first to engineer it all together.”

• Timing is everything. Fundraising should be well timed to meet the needs of your business, particularly if that means capitalising on a particular opportunity. TrustedHousesitters’ CEO Mathew Prior shares how their Series A was timed to capture the post-COVID tailwinds the business was experiencing, which had a huge impact on their revenue and membership size.

• Investors look for coachable founders. The notion of “strong opinions, loosely held” encapsulates the balance of conviction and coachability that makes a good founder. Investors particularly value this—they want to back founders that they can help, and who are open to their help. When we’re hiring founders, we intentionally pick an area of improvement from a founder’s pitch, to see how they respond to the feedback.

…about building your business model

• Take inspiration from other successes. Gauthier van Malderen describes his business Perlego as a “Spotify for textbooks”. And in truth, that’s really where the inspiration came from. He saw a huge problem around the rising cost of academic textbooks, and sought a tried-and-tested solution: platforms like Spotify and Netflix. “Not only have these widened access to vast volumes of music and film, they’ve made them considerably cheaper.”

• Ask yourself: can you survive without consumer spend? Scan.com founder Charlie Bullock shared one of the best pieces of advice he ever received, which came from Treatwell founder Lopo Champalimaud. “He asked us to consider a business model with zero consumer spend. Essentially, if we cut off all marketing channels, our business would still survive.” That guided Scan.com towards a B2B2C model where, instead of going for consumers, they’ve targeted clinicians and insurers, bringing in swathes of customers without any need for consumer advertising

…about strengthening your network

• Remember the four Cs. Namely—Customer, Colleague, Cash, Coaching. “Any time you are interacting with someone, you should be quickly trying to figure out which one of these four categories that person fits into, and saying that to them as quickly as possible,” explains DRIFT’s Ben Medland.

…on making big decisions

• Be wary of the sunk cost fallacy. Whether you’re hiring, expanding internationally, or changing business models, big decisions need to be made quickly. But they also need to be evaluated quickly. “There’s a fallacy about sunk costs, where you can overemphasise the time you’ve already put in. But in general, I don't think we’ve ever regretted cutting something too soon–the biggest regrets come from cutting too late,” explains Scan’s Charlie Bullock

…on building impact

• Impact doesn’t mean bad returns. Impact venture is often misunderstood. The way we define it: “An impact venture is defined by a business model where impact is correlated with, and driven by, commercial success. A good litmus test that we use is—if you remove the impact, you remove the business, and vice versa.”

💥 Founders Factory: A year in numbers

48 investments made this year through our Accelerator programmes—including 8 startups spun out of our Venture Studio

$1.1 billion, our all-time global fundraising total—including notable fundraises this year from Storyblok ($80M), Perlego ($20M), and Tembo ($18M)

#4, our place in the Financial Times’ European Startup Hubs ranking

4 new partners joined—Rio Tinto, the Government of Western Australia, Vonovia, and Enterprise Singapore

2 exits—Landvault, acquired by Infinite Reality for $450M; and Versed AI, acquired by Exiger

📚 Best of the rest: 2024 summaries & 2025 predictions

• State of European Tech 2024 (Atomico)

• AI eats the world (Benedict Evans)

• Big Ideas in Tech for 2025 (a16z)

• …and pretty much every other 2024 trends report

That’s it for 2024! See you next year 👋

Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.

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It was the Egyptians, over five thousand years ago, who first recognised the potential to harness the power of wind and use it to power ships travelling down the Nile.

Since then, wind—our most abundant source of energy—has been used for manufacturing, agriculture, and more recently, to generate electricity. And now, we’re seeing the advent of a new class of clean energy—using wind to power the production of hydrogen. This is the simple but powerful offering behind DRIFT Energy.

In this month’s Startup Bulletin, DRIFT CEO & founder Ben Medland shared some of his most valuable lessons so far from building at the intersection of ocean and energy. Also in today’s newsletter:

• Our recommended reading list

• Highlights from our global portfolio

• Top opportunities in tech

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⛵️ DRIFT’s Ben Medland: On creating a new class of clean energy

There was a surprising source of inspiration for DRIFT Energy—founder Ben’s son, who asked, “Why can’t we create wind farms that follow the wind?” The result is a new class of portable renewable energy, a wind-powered sailing vessel that harnesses wind to generate clean hydrogen.

As he looks to scale DRIFT and put designs into construction, here are some of the lessons Ben’s learned along the way.

1. Use existing technology where possible

Once we had our central hypothesis—what if a sailing vessel could generate energy—I had to inquire about what it would take to actually build this.

Fortunately, operating in the sailing and maritime industry, innovation has really advanced over the last decade, meaning that a large proportion of the equipment and technology we would require already existed. The materials, a lot of the machinery, even the turbines for capturing the wind, we could all largely buy off the shelf. This made constructing the ‘hardware’ aspect of the business relatively straightforward.

