Anthony Collias

First Priority: Founder First duty: Protect The Founder at Foundership

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I often talk about ‘building something offline, before raising money’. This is the perfect example of what I mean👇 One of our portfolio companies Tradeaze UK LTD (it’s a biassed example, I’ll admit), identified a pain point: Co-founder, Jack, is an electrician by trade and saw first-hand the amount of time wasted by tradespeople when picking up tools and parts needed for a job.   To solve this pain point: ↳ Jack set up a Tradeaze iPhone, approached tradespeople on the street, handed out flyers and reached out on Facebook groups to his target audience. ↳ Tradies would text the number, asking for a part or tool. ↳ Jack would then jump on his bike to pick up the part and deliver it back to the customer directly. ↳ After a while, Jack started working directly with merchants providing them with a tablet in kiosk mode, with which the merchant would fill in a really simple form and Jack would receive the order email. ↳ Again, Jack or one of the delivery riders would take the part direct to the tradesperson in need. ↳ Jack continued this way until he got to breaking point and couldn’t handle any more daily deliveries. ↳ This is when he expanded his team to bring in even more experience with his co-founders Joe Blair and Ruben Engel. Since they have raised investment from us and other investors. They were able to prove their pain and solution offline, saving them money and time and proving traction to bring on investors ! Raising too soon, before proving you have the right solution is a huge risk. This is a fantastic way to build a business without needing to raise investment right away. Build offline first ! #businesstips #entrepreneurship #startups

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I couldn’t be prouder to be a Venture Partner at Isomer Capital (aka the best European FoF - at least for me) as we just announced the launch of our pioneering £100m secondaries fund. This fund is dedicated to acquiring stakes from LPs in various VC funds, tapping into a massive and largely unexplored market. 🌟 Key Highlights: - Focused Investment: Primarily targeting stakes in VC funds, with selective investments in private companies. - Robust Funding: Already over 20% funded, thanks to strong support from Nordic family offices and a German foundation. - Market Potential: With a growing number of private tech companies and a VC liquidity crunch, Europe's VC secondaries market is poised for rapid growth. - Track Record: This isn’t Isomer’s first foray into the secondaries market. As a firm we’ve done several secondaries deals with portfolio companies and VC firms, including early-stage VC Seedcamp (in 2021) and mobility giant Bolt (in 2023). - Expert Team: Welcoming the amazing Omolade (Rachel) A., formerly of Coller Capital, as a principal to lead this initiative. 💡 Investment Strategy: - 65-75% of the fund will buy "LP interest" stakes in VC funds. - 15-25% will be directed towards stakes in companies. - Up to 15% reserved for flexible investment opportunities. 📈 Looking Ahead: We're targeting returns of 2-3x, with significant distributions expected in the next 4-7 years. As one of the few players in this space, we're not just participating in the market—we're driving it forward. Read all about it here: https://lnkd.in/dc7sbC3G #VentureCapital #SecondariesFund #EuropeanVC

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This is not the responsibility of venture capitalists. More indiscriminate 1 million dollar grants need to be handed out so we can get that from 0.5% to maybe 5%. The government isn't the best at capital allocation. This is a sore spot of capitalism at the moment, wherein truly innovative ideas(or just different/non-validated founders but might work) don't get funding from anyone(too risky for VCs, not grant worthy from Gov, too high interest loans). This is a problem which is my responsibility to solve as well and I don't have a solution. How would you solve?

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NOTWICS would like to alert founders to this lovely message I got from my good mate Tom Britton @ SyndicateRoom This excellent Cambridge based pre-seed and seed stage VC is looking for top founders and hopefully this is the first of many funds ringing the bell saying they are now deploying 💥 - akin to top man Dan Bowyer’s LP post yesterday. The winds of change are coming - funding is coming back From Tom “Hey Chris - We've partnered with Carbon13 to launch their next Climatech SEIS fund. The fund will open to investors on Tuesday and aims to deploy in the current tax year. And on Carbon 13 Carbon13 companies have gone on to raise up-rounds totalling more than £38m. The average age of their cohort participants is 37, a quarter hold PhDs and 63% of their teams are mixed gender”. Their portfolio now has 71 ventures across five key sectors: chemicals and materials, energy, food systems, enabling platforms and the built environment. Founders find out more here and get applying https://lnkd.in/es6EvuN5 Or Direct Message Tom for more Apologies for spelling mistakes - rushing to host a huge defence tech breakfast with FieldHouse Associates and others #startups #scaleups #vc #angel

