Fintech Founder John Regan

There is a particular kind of energy that belongs to people who have been around long enough to know that most problems are the same problem wearing different clothes. John Regan has that energy. We meet in the Electric Bar at The Ned and order two coffees, a light 'breakfast' and good on the purse strings. He is direct, quick, and laughs easily at the absurdities he has accumulated across thirty years of building companies.

Regan has four clean exits to his name. The thread running through all of them - marketing analytics, data intelligence, fintech, adtech - is the same one he is pulling again now. Data. Specifically, the gap between what data exists and what decisions actually need. "The thing that's broken," he says, setting down his cup, "is that there is very, very limited financial information available on private companies."

He walks me through it. Companies House: 95% of accounts are filed without a profit and loss. Even those that do file can wait nine months after year end, then another year passes before the next filing. By the time an investor looks at it, the numbers are already ancient history. Credit bureaus: backward-looking. CCJs and county court judgments tell you what went wrong in the past, not what's about to happen. "I mean, honestly, what relevance is it to me as an investor that someone had a judgment against them? I want to know what's going to happen."

The analogy he reaches for is sharp. Up until 2008, the assumption held that if you looked in the rear-view mirror and the road behind you was straight, the road ahead probably was too. Then everything changed. "Now we're going around country roads, still looking in the mirror, trying to navigate where the turns are. That's the problem."

Regan came to data by an unlikely route. His degree was in public administration - specifically epidemiology, the science of tracking where diseases spread and why. He was selling classified advertising for the Daily Telegraph when the connection clicked. "I realised I could use the same technique to work out who was going to respond to a mail shot," he says.

That became one of the UK's first independent marketing analytics businesses, built in the early internet era when database marketing was still finding its feet. He sold it to Havas. The next business, AI Data Intelligence, went to Communisis. Then Platform Black - one of the early fintech ventures, an invoice marketplace attempting to productise lending through data. The technology didn't quite exist yet to do what he really wanted, so after three years and a five-times return, he took the offer from the second-biggest investor and moved on.

A stint as CEO of a listed acquisition vehicle followed - four years on a public company board, triaging over a thousand companies, watching pitch decks pile up that said very little about where those businesses actually were. "The evaluation was fifteen million. The CEO was on record saying how excited he was. That wasn't very helpful. I wanted to know where they were now." After four years he'd seen what he needed to see. "I'm a builder, not a board member." He went back to building.

Certifii is, in many ways, the business he has been trying to build since Platform Black. The idea: take a non-technical founder's financial data, cross-reference it against sector cohorts and historical benchmarks, validate the model's internal logic, and produce something he calls credibility intelligence - a single, explainable Trust Index, running one to a hundred, with the full analytical architecture underneath it. "Can you provide a credible model which gives you credible intelligence about where the business is going to be in thirty-six months?" he muses.

The product has three layers. The first is the number - immediate, binary, designed to give an investor a fast yes, maybe, or no without having to think about it. The second layer shows the seven axes that construct the Trust Index: liquidity, forecast credibility, hockey-stick detection, cost growth, and others. The third is a full financial model, IFRS-compliant, with cash waterfalls, recurring revenue analysis, and a ready-made investment committee pack. Reports started at around fifty pounds - a price point he clearly enjoys quoting. "About a thousand percent less than McKinsey were charging for the same analysis."

The co-founders matter here. Chris McDonald spent years at TransUnion and CallCredit - one of the architects of the credit scoring infrastructure that underpins UK lending. Simon Hudson has held CTO roles across ten companies and built credit scoring systems from the ground up. The three of them met in different configurations across different decades. Regan and McDonald go back to when McDonald's data business was a supplier to Regan's. They stayed in contact as McDonald built toward running a multi-family office under the NXD banner - a group of investors that includes a cluster of founders from the data world Regan came up through.

NXD, Chris's own multi-family office, went live as Certifii's first pilot partner the week we meet. They are seeing roughly thirty to forty deals a month. "It's a real pain," Regan says. "And with a founding partner, you get absolutely candid feedback rather than 'John, we're not going to continue with that.' It's: this bit's wrong, fix it."