The ‘software’ demanded more ingenuity and innovation. Our hypothesis, for a boat that could follow the wind, led us to an algorithm that could autonomously direct the vessel to optimal conditions. We’ve dubbed this the ‘Goldilocks Algorithm’, taking us to where the wind is ‘just right’.

2. Your product roadmap should be guided by an overarching mission

For DRIFT, this mantra is ‘anything that makes the boat go greener’.

This came from a decision that, if we’re going to be creating a new class of renewable energy, we might as well make it a good one.

This mantra really guides every decision we make. This means making the vessel lighter, more streamlined, faster, so that it can generate energy more efficiently. It means choosing the right materials, that are sustainable or circular, where possible.

As a sailing ship, there are no diesel engines: and now, pending approval, I have a vision that we’ll have no fossil fuels on board.

3. Understand your target market

Working in the energy sector, it’s really important to consider who you are generating energy for. Given that we are creating a new class of energy, we had the opportunity to meet the demands of some of the most underserved communities when it comes to reliable, clean energy.

Operating in the maritime sector, I started meeting island or coastal communities in developing countries, who had scarce access to this sort of power. These communities already import their energy via ship—so why couldn’t we do the same for them, with clean energy?

Step one is ensuring that these fringe communities are not left behind in the energy transition. The next step is potentially even more exciting—creating the opportunity for these largely-maritime nations to become net-exporters of renewable energy.

4. Translate it for investors

Ingenuity is a great thing in climate and deep tech—but it can also be off-putting. Investors look for precedent, for things that already exist, for proven successes.

So when I’m speaking with investors, I try to keep it simple. I tell them it’s a sailing vessel, and we’ve had those for years. That we already have boats powered by hydrogen, we’ve just simply taken that and engineered it in reverse. So basically, everything we’re doing has been done in aggregate, we’re just the first to engineer it all together.

I also stress that this is really a technology of now. That what we’re doing wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago; but that sophisticated shipping technology, clean energy demand, and advancements in AI all demonstrate that this is a product of today.

Read Ben's full story

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• 2024: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise (Menlo Ventures)

• The great carbon clear-up (Founders Factory)

• How the far right is weaponising AI-generated content in Europe (The Guardian)

🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory & our global portfolio

• Tembo announced £14M in Series B funding, as they build out their mortgage platform maximising affordability for buyers & remortgagers

• Calvin Risk announced their $4M seed round, as they build out their platform helping companies analyse real-time insights into their AI portfolio, and potential risks

• Scan.com were named in Deloitte’s Fast 50, ranking eleventh among the UK’s fastest growing businesses

• Ogma announced their approval for use in the NHS as part of the UK government’s rigorous G-Cloud 14 procurement framework, making it the first AI-powered tool for speech and language therapists to receive ‘official recommendation’

• AutoConnexa launched their crowdfunding campaign on Doorway, as they’re looking to transform motor insurance through IoT and telematics technology

• Chiron Health closed their first funding round led by SFC Capital. They’re developing a new data-driven self-care pathway designed to sit alongside medical care

Opportunities

💼 Roles

We’re hiring a number of EIR roles for our Venture Studio, offering the chance to lead the vision and build of new concepts we’re developing. These include:

• Founder & CEO at Tetto—LLM-powered home insurance. Read more here

• Founder & CEO at Delorean—agentic infrastructure for insurance. Read more here

We’re also hiring to join our Operations team:

• Partnerships Lead (Singapore)—a chance to join our newly-launched Singapore operations hub. Read more here

You can see all our open roles here

📆 Events

• Women in Fintech Pub Quiz (December 5th, Central London)—a great chance to meet (and quiz) alongside some of the best and brightest in the industry. We’re particularly keen to welcome founders and investors. Apply to attend here

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.

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Tom Hulme, Managing Partner at Google Ventures, has backed some of Europe’s most promising startups—the likes of Lemonade, Multiverse, GoCardless, and Blockchain.com.

So what does he look for in his early stage investments? 

“If I have shown interest in your business and your product, then it’s more likely that I’m actually trying to understand how the person sitting opposite me (e.g. the founder) is actually thinking about the problem.”

This underlines a near-universally accepted truth—that the founder themself is as important, if not more important, than the business. So what should you be looking for in a founder?

In this month’s newsletter, we share insights from our Venture Studio talent team, who hire 10+ founders every year to build and lead our businesses. They’ve created a practical guide to killer traits we look for in founders, and how to self-assess for them. 