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"Funding Collapse sends investment in start-ups to six year low" The Times today covering the shocking stats that VenturePath uncovered, with our partner Beauhurst. Great quotes from supporters Michael Moore CEO, BVCA and Julian David CEO, techUK. * UK VC funding at Series A is -44% from last year, and worsening * Q3 24 is down a staggering 57% from Q2, itself down from Q1 * 9 in 10 seed funded startups cannot access Series A VC funding, the next 'rung on the funding ladder' * Just 32 future scaleup companies across the whole of the UK were able to access their first VC funding round in Q3...a 6 year low * Half a billion less capital is going in to UK scaleups at Series A, than just 2 years ago! As the UK scaleup funding gap widens, we are losing ground against other countries, at both startup stage (a position the UK worked hard to achieve, since 2011), and for scaleup support. OECD data: 13th in the world for scaleup support, and that's before Series A funding access dried up. I get that its confusing. Another report (BBB, Nations & Regions) released this week spoke of positive trends in private investment, stating "The data for Q2 2024 shows that investment value has continued to grow". Great, I love to see optimistic data. But under analysis that bundles venture with private equity (later stage), where a few megadeals skew the numbers. Otherwise the exact opposite is true. Our independent research here, for the UK ScaleUp Investment Mission, is laser beam focussed on Series A. The funding round where companies move from the c.1m startups launched each year, through the 2,179 that access seed funding, into the rarefied category of being recognised as future scaleups, attracting Series A funding (£2-10m). The UK venture landscape is currently funding just 248 pa of these companies, and declining. We've been sharing this urgent call for support with the new Government since the day after the election. I've personally met with several Ministers, and spoke to all the relevant Government departments. I will shamelessly repeat loudly what is at stake. UK scaleup funding at Series A has nearly halved in a year, and continues to decline steeply, more than halving in the last quarter. VenturePath developed The UK ScaleUp Investment Mission to convene the scaleup support ecosystem and £7bn of funders to help address this problem, to improve nationwide access to VC investment, and create more venture-backed successes. We have clear support, clear recommendations to reverse this decline in UK scaleup investment, and have made a clear ask of Government for participation in this, to ensure immediate action is taken to create the conditions for success for UK scaleups, ensuring the focus on growth isn't undermined by lack of capital, or equitable access to it. Government decision makers, we'd love your interest, to progress to action. HM Treasury: Rt Hon Rachel Reeves Spencer Livermore James Murray & CC Poppy Gustafsson (welcome to the debate).

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🌱 Apeiron Venture Capital Makes Its First Investment in Green Construction Tech Startup Circuland 🚀 When most people see a building, Circuland sees a Materials Bank. Let me explain. 👇 🌍 The construction industry is responsible for a staggering 40% of global carbon emissions and accounts for 62% of all waste generated in the UK. Yet, despite the scale of the problem, technological innovation in this sector has lagged behind. That’s where Circuland comes in. Circuland is revolutionizing the industry by enabling circular economy practices with its innovative Digital Material Passports. These passports ensure that every building material can be tracked, reused, and repurposed—cutting down waste and turning buildings into valuable resource hubs 🔁. Despite being a young startup, Circuland has already gained traction with Fortune 500 companies and leading construction groups across the UK and Europe 🏗️🌍. At Apeiron, we’re incredibly excited to back the vision of Anastasia Stella (Co-Founder & CEO) and Angelo Mermiklis (Co-Founder & CTO). Their mission to transform buildings into large-scale data warehouses, drive material reuse, and promote data-driven decision-making in property maintenance is exactly the kind of future we want to help build. 🏢💡 This is just the beginning. 🌿✨ 👀  Full-fledged PR in the first comment - current openings in 🇬🇷 in the second comment. 👀 

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Compare this to founders and startups from developing Asia. The avg pre-seed round would be around €100K and Founder's salary would be around €10K PA. Startups with lower burn will be invincible as Innovation and tech tools aren't geo-restricted anymore. #Startups #VentureCapital #Investment #Innovation #Funding

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Whilst there remain plenty challenges to building startups in the UK, as Dan Bowyer says, this is news to celebrate. Nurturing innovation in the UK requires more than just VC money in, but it's a pretty good start.

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Founders, If you're in the fundraising game.... You know there's a phase I like to call 'the gap.' It's that tricky period between getting a verbal nod from an investor and actually seeing the funds hit your account. Verbal commitments are great, but they don't always guarantee a closed deal. Here's how I handle this to keep things moving smoothly: Be Prepared to Act Fast: As soon as you get a verbal commitment, make the next steps as easy as possible for your investor. Any delays on your part can open the door for them to reconsider. Set Clear Deadlines: Make sure your investors know exactly when the round is closing. Setting a firm deadline for contributions helps keep everyone on schedule. Keep the Lines Open: Follow up with your investors regularly. Make sure they have all the information they need and gently remind them of the deadlines. And a little tip for peace of mind. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Hold off on the celebration until the funds are securely in your bank. That's when you know you've really crossed the finish line. ✌️ #venturecapital #vcfunding #entrepreneurship #familyoffice #raisingcapital #fundraising #growth #startups #startupcommunity #startupecosystem #startupfunding