There is a second problem Certifii is built to solve, and Regan is particularly animated about it. The rise of AI-generated financial forecasting. "I can type a single line into a model and get a full financial forecast without knowing a single thing about the business. You just say 'this is a standard SaaS company' and it does the numbers for you." He lets that sit for a second. "What helps if you're a founder who wants to look credible to investors - or a scammy one who wants to spin up four or five companies with a pitch deck each."

The same technology that creates the problem, he is quick to add, is also what made Certifii possible. The proof of concept was built almost entirely with AI tools. Before, something equivalent would have been twelve months minimum, probably twenty-four if it went badly, and between half a million and a million pounds in developer time. "Now that's compressed into a couple of months." The moat, for now, is data that simply doesn't exist in public models. Feed a company into Certifii and it returns analysis that Claude or ChatGPT cannot produce, because the underlying financial data isn't in the public domain. The moat compounds as the ecosystem grows. Every forecast that enters the platform sharpens the benchmarks. The next iteration, roughly a month out when we speak, adds portfolio monitoring - tracking actuals against the model that was submitted at the point of investment. Internally they call the core metric the "say-do gap": what did you say you would do, and what did you actually do?

"It discourages hockey-stick forecasts. And eventually, that Trust Index follows the founder. The next time they raise, we can show how well they performed against what they said last time," he says.

The longer-term vision is something closer to what credit reference agencies do for consumer lending - reciprocal, aggregated data across a whole ecosystem of private companies, creating a real-time picture of how any given vertical is actually performing. "Is the problem a problem in that vertical, or a problem with your business? Did we go with the storm or against it? Because I can see what's going on." He pauses. "We're much closer to that than you might think."

There is a dimension to this that goes beyond the mechanics of investor triage. Regan had a decent network starting out his career but he is clear-eyed about the difference between that and the networks that really grease the rails.

If I was a sheep farmer in Wales with the same knowledge in my head and the same business plan, my chances of getting this off the ground would be close to zero. Because of the network, not the idea.

Certifii, if it reaches the scale he's describing, would mean that a credible financial model is the credential - not who you know, not which accelerator you came through. "You're not disadvantaged by your postcode. It's just: do you understand your idea, do you understand your finances? If yes, you can present that to anyone." He is aware this is an ambitious claim. But he has been building data infrastructure for thirty years, and he has seen enough of the alternative to know what the problem costs.

We talk about the personal toll of four companies - the first two offices, the stress, the exits that felt like they should have resolved something but didn't. He had an office on the Kings Road, walked across the Albert Bridge every morning. He was so focused and pressured that he barely registered where he was. "I was so stressed that it felt like a really tough job, when actually it could have been a movie," Regan recalls.

He talks about the "crisis club" - a rule he had with an early team that when stress rose to the point of tension, they stopped, went to the pub regardless of deadline, got three pints in, and then solved it. "That was just the mechanism to move out of that mode into a different space." Something he had stumbled onto before he had the language for it. Now he does.

"We're hardwired to see the tiger in the bushes. The person who assumed the rustling was just wind when it was a tiger didn't survive. So we scan for threats. But the thing that actually goes wrong is never the thing you think it is." He leans forward. "In every business, I've worried about the alleyway with no exit. And I've never been stuck in one. Never. So I've learned to let that process run in one part of my brain while the other part asks: so what's the actual solution?"

We're hardwired to see the tiger in the bushes. The thing that goes wrong is never the thing you think it is.

The advice he gives founders now is to enjoy it. Not as a platitude - as a practice. Build the mechanisms for it. Take the run, do the breath work, go to the pub when the team starts to fracture: "Even if it goes wrong, it won't be that bad. Worst case, you're an experienced person now. You go again."