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• What we’ve been reading this month

• Highlights from FF and our global portfolio

• Upcoming opportunities, events, roles in tech

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👀 5 killer founder traits—and how to assess for them

By Raluca Ciobancan, Head of Talent Investing, and Sara Foster, Talent & Community Lead

1. High risk appetite

A strong risk appetite is non-negotiable for founders. Building a startup is anything but a safe bet, and we’re looking for those who can embrace uncertainty and keep pushing, even with odds stacked against them. Timing matters, too; founders need to be ready to trade a stable job for the wild ride of entrepreneurship, focusing on the potential upside rather than the inherent risks. Cat Jones did exactly that, launching Byway, a flight-free travel company, during COVID—betting big that travellers would lean toward greener options post-pandemic. Her risk paid off, with Byway closing £5M in Series A, and thriving across Europe.

Ask yourself: 

• Have your career decisions in the past been proactive or reactive (e.g. are you consciously taking steps forward, even when risks are involved)?

• Regarding previous founding experience (not essential but a positive), are you comfortable with navigating unknowns, acting decisively in the face of uncertainty and adversity?

2. Balance of IQ and EQ

We look for founders who balance smarts with empathy—people who understand the problem deeply and care about the users they’re building for. Great founders connect with customers and inspire their teams by leading with humanity and self-awareness, creating a culture that thrives on impact and growth. Nila founder Anthony Jacob exemplified this, building trust with customers through empathy and a personal commitment to their needs, which has been key to his business’s success.

Ask yourself:

• Are you able to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers—and do you have examples of this?

• What characteristics would you look for in a co-founder that would compliment your own? (this demonstrates your ability to open and reflective about your strengths and gaps) 

3. Authority to build

We look for founder-market fit—founders with a compelling reason and deep experience to lead in their chosen space. It’s a mix of personal insight and industry know-how that makes them stand out. For instance, Ogma’s Louise Weiss demonstrated to us both expertise and passion, blending her background in cognitive neuroscience and years in children’s language development with entrepreneurial drive, giving her a powerful edge in transforming speech therapy with AI.

Ask yourself:

• What is your reason for winning in this space? 

• How are you using your experience to think differently about this problem? 

4. Magnetism

Magnetic founders draw in the best talent, investors, and customers—they inspire people to think, “I want to be part of this.” Storytelling is key. Early-stage startups start with zero credibility—especially if they’re aiming to disrupt the status quo. Good storytelling lets founders paint a vivid picture of where they are, where they’re headed, and why you’ll want to be part of the ride.

Ask yourself:

• Do you have a clear, compelling pitch?

• Are you able to get people excited about your vision, and about the possibility of working with you? 

5. Ability to find shortcuts

Great founders know how to hack their way forward, finding shortcuts and clever workarounds when resources are tight. They think “How can I make this work?” instead of getting bogged down by obstacles. Resourcefulness is a game-changer, setting apart founders who act quickly and inventively.

Ask yourself: 

• Entrepreneurship can be demonstrated anywhere—where have you used it as a skill?

• What’s a time you’ve shown creativity to overcome big problems with limited resources?

Read the full article

📚 What we’ve been reading this month

• Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons (Stratechery)

• The next big areas of competition (McKinsey)

• The State of AI Report 2024 (Nathan Benaich, Air Street Capital)

• Generative AI’s Act o1 (Sequoia)

• Machines of Loving Grace (Dario Amodei)

🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory & our global portfolio

• We announced our expansion into Singapore, partnering with Enterprise Singapore (the government-backed agency for startup development) to launch a new Deep Tech Venture Studio and operating hub

• We announced the inaugural cohorts for our climate and deep tech programs based in Perth. Our Rio Tinto Mining Tech cohort includes companies transforming mineral recovery and discovery processes, while our WA Nature Tech cohort stretches across agtech, marine restoration, and cultural competency.  

• Perlego announced their latest funding round, raising $20M to build out a new suite of AI learning tools for their edtech platform

• Our team attended Climate Week NYC, co-hosting a dinner with HSBC’s leadership team around decarbonisation, as well as the Ocean Innovator’s Platform with our colleagues at Blue Action Accelerator

• Digital beauty concierge platform Ruuby raised $2.6M as they grow their platform in France and Switzerland

• martee ai, who have built the first demand forecasting tool for the food-on-the-go industry, closed their first round of funding

• Winx’s at-home UTI Test was named in Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2024. Winx is a e-commerce store for sexual and vaginal health products

📍 Upcoming opportunities in tech

📆 Events

• Pitch Perfect (November 12th, Online)—startups get the opportunity to pitch live & receive instant feedback from a panel of VCs including FF investor Claire Mongeau. Apply or register to attend here

💼 Roles

We’re hiring for a number of entrepreneur-in-residence roles in our Venture Studio—a chance to work closely with the Founders Factory team & our corporate partners to lead and build new concepts. 

• Founder & CEO at MietMagie (Vonovia)—building a neo-bank with built-in rewards for the rental sector. Find out more

• Founder & CEO at InsureAI (Aviva)—building agentic insurance infrastructure. Find out more

• Founding Engineer at Virtuals (Pico)—leveraging generative AI to transform social media. Find out more

Check out all our open positions here

See you next month 👋

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In little over a decade, fintech has plotted its path to world domination. 