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Femtech has been in the headlines this week, as London-based Flo Health cracked a US$1 billion valuation following its US$200m Series C raise backed by General Atlantic – making it Europe’s first femtech company to achieve unicorn status. This has been controversial news on two fronts. First, the news that first place was taken out by a women’s health app run by an all male founding team, which stands in stark relief to the lack of capital going to women-led businesses - with only 2-4% of VC funding going to women-led companies. Second, Flo is still facing an ongoing Canadian class action claiming that it shared intimate health information – including details about users’ menstrual cycles, pregnancies and sex lives – to companies like Facebook, without their knowledge (and it’s not the first time, either - links in comments). This reflects consumers’ very real concerns about data, safety and trust when accessing essential health care that touches on highly personal aspects of our lives. In my favourite conversation yet, Rachel Yang and I recently sat down with Ida Tin, Danish entrepreneur, author and co-founder of the pioneering menstruation tracking app Clue, who coined the term ‘femtech’ back in 2016, to discuss the intersection of data, power and trust. Some highlights from our conversation? Although funding levels into femtech are not nearly as high as we’d like to see, Ida shared that the sector has evolved dramatically since she started Clue over a decade ago. We’re no longer faced with the barrier that women’s health is a niche area, and this shift has encouraged more women founders to start businesses solving the problems they themselves face. That said, there’s still a long way to go in terms of investors believing the scale of these problems and not subjecting women and gender diverse founders to a higher bar. Femtech solutions like Clue go a long way to addressing inequity in health care by empowering people with menstrual cycles with their health data in three ways – to give you the data to know when something isn’t right with your health, to help collect data to share with your doctor to help your experience carry more weight (although it shouldn’t have to be this way!), and helping healthcare providers connect broader datasets to identify key diagnostic gaps. In the post-Roe v Wade world, transparency on data privacy in the femtech space is more concerning than ever – and the risk here really comes down to the ethics of the people making decisions. Consumers are scared of data leaks and tech companies misusing their trust. Against this backdrop, data regulation in the health space is very necessary, and founders need to make sure they’re treating users’ data with the care it deserves. Check out the link to full interview in the comments below👇 Do you know an amazing founder building in the femtech space? I'd love to chat!

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Is everyone launching VCs nowadays? In late 2022, I enrolled in the VC Lab programme but the timing wasn’t quite right, so I dropped out. Now, with better timing after selling my business, I’ve rejoined the VC Lab again (here is a spoiler into my future plans 🙈) Sifted tracked only 40 new first-time funds with a first or second close in 2023, a decrease from over 60 in 2022. As of 2024, only 18 new VCs have been launched in Europe. Anyone in my network launching a VC fund or considering it? How are you navigating this process? #VC #VentureCapital #Fundraising #BusinessOpportunity

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I've had the great luck to invest in some unicorns at inception. There's not so much you can look for when backing founders that early, but obsession can be spotted early and does play a massive role. In my opinion, our irrational, relentless drive (sometimes without the presence of a clear goal) can be more powerful than intelligence, industry experience, and vision. Thanks to Lisa, I had the honour to discuss my views on investing, my tech ventures, and EWOR with Pádraig Belton from the BBC. Thank you, Pádraig Belton for this fantastic interview. Short teaser below. Full version will be released soon!

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Turning circles Of taxis And venture studios too Efficiency of use Here’s a thought👇🏼 London black taxis are known for their knowledge of the City and for having a tight turning circle. Both are part of their competitive advantages. Plus they are a custom built vehicle to meet a specific role. And so are venture studios. They also have competitive advantages built into their custom build. Speed to market, depth of expertise at hand, shared knowledge and assets, a distinct process to match their needs and a sharp focus on product market fit and a robust scalable go to market strategy. Ticked. Frequently we get asked where do we find our investable ideas from. As a formation venture studio we are creatives and the ideas/concepts are home grown. This has one exceptional outcome in particular. Each business compounds and leverages on the other. The portfolio effect is embedded. So we don’t hunt through piles of business plans and decks, we don’t hang out at pitching events like VCs. We just get on with business. The portfolio effect isn’t simply shared services it is much more than that. In our ideation process we look for compounders. The consequence of this approach is that our efficient frontier is better placed than our competitors. So what’s the prompt for this set of ruminations? We’ve spotted a clear niche within our idea lab that has the scope, scale and shape that excites us. So we’re going to make it happen. And my book is out shortly too. #ThinkLikeAClient #GrumpyOptimist #TechStartUps #VentureStudios #Entrepreneur Footnote: all my content is written daily by me with no additives or tricks. If it interests you please tag the 🔔 in my profile to get it delivered straight to you. Otherwise if you search #GrumpyOptimist you’ll find my library of past posts. Never recycled, always fresh.