Visit Certifii

There's a grand piano in the entrance of Fidelio, the classical music cafe on Clerkenwell Road. The name comes from Beethoven's only opera - a story about loyalty, disguise and someone pretending to be something they're not in order to get closer to the truth. As it turns out, that's not a bad frame for what follows. I've known of Simon Blakey for a while - seen him speak at a UKBAA event, read the Playfair blog posts, tracked some of his investments from a distance - and what strikes you, before you've even sat down, is that he's done something vanishingly rare. Lots of people angel invest. Almost nobody does it full-time, for 26 years, with the commercial discipline and organisational structure of a small fund. A portfolio of over 100 investments is testament to that. He started in the dotcom boom, in a world without SEIS, without Seedlegals, without smartphones. The fact that he's still here, still investing, still learning - that's the story.

He orders poached eggs on brown toast with a fruit bowl on the side. I go for the Turkish eggs with avocado.

Blakey's background is not what you'd expect. He trained as a biochemist, then pivoted to management accounting when he realised the money wasn't there. He worked at Arthur Andersen in business consulting, specialising in financial services start-ups. On the side, he got into residential property development - renovating flats and flipping them every six weeks or so. It was, by his own account, really profitable. But he was bored.

It was 1999. The dotcom boom was in full swing - a period he notes has "remarkable similarities to the AI boom we're seeing now." Everyone was chasing eyeballs, worrying about monetisation later. Blakey thought the model was interesting but also a good way of destroying a lot of capital. At the same time, people had just started talking about angel investing. He went to see someone he respected, who gave him a piece of advice that changed his trajectory: if you're going to do this, do it full-time or don't do it at all.

He was in his twenties. He'd done well out of the property side. So he thought - right, I'll try being a full-time angel investor for a couple of years. "Having no clue whatsoever about what angel investing was."

I was naïve - and I had no clue whatsoever about what angel investing was.

He didn't know that the average angel at the time was a man in his forties, fifties or sixties, doing it very much part-time as a hobby - a niche section of someone's overall investment strategy rather than the centrepiece of it. He had no corporate finance experience, no M&A experience. What he did have was a contrarian instinct. He went looking for businesses that had been left by the mainstream - companies that weren't fashionable, weren't hot, but were still fundamentally sound. And he had beginner's luck.

One of his earliest investments was a company called ByBox - a logistics business that only ever raised angel money. Blakey and his brother backed it together. They sold it to private equity for a significant sum and the angels did very well. Then there was a telco business doing prepaid mobile phone top-ups, building the software for high street retailers to handle electronic rather than paper-based top-ups. He put in a six-figure sum - partly because someone dropped out at the last minute. It was a husband-and-wife team. They sold within eighteen months and did very well again. "I looked back and go; I definitely had beginner's luck."

He set up Avonmore Developments as a vehicle, partly out of necessity. He was so young, so outside the norm, that people didn't know what to make of him. "I used to go to meetings where people were like, who the hell are you?" He had to pretend to be an analyst for a fund that just happened to be his own money. Someone once asked if the money was legitimate. He was simply that unusual.

His brother Michael joined two years later. Michael Blakey is now based in Singapore running Cocoon Capital, but for years the two of them operated as each other's investment committee. Neither could do a deal without the other's sign-off. Either one had an absolute veto. Michael was front of house - the deal sourcer, the face in the room. Blakey was behind the scenes, assessing deals, working with the portfolio companies, flagging when something needed attention. "Unless you did a deal with us, people used to tell my brother they didn't believe I existed," he laughs. It was structured, complementary, and critically, fast.

I ask whether there's a core thesis that runs through the portfolio or whether it's more opportunistic. He's honest about it - in the early days, he was naïve about the requirements of later-stage investors. If you back a brilliant business in a sector that institutional VCs fundamentally don't like, the bar for that company to raise follow-on funding becomes punishingly high. You either need the business to reach cashflow breakeven without much more capital, or you've got a structural problem. Some of his best investments followed exactly that model. Build cheaply, get customers paying early, and give yourself choices about what the capital structure looks like later.