Not content with revolutionising the financial services industry—through neo-banking, payment technology, cryptocurrencies, and much more—fintech has come to shape just about every industry. Healthcare is front and centre of this, an industry that has historically struggled joining up the dots between the patient, the provider, and the payer (usually an insurer). 

One such company is Scan.com, one of our Fintech investments with Aviva, who in a few years have transformed access to diagnostic imaging (MRIs, CTs, ultrasounds, etc) through building an infrastructure that connects patients, clinicians, imaging centres, and insurers. They’re already one of Europe’s fastest growing companies.

This month, we caught up with Scan’s co-founder & CEO Charlie Bullock, who shared some his most valuable lessons from his journey so far. Also in this month’s Startup Bulletin:

• Our reading list (feat. The New Yorker, a16z, Sequoia, and more)

• Highlights from our global portfolio

• Opportunities this month in tech

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💡 5 things we learned from Scan.com CEO Charlie Bullock

Since launching in 2017, Scan.com has become one of Europe’s fastest growing healthtech companies. At its helm, CEO and co-founder Charlie Bullock, who shares insights into some of his most valuable learnings along the way

1. Shake off the sunk cost fallacy

Early days in a startup is all about running different experiments, taking certain risks, and seeing what works. Early on for us, we made several bold decisions about global expansion, including launching in the US. It was risky, ran against a lot of the advice we received (we’d not even raised a Series A yet): but a few years on, I can now say that has been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. 

At the same time, you have to be hyper conscious of when to cut off an experiment—crucially, not procrastinating a hard decision. Our expansion to the German market did not see the same success as the US, largely because we just couldn’t make the margins work. Very quickly, we realised there wasn’t a big business to build there and we pulled the plug. 

I think you can overemphasise the time and investment you’ve already put into a certain project, hire, product line, etc. But really, in a startup, you can’t make those decisions fast enough. So ditch the sunk cost fallacy and consider quickly if it’s worth your time.

2. Consider: can you survive without consumer spend?

Scan.com was initially meant to be a consumer marketplace that would connect patients to available appointments at imaging centres. With quite little effort, we saw exciting traction for that proposition.

But one great piece of advice came from one of our advisors, Treatwell founder Lopo Champalimaud, who had his own insights from building with Europe’s biggest consumer wellness marketplaces. 

In short, he asked us to consider a business model in which we had absolutely zero consumer spend. Essentially, if we cut off all marketing channels, our business would still survive. 

It was a radical proposition, but made me realise the scope of building in B2C. Consumer is attractive, but it’s often more obvious, meaning it’s saturated. Sometimes the bigger opportunities lie in the complex, less glamorous areas. This advice fundamentally pivoted our approach, seeing us adopt a B2B2C model in which we targeted doctors, insurers, and other telehealth companies with existing cohorts of patients—bringing in customers without needing to spend heavily on consumer advertising. 

3. Be clear about the employee traits you value

As we’ve grown quickly as a team, it’s been tremendously valuable to us to have clearly defined characteristics that we look for in new hires. This is has been particularly important given we’re navigating a complex space (healthcare) and constantly expanding into new markets. 

If I had to single out one trait I value, it would be curiosity. I really can’t stress enough how important it is to have people with an insatiable desire to learn and discover. Healthcare has this complex lattice of incentives, mechanisms, providers, and regulation, and requires people to be able inquire enough to deeply understand it. 

4. Love the problem, not the solution

As we expanded into the US, it became abundantly clear to us that we can’t just copy and paste our UK business model into this new market. In order to really capitalise on the opportunity, we had to really spend the time to speak to all our different stakeholders, from patients to clinicians to insurers, to sketch out a new product stack that would work in this market. 

It would have been a huge mistake at this stage to stick to our guns with what we were doing already. Our success comes down to being problem-minded rather than solution-minded. 

5. Stepping back is often the best thing you can do as a leader

As we’ve grown to over 150 people, spread over two continents, my role as CEO has changed immensely. I’ve found it particularly challenging letting go of the day-to-day tasks. But I have to be mindful of where I can add the most value as a CEO. And often that requires stopping what you’re doing, stepping back, sticking your head above the parapet, and thinking about the future. 

This is excerpted from a Founder Profile of Charlie Bullock on our website. 

Read the full article

We invested in Scan.com in 2021 as part of our Aviva Fintech Accelerator. Applications for our Fintech Accelerator H2 2024 intake are now open, find out more and apply here.