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🔻 RIP: The startups that went bust in 2024🔻 Sifted lists 16 startups that filed for bankruptcy, insolvency or administration in 2024: 🔻 Allplants • Location: UK • Product: Vegan meal kits • Year Formed: 2016 • Amount Raised: $81m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Arrival • Location: UK • Product: Electric vehicles • Year Formed: 2015 • Amount Raised: $1.2bn • Valuation When Listed: $13bn 🔻 Cake • Location: Sweden • Product: Electric motorcycles and scooters • Year Formed: 2016 • Amount Raised: €60m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Cazoo • Location: UK • Product: Online car marketplace • Year Formed: 2018 • Amount Raised: $2bn • Valuation When Listed: $8bn 🔻 Cubyn • Location: France • Product: Logistics for online retailers • Year Formed: 2014 • Amount Raised: €52m • Valuation When Listed: €175m 🔻 EasyMile • Location: France • Product: Autonomous shuttles • Year Formed: 2014 • Amount Raised: €55m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Infarm • Location: Germany • Product: Vertical farming • Year Formed: 2013 • Amount Raised: $604m • Valuation When Listed: $1bn 🔻 Lilium • Location: Germany • Product: Flying air taxis • Year Formed: 2015 • Amount Raised: $375m • Valuation When Listed: $1bn 🔻 MaaS Global • Location: Finland • Product: City travel app (Whim) • Year Formed: 2015 • Amount Raised: $162m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Masteos • Location: France • Product: Turnkey rental investments • Year Formed: 2019 • Amount Raised: €70m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Mycorena • Location: Sweden • Product: Mycelium protein for meat alternatives • Year Formed: 2017 • Amount Raised: €35m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Northvolt • Location: Sweden • Product: Battery manufacturing • Year Formed: 2016 • Amount Raised: $9bn • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Prophesee • Location: France • Product: Neuromorphic computer vision technology • Year Formed: 2014 • Amount Raised: €126m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Second Home • Location: UK • Product: Coworking spaces • Year Formed: 2014 • Amount Raised: £60m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 🔻 Stenn • Location: UK • Product: Invoice financing for ecommerce and SaaS • Year Formed: 2015 • Amount Raised: $50m • Valuation When Listed: $900m 🔻 Vässla • Location: Sweden • Product: Electric mopeds • Year Formed: 2017 • Amount Raised: €13m • Valuation When Listed: Not listed 💡 Who do you think should be added to this list? #Startups #TechNews #Entrepreneurship #Funding #StartupLife https://lnkd.in/e8GATNWM

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This year, Sifted has tracked 686 rounds worth €3.1bn raised by european startups launched in 2023 or 2024: here’s what they’re up to, plus a free downloadable list of all tracked fundraises. 📈 #EU #europe #EuropeanStartups #aistartups #deeptech #capitalmarkets #startupfunding #techstartups #vcfunding #AI #artificialintelligence #aitechnology #aipowered #vctrends #aiguided #generativeai #genai #aiinvestments #aibusiness #startup #saasstartups #businessexpansion #startupgrowth #vc #venture #fundraising #funding #capitalraising #earlystagestartups #pe #privateequity #angelinvestors #startupfinancing #venturefunding #venturecapital #investors #startupecosystem #marketdata #innovationecosystem #scaleups #freedownload #list

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🚀 From Garage Startup to Financial Powerhouse: The Full Journey of Mattioli Woods plc 🚀 Join me as I explore Ian Mattioli's journey from a garage startup to the financial giant Mattioli Woods plc. Ian shares insights on work-life balance, structuring a startup, and evolving from pensions to wealth management. Discover how his vision shaped Mattioli Woods plc and our health tech ventures, Care Hires and Kanabo. Ian helped Care Hires grow to a platform connecting 19,000 care workers with care homes across the UK. At Kanabo, he's supported our growth as a telemedicine startup listed on the LSE, connecting 4,200+ pharmacies and launching medical cannabis clinics. A must-watch for entrepreneurs and startup founders seeking inspiration to turn their vision into reality. Learn how these lessons drive innovation and growth in Care Hires and Kanabo Full Version linked below 👇 #Entrepreneurship #StartupSuccess #WealthManagement #BusinessGrowth #LeadershipLessons #Inspiration #HealthTech #MedicalCannabis Leicester Startups, Loughborough University, University of Leicester De Montfort University, Avihu Tamir, Nizam Bata ACCA, Tharaka De Alwis.

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Question for all the founders in my network: What tools are you using for your customer waitlists? 💡 I've seen everything from simple one page websites to more developed integrated engagement/management platforms. Keen to know what people think is good! #founders #vc #startup

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