Ventrata is the clearest example. Blakey met the founder, Ollie Morgan, in 2014 and thought he was brilliant. He was twenty or twenty-one at the time. They stayed in touch. In 2016, Morgan came back and said he was ready. He had no business plan, no management team, just some developers. He couldn't stay in London to build it - the costs were too high. So the company was built outside London, kept very lean, with customers paying as early as possible. It's a model Blakey has seen work before - ByBox, too, was built everywhere but London. Today Ventrata is a hundred and fifty people, profitable, doubling year on year, with an equal footprint in the US. As Blakey himself puts it - "the best people to pay for your business are your customers."

The best people to pay for your business are your customers.

At this point, a figure appears at the table next to us. "Oh, there's Chris Smith," Blakey says, glancing up. Smith is from Playfair Capital. Clearly a go-to morning spot for the Playfair team. "I'm being interviewed at the moment. Good morning." A brief hello, and we're back.

I ask about his relationship with Playfair. He was brought in to chair the investment committee for Fund Two. The connection came through a joint investment he'd done years earlier with one of the team. "He said, I want someone who's good at saying no." Blakey's dynamic with Michael - one gets excited, the other applies the brakes - was exactly what they wanted from an external IC chair. It worked incredibly well. By the end of Fund Three, with a large portfolio requiring follow-on decisions and ongoing deal flow, Simon wanted to focus more on his angel investments and moved to being Playfair's Senior Advisor and Venture Partner. He now works on deals alongside the team, mentors team members and brings his own pipeline to the table. "It's an incredibly complimentary relationship and I've learnt so much about the similarities and differences between Angel and VC investing because of it."

The conversation shifts to what everyone's thinking about at the moment - the compression of engineering costs through AI, and what that means for software defensibility. My own view is that it's simultaneously the best and the worst time to build a business. When I was working on Floe, engineering costs and build times were ten-fold what they are now. Anyone can start. Intelligence and skill have been democratised. That's thrilling, but the flip side is obvious - if anyone can build it, what's the moat?

Blakey's answer is characteristically grounded. He takes me back to the dotcom era. "There are always doom and gloom scenarios," he says. Back then it was the internet eating retail, high streets closing, everyone buying everything online. It didn't happen like that. The most successful retailers incorporated the internet as a channel and used it to understand their customers like they never had before. The same logic applies now. Yes, the ability to write code has become dramatically easier, but customers aren't buying code - they're buying solutions. Can you provide customer support? Security? Data storage? Do you understand the processes inside the buyer's organisation? For B2B SaaS companies in particular, it's never just a case of handing over the code and saying off you go. A couple of his portfolio companies are already using AI chatbots to handle first and second-line customer support, one reducing headcount in that function by fifty per cent. The companies that should worry aren't the ones with established client bases - it's the incumbents in markets still running archaic software from the nineties and early two-thousands who haven't innovated in fifteen or twenty years. Those businesses are in trouble.

I raise the point that brand might become a more meaningful differentiator than it has been - if anyone can build the software, the stickiness comes from trust, from connection, from everything around the product. He agrees. "What's your brand? You can buy any number of different top clothes for example, but so much of it is - you're buying trust."

On the angel market more broadly, Blakey is optimistic about the infrastructure - ASAs, SeedLegals, Odin, Mara etc. have made it dramatically easier than the days when every deal required bespoke legals. But he's cautious about people's expectations. Too many successful entrepreneurs cash out and decide they'll become angels, then put too much money into too few companies too quickly. "And then they go, oh shit, this is actually really difficult." The fundamentals haven't changed. You need a portfolio approach. You need to understand what portion of your net worth should be allocated. You need a long-time horizon. Most investments will barely wash their face. But you might get one that pays for the lot.

This resonates with me more than most of what we discuss. Having invested in a couple of companies directly, including Floe Oral Care, the logic of portfolio construction makes visceral sense now. Some people don't have the liquidity to build enough diversification. Others have the liquidity but not the time or knowledge to pick and manage. That's where diversified retail funds come in. As a general rule, venture is recommended to make up five to ten per cent of someone's investment strategy. Yes, it's high risk. But the perception of angel investing as throwing darts - a hobby, a punt - has rapidly changed since Blakey started out. The investments are high risk, but there's also risk in not having sufficient exposure to venture as an asset class in what is a rapidly moving, hugely exciting, and unquestionably competitive landscape. We are going through possibly the most game-changing technological revolution that humanity has experienced. Sitting it out carries its own cost.