📚 What we’ve been reading

• Why AI isn’t going to make art (New Yorker)

• Top 100 Gen AI consumer apps (a16z)

• Why Edtech startups don’t scale (Gian Segato)

• The Future 100: 2024 (VML)

• The AI Supply Chain Tug of War (Sequoia)

🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory and our portfolio

• Founders Factory Africa relaunched as 54 Collective. Their new identity, representing the 54 countries in Africa, represents their ambition to back founders across the continent agnostic of sector

• DRIFT Energy closed their £5M Series A, led by Octopus Ventures. They’re building a fleet of high performance sailing vessels (see above) to capture wind energy, generate green hydrogen, and distribute it to coastal and island communities

• Endolith emerged from stealth, announcing a $5.1M seed round backed by Collaborative Fund and Overture. They are enhancing copper recovery from mining ores

• Our team in the media…

  • Head of Investments Olivia Brooks wrote in Mining Magazine about the opportunity to decarbonise the mining industry

  • Investor Edo Gentili spoke to UKTN about the current AI investment landscape

  • Head of Data Science Bianca Furtuna spoke to Tech Funding News on AI, machine learning, and her experience as a woman in tech

📍 Opportunities, events, jobs

Events

• Ocean Tech Breakfast (October 15th, London)—welcoming founders, investors, and enthusiasts in the ocean space. Apply to attend here

Jobs

We’re hiring for a number of Entrepreneur-in-Residence roles for the latest projects in our venture studio:

• Founder & CEO @ MietMagie—rental rewards platform, backed by Vonovia

• CTO/Tech Co-Founder @ Regeno—financing the transition towards regenerative farming, backed by Nesta

• Founder & CEO @ Virtuals—gen AI social universe, backed by Pico

See all open roles here

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.

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Metaverse, immersive technology, 3D internet. Call it what you want—Sam Huber is confident in a future in which our physical lives intersect with virtual worlds. 

His conviction stretches back to the start of his career, moving across game development to in-game advertising, now to at the helm of Landvault, one of the biggest 3D world builders and immersive tech developers. They now play a critical role in helping brands create and authentically monetise virtual real estate. 

This month, they announced their $450M acquisition by immersive tech giant Infinite Reality. To celebrate this, we look back at an interview with Landvault CEO & founder Sam Huber, highlighting some of the most valuable things we learned. 

Also in today’s Startup Bulletin:

• Our top recommended reads

• Highlights from our portfolio this month

• Opportunities across tech—surveys, startup programmes, EIR roles

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📣 Refer a friend, colleague, co-founder…

We’ve launched our new referral scheme on Substack:

Refer a friend

 ⭐️ 5 referrals = Newsletter shoutout

⭐️ 15 referrals = Startup spotlight in our newsletter

⭐️ 30 referrals = 1-2-1 Zoom consultation with a member of our Ops Team

💡 Four things we learned from Landvault’s Sam Huber

In the wake of Landvault’s $450M acquisition by Infinite Reality, we share excerpts from our interview with CEO Sam Huber, and the lessons he’s learned along the way as a founder. 

Embrace creativity and experimentation where possible

Sam Huber’s entry into the world of gaming was through ‘hyper casual games’, the minimalist mobile phone games like Flappy Bird that are compelling and easy to grasp.  Despite their simplicity, he relished the opportunity they gave him as a developer and a founder to embrace creativity. 

“Gaming felt like the ultimate expression of creativity: a chance to create your own characters, your own narrative, as well as environments on top of which people can create themselves,” Sam says. 

On top of this, it taught him some valuable lessons about building MVPs—and why momentum is often far more valuable than perfection. 

“For a SaaS business, you need a proper vision and a plan; with a game, you can just build something fun! It felt like the perfect opportunity to just create something fun, put it out into the world, and see how the world reacts.”

Find opportunities to solve your own pain points

The idea for Admix (Landvault’s predecessor) actually came from Sam’s experience of developing games—in particular, trying to find opportunities for monetisation and advertising. 

“In-game advertising was terrible. No matter what we tried, it was too intrusive, it broke the game down, and ultimately you’d spend more time watching ads than playing the actual game. Gamers hated it, developers hated it, even brands hated it, but had no alternative. It was a necessary evil.”

Building Admix, and eventually Landvault, was an opportunity to fix this problem and design an in-game advertising tool that was actually beneficial to all parties, offering content creators the tools to monetise real estate within their games via product placement.

Always look for untapped markets

But while the principal focus of Admix was on in-game advertising, Sam never took his eyes off an even faster growing opportunity in the background: the 3D internet, which encompassed gaming but included metaverses, virtual worlds, and cryptoassets. 

“I’m a believer in blue ocean strategy—rather than competing in crowded markets, creating new market space where you can dominate. I was aware that no matter how well we did at Admix, our upside was capped, and we’d always be competing with the scale of Big Tech companies.”

Pivoting into 3D world building would require expertise and experience—and when the name Landvault popped up, it appeared to be the perfect partner for metaverse activation and brand building. They were already known as one of the most prominent 3D world builders, quickly growing in size, and attracting some of the most exciting metaverse projects out there. 

In June 2022, Sam announced they were acquiring the business and merging under the new name, Landvault. 

