🚀 The Big 5-0

Founders Factory Startup Bulletin #50

This is the Startup Bulletin—written for founders, by founders. Each month we bring you a round-up of startup and investment stories, key learnings from founders, and insights from the Founders Factory team.

Welcome to the 194 new subscribers who joined us since our last newsletter! Help us grow our 20,326-strong community of founders, investors, and startup enthusiasts by sharing this post:

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

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🔎 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.

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📚 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

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🚀 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

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📍 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

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See you next month 👋

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