Blakey is emphatic on deal quality. The volume of AI-generated outreach has gone through the roof, and it's creating noise on both sides - investors drowning in pitches, founders blasting cold emails into the void. Pattern recognition and genuine connection are getting harder, not easier, in that environment. Nothing replaces walking into a room and meeting people. "I will one hundred per cent say I will invest in a brilliant founder doing an OK business, rather than a brilliant business with an OK founder." He's done it for twenty-six years.

There's a risk, though, that angels get too close. He calls it going native - when an investor loses perspective, starts acting more like a co-founder, stops being able to give the business an honest read. "You have to support as much as possible," he says, "but you also have to be prepared to say some hard truths when everything is telling you this is going wrong."

A LinkedIn post Blakey wrote recently about how to do outreach effectively has had a hundred and twenty-five thousand views and over six hundred saves. Hundreds of connection requests followed. I ask how he filters. He's rigorous - geographically and otherwise - but acknowledges the irony. The platform incentivises you to connect with everyone, which means the connections themselves become meaningless. "If LinkedIn only allowed you to connect with people you'd actually met," he says, "you'd have something genuinely curated. Until then, it's noise management."

I do muse on what the next connection platform will be. Tools like Fixer are starting to address the inbox problem. Building alternatives to LinkedIn is a nascent trend, but clearly tough - the network effects are enormous, and the switching costs are real. On honeymoon last month I met the co-founder of Brigade Media, co-founded with Sean Parker of Facebook and Napster fame - essentially a social network but for politics. It launched, raised serious money, and ultimately shut down. Very interesting to think about what social media 2.0 looks like in twelve to eighteen months, and what new players or structural changes to the current models might emerge.

For the closing beat, I ask what advice has stuck with him the most. Blakey reaches for Abraham Maslow - the psychologist behind the hierarchy of needs, the theory that once basic requirements like safety and shelter are met, people pursue progressively higher forms of fulfilment. Beyond a certain income level, every additional pound has diminishing returns. The real question is whether you're doing something that gives you genuine satisfaction. "I do what I love. This isn't a job for me; this is a passion." He controls his diary, fights against anyone trying to cram it, spends time with friends and family when he needs to, and works on problems that he finds genuinely interesting. He met someone just the day before who told him that passion is what keeps you young. He's currently looking at a business in an area he's had almost no exposure to - the market dynamics are fascinating, the go-to-market needs work, and the challenge of figuring out whether it's an investable proposition is exactly the kind of problem he gets out of bed for.

I do what I love. This isn't a job for me; this is a passion.

It sounds simple when you put it like that, I say. He smiles. "Way too simple."

Visit Avonmore Developments

Visit Playfair Capital

Walking down Electric Boulevard towards Dishoom at Battersea Power Station on a Monday morning, it is hard not to be impressed by what has become of the building. The red brick cathedral that once powered a fifth of London has been turned into something absurdly glossy - Apple's UK headquarters upstairs, restaurants and retail at ground level, luxury flats stacked above the turbine halls. As a Chelsea fan, there is still a quiet pang at what might have been. The stadium that never materialised. At least Xabi Alonso is coming next season, which takes some of the sting out of a tough year. I am early, so I order a chai and wait. Harry Hanlon arrives a few minutes later, scanning the room before sliding into the booth opposite.

Hanlon's route to founding Arrival is not the typical startup origin story. There was no lightbulb moment in a dorm room. He studied at Cardiff, went into banking, and one of his first jobs was helping build Mettle - NatWest's digital bank for small businesses - out of Rocket Space in Islington around 2017. Fuel Ventures, as it happens, were on the same floor. "I used to walk past the Fuel desks every day," he tells me. "Mark had just started. You'd meet at those co-working space drinks. I always thought, when I do my own company..." He trails off. It took close to a decade, but it came true.