The Metaverse isn’t dead 

As quickly as the word ‘Metaverse’ captured everyone’s attention, it shrank back into the background. Billions of dollars of investment seemed, for some time, unable to deliver on these new immersive universes where we’d do our shopping, attend concerts, and so on. So is the metaverse dead? 

Sam believes that investing in the metaverse is an investment for the future, for staying relevant with younger consumers. 

“When older people say, “Oh, the metaverse isn’t for me, I'd never use it,” they’re probably right. Generation Alpha will be the citizens of the metaverse. And moreover, over the next 5 to 10 years, this generation will become the biggest customer segment in the market.”

Read Sam’s story of building Landvault

📚 What we enjoyed reading this month

• Bryan Everlasting (The Generalist)

• Technology Trends Outlook 2024 (McKinsey)

• When AI teammates come on board, performance drops (Harvard Business Review)

• Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit? (Goldman Sachs)

🚀 Highlights from the Founders Factory community

• Landvault was acquired by immersive tech giant Infinite Reality, valuing the business at $450M  

• Versed AI announced their acquisition by Exiger, a market leader in supply chain management. Cambridge University spinout Versed uses AI to enhance supply chain visibility and monitor risk

• Byway (founder Cat Jones pictured above) closed a $6.4M Series A, led by Heartcore Capital with participation from Eka and other existing investors. Offering a flight free, sustainable alternative to travelling, they’re building out an AI trip-planning tool allowing customers to design custom trips

• Xapien announced their $10M Series A, backed by YFM Equity Partners, to scale their AI engine for due diligence

• We launched our new B2B SaaS Fund in partnership with SyndicateRoom, to invest in eight promising pre-seed businesses

📍 Opportunities

• Founders Forum have launched their Big Tech Survey, seeking to understand the level of support offered by the six big tech firms (Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA) to startups and scaleups in Europe. You can take part here

• Tech Nation have opened applications for their Upscale programme, catered for startups on the road to Series B. Applications close August 19th—find out more & apply here

• Seeking Entrepreneurs-in-Residence—we’re currently for several founder roles to lead our latest businesses in our Venture Studio. These include:

  • Regeno—financing the transition toward regenerative farming

  • TuttoAposto—personal savings AI agent

  • Ökofix—retrofitting platform for private landlords

  • MietMagie—rental rewards platform

See you next month 👋

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When French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared “Property is theft!”, he clearly hadn’t accounted for future developments and innovations that would transform the property market.

Over the past decades, we’ve seen a particular concentration of interest around addressing challenges that face urban living. Proptech as a category has meant finding new ways to solve challenges across the value chain, from finding a house, buying one, renovating and retrofitting it, and eventually, selling it. That’s not to mention the trillions in value locked up in commercial real estate. 

In today’s newsletter, we’re celebrating a number of founders thinking particularly creatively around these problems and building exciting new proptech ventures to solve them. 

Also in this month’s Startup Bulletin:

⭐️ What we enjoyed reading this month

⭐️ Highlights from Founders Factory & our global portfolio

⭐️ Opportunities in tech—events, job roles, etc. 

Subscribe now

📣 Refer a friend, colleague, co-founder…

We’ve launched our new referral scheme on Substack:

Refer a friend

 ⭐️ 5 referrals = Newsletter shoutout

⭐️ 15 referrals = Startup spotlight in our newsletter

⭐️ 30 referrals = 1-2-1 Zoom consultation with a member of our Ops Team

🏡 There's proptech for….

One of the most exciting aspects of proptech as a category is how broad and varied it is. Here are a number of opportunities where we’ve seen proptech solutions:

…Building more energy efficient homes

There’s an urgent and growing demand to address household carbon emissions. In the UK, these account for over a quarter of total carbon emissions, a result of leaky, inefficient housing stock; in the EU, this is as high as 36%.

In many countries, it will soon be enshrined in law that housing must meet a minimum standard of efficiency. But how can we ensure homeowners and landlords upgrade properties that that many simply cannot afford to retrofit?

Furbnow is one proptech venture hoping to transform the end-to-end experience of home retrofitting. One platform connects homeowners, contractors, surveyors, and suppliers, streamlining a process that is known for its bottlenecks. 

And for those who cannot afford to retrofit themselves? There’s Econest, a ‘sustainability-led property developer’. Their mission is to buy up leaky housing stock, retrofit it (benefitting from scale of operations), to then manage at scale for large investment portfolios. 

…Improving real estate decision making

AI unlocks decision making for a number of industries—so why can’t real estate be the same? Real estate investors with large portfolios can easily miss valuable information or key opportunities that could prove instrumental to their investments. 

To solve this, Built AI has built a digital twin of the global commercial real estate market, an engine that can power real estate decision making for everyone from investors to brokers to agents. 

…For widening access to home ownership

Getting the first foot on the property ladder can be the hardest—and it’s only getting harder. Millennials are less well off than their parents at the same stage in life, at odds with the increasing cost of buying a house. First time homebuyers are more reliant than ever on intergenerational wealth (AKA bank of Mum and Dad) to secure a mortgage and put together a deposit for a new home. 

Tembo is using this same logic and expanding it, helping first time homebuyers maximise borrowing and mortgage affordability, all through the power of family—whether that’s using a family member as a guarantor, or capitalising on value from their property, or through shared ownership mortgages. 

We’ve just launched a new Proptech Venture Studio, backed by Vonovia, Europe’s largest housing group. We’re already up-and-running with our first two concepts, which you can find out more about below (and how to apply as an EIR):

⭐️ Project ÖkoFix

⭐️ Project MietMagie

📚 What we enjoyed reading this month

• AI Survey: Four Themes Emerging (Bain & Company)

• 2024 SaaS Trends – Usage (Productiv)

• The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value (McKinsey & Company)

• Hi, AI: Our Thesis on AI Voice Agents (A16Z)

• The Startup Manifesto (Startup Coalition)

🚀 Highlights from the Founders Factory community

• Materials Nexus announced the latest breakthrough from their AI & quantum powered material discovery platform. MagNex is a permanent, rare earth free magnet which took just 3 months to design, synthesise and test

• Gridshare reached 100% on their first crowdfunding campaign, offering retail investors the chance to own part of a newly constructed solar farm

• Furbnow founder Becky Lane featured in this month’s Business Green, sharing her key insights from building out a home retrofitting platform

• Nesta hosted a Pitch Showcase, hosting three Mission Studio businesses—Martee AI, Mealia, and Ogma—to pitch to a room of mission-led investors

• We announced our first two MB Speedup investments, in partnership with Mediobanca—Dataspark, who are building a GenAI ecosystem for enterprise, and Connexa, a turnkey telematics solution for car insurers

• Kaizan has launched out of beta. They’ve built an AI powered client service, using natural language processing to measure client sentiment

Opportunities

📅 Events

• Sifted Startup Life (July 9th, London)—join for a discussion on ‘AI vs employees’, as well as a networking session with the Sifted Editorial team

• Jumpstart’s Big Startup 5K (August 6th, Battersea Park)—bringing together 1,000 people from the startup ecosystem to Battersea Park for a 5K fun-run

💼 Job roles

We’ve got a number of open roles across our team and portfolio, which you can check out here. Here are three highlights:

• Entrepreneur-in-Residence @ Project Tetto (Milan, Hybrid)—LLM-powered home insurance

• Accelerator Program Operations Lead @ Founders Factory (Perth)—supporting day-to-day operations of our new accelerator programs with Rio Tinto and the WA Government

• FP&A Lead @ Perlego (London or Remote)—focus on financial operations and strategic decision making at join this fast-growing edtech

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.

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NVIDIA has redefined growth for Silicon Valley. 

Since 2020, the company’s value has grown 18x, from $145 billion to $2.8 trillion. Having successfully capitalised on the AI boom through its manufacturing of chips, as well as development of GPUs, NVIDIA is now poised to overtake Apple to become the world’s second largest business by market capitalisation.

NVIDIA is just one of the many deep tech success stories that has seen the broad category of complex, science-rooted, highly technical businesses become the most coveted investments on the market. For businesses once considered capital intensive and technologically risky, this is a considerable u-turn. 

In today’s Startup Bulletin, we dive into the Deep Tech Opportunity, how we define the category and why we’re so excited about it. 

Also in this Startup Bulletin

• Shout-outs

• What we enjoyed reading this month

• Highlights from the FF global portfolio

• Opportunities in tech—events, job roles

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📣 Before we start…shout-outs

We’d like to start off this month by shouting out our top referrer this month—Natalie Weil & Calin Coman-Enescu from Old Street Ventures. OSV is building a platform providing retail investors the opportunity to invest in VC-level dealflow.

Interested in featuring in the next edition? We’ve launched our new referral scheme on Substack:

Refer a friend

 ⭐️ 5 referrals = Newsletter shoutout

⭐️ 15 referrals = Startup spotlight in our newsletter

⭐️ 30 referrals = 1-2-1 Zoom consultation with a member of our Ops Team

🤖 The Deep Tech Opportunity

Deep Tech has become a wide reaching, all-encompassing, catch-all term that has likely been used to describe anything ranging from quantum computing all the way to novel clean energy. But what actually is it, and why are we so excited about it? 

There are a number of characteristics that define Deep Tech

• Breakthrough. This category of technology isn’t something that already exists and is merely a new application of it. There must be something inherently novel or groundbreaking about deep tech. This is what makes it particularly exciting.

• Originated in science or research. A large amount of deep tech is the result of scientific development or research, often as part of a thesis or focus of study from universities or top research facilities. Our Creator Fund is specifically poised to invest in university-based talent looking to spin out innovative research

• Technology first. In many instances, the technology precedes the business itself. Deep tech founders often spend much of their time finding practical and commercial applications for the technology, around which they can then build a product and a business. The technology behind Jeevan, from our Blue Action portfolio, actually began as a water purification technology—before discovering a more scalable use for removing CO2 via direct air capture.

As a result of these things, two challenges often stand out to investors, and often stand in the way of commercialisation. 

• Resource & capital intensive. These businesses require large amounts of investment in order to find proof points and practical applications. Talent may be highly specialist and technical, resulting in higher operational costs. Many deep tech businesses may also be hardware businesses, meaning they can be costly to manufacture and scale.

• Higher technology risk. The scientific breakthrough is just the first step, and it may still take founders a while to really validate the technology and find product-market fit. That’s why deep tech is largely grant-funded, at least in the early stages

These may be the type of red flags that would scare off certain investors, and may have been what has historically limited investment in deep tech (particularly hardware) as a category. But for us, there are enough reasons to be seriously excited:

Opportunity to create a new market. Investing in deep tech doesn’t mean capitalising on a particular trend. It means driving new trends, with the possibility of creating new categories and technologies that could gain extraordinary momentum. DRONAMICS envisioned a technology capable of transporting cargo across continents at high speed and low cost: it didn’t exist, so they built it.

Not restricted to one particular purpose. Deep tech isn’t just a layer built on top of existing technologies. It is often the building blocks themselves, the foundations on top of which other founders and developers have the opportunity to create exciting new businesses. Monolith AI’s software has applications across numerous industries,

Opportunity to disrupt ‘hard-to-abate’ industry. Some of the most carbon intensive industries, like mining, are also the hardest to disrupt. These industries will require scientific breakthroughs to radically transform their processes across the value chain.

Potential to create groundbreaking impact. From an impact, mission-led perspective, few opportunities are more tantalising than deep tech. If we are to solve society’s biggest challenges, including the climate crisis, we’ll need to invest in the best scientists and technologists to bring breakthroughs to scale.

We are currently welcoming applications for three new Climate & Deep Tech programmes. Learn more about these programs here and how to apply:

⛏️ Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator Program

🌊 Blue Action Accelerator OceanTech Program

🏞️ Western Australia Government Nature Tech Program 

📚 What we enjoyed reading this month

• The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history (Casey Handmer)

• The Unsexy Future of Generative AI Is Enterprise Apps (WIRED)

• Modern Meditations: Tyler Cowen (The Generalist)

• The role of AI in fintech: A 10 year horizon (Founders Factory)

🚀 Highlights from the Founders Factory community

• Storyblok (pictured above) raised $80M in Series C funding, led by Brighton Park Capital with follow-on from Mubadala, firstminute capital, and HV Capital, to build out their headless CMS platforms

• Iris.ai announced their $7.6M Series A funding round, led by Silverline Capital with funding from the European Innovation Council. They’re building an AI to help organisations extract insights from vast volumes of data and research

• StructureFlow closed $6M in Series A funding, led by FINTOP Capital, with follow-on from Venrex, to build out their legal services data visualisation tool for complex deals and transactions

• Insurtech Eleos also celebrated fundraising success, closing a $4M seed round led by Fuel Ventures and Indico Capital. They’re bringing focus and innovation to life insurance and income protection

• Across the pond, healthtech Mae also closed their latest funding round led by impact-first healthcare investor Jumpstart Nova. Mae is building a community support platform for expectant Black mothers

• Our CEO Henry Lane Fox and Creator Fund CEO Jamie Macfarlane appeared in conversation at the recent Tech.EU summit, to discuss ‘Finding Hidden Gems in Deep Tech’

• We launched our investment themes for our new programmes with Rio Tinto and the Government of Western Australia. Learn about our Mining Tech and Nature Tech programmes

• We held our first Women in Fintech event, bringing together over 40 women from across the industry at Founders Factory HQ 

• GridShare launched their first crowdfunding campaign to help people invest in and co-own newly constructed solar farms in Italy. Founder Giovanni appeared in Italy’s La Repubblica to outline the vision of the company

• AtmoCooling were one company featured in Sifted’s spotlight of climate tech in the Middle East, highlighting their atmospheric temperature-influencing technology in the UAE

Opportunities

📅 Events

• London Tech Week (June 10th - 14th)—an annual celebration of technology in the UK capital, bringing together top founders from home and abroad. Have a look at the agenda and how to secure a pass here

• Tech Nation Pitch Showcase (July 3rd)—TN is hosting two pitch events for their Libra (underrepresented founders) and Climate cohorts. Find out more & apply to attend here 

💼 Job roles

We’ve got a number of open roles across our team and portfolio, which you can check out here. Here are three highlights:

• Deep Tech Investor (London or New York)

• Tech & Data Lead (London)

• CTO/Technical Co-founder @ Project Re:geno (Agtech Startup)

See you next month 👋

Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.