The path from banking to utilities ran through a spell as COO at a fast-growing utilities management company. It was there that Hanlon developed his understanding of the space where finance and property overlapped - and where the cracks in the industry's model first became apparent.

The wider utilities management industry, as Hanlon describes it, is built on opacity. Customers pay a lump sum each month - say 250 pounds - into an account with no visibility of where their money goes. "You only find out at the end when you get told you're 800 pounds still in debt," he says. "And if there's credit, well, you should ask them specifically about where it's going and if you can have it back." Many of these companies work with a single energy supplier, mark up standing charges by as much as a pound or two a day, and sell "unlimited energy" tariffs that are really just wildly inflated prepayments with fair usage caps buried in the terms. "You're literally just paying for energy you're never going to use."

Hanlon and Rosie Kirk, who had worked her way up through the same company, eventually moved on. They had a deep understanding of the sector's shortcomings, no desire to go back into banking, and a clear sense of what the alternative should look like. "We were like, well, we know how to do this. Let's do it properly."

Arrival, which the pair co-founded alongside a technical third co-founder, Dan Koehler, is their answer. The proposition is disarmingly simple. A renter enters their postcode, Arrival pulls the address, scrapes every available tariff from every energy supplier on the market, calculates council tax and applies any eligible discounts automatically - single person, student exemption, carer's discount - and sets everything up in one place. One bill. One direct debit. Three minutes. The entire signup journey runs through their site or WhatsApp - a renter can set up all of their bills without ever downloading an app or picking up the phone. For students, it is also completely free - no management fee at all. Given that Hanlon's critique of the industry centres on it preying on those who don't know what a reasonable bill looks like, waiving the fee for the most vulnerable group is the clearest signal of intent.

The flat management fee is 12 pounds 99 pence a month. There is no markup on tariffs, no commission from energy companies, no kickbacks to letting agents. "The tariff we advertise, you get," Hanlon says. "We pull the last five years of consumption data on the meter to give you a proper picture of what that property uses, and then we show you everything." He mentions a conversation with a utility company offering a custom tariff below market rate. "We're happy for that, but we'll display it alongside everything else. Going back to the brand point - we have to live and breathe transparency. Think of it like having Martin Lewis attached to your bank account. That's where I want us positioned."

Think of it like having Martin Lewis attached to your bank account.

It is a stance that costs them in the short term. Some partners, he explains, typically want a kickback for referrals. Arrival's competitors can afford to pay one because they are taking far more from consumers through hidden markups. "The only money we're making is 12.99. There's just not the margin." He describes a meeting the previous week with a large company offering tens of thousands of leads a month in exchange for a ten pound monthly kickback per customer. "That's really attractive. But the only way to fund it is to uplift their bills. We could easily hide it - add 50p extra standing charge a day, and most people would have no idea. I just can't do it."

The B2B side of the business is what gives Arrival access to customers at the moment of moving - the narrow window when someone is actually willing to set up their utilities. Build-to-rent operators are the beachhead. For a BTR operator managing thousands of units, the pain is acute. Every time a tenant moves out and a new one moves in, someone has to notify the council, water company, and energy supplier, get meter readings, manage the void period billing, and ensure liability passes correctly. Hanlon estimates it takes a property manager about 90 minutes per void. Arrival automates the lot. "We get the checkout report from the first tenant, the inventory report of the new one. The delta between the two is the amount owed on the meter for the void. AI has changed the game there - we just read those reports and automate the notification."

He is in discussions with a major institutional landlord to onboard their entire UK portfolio - tens of thousands of units, and significant recurring revenue before Arrival even sells a single bill to a resident. Clare Marie Johnson, a BTR director at Centrick, has joined the board as a strategic advisor. Hanlon sees build-to-rent as a natural beachhead - operators managing large portfolios at scale need exactly what Arrival automates, and their residents tend to be time-poor and willing to pay for convenience. But he is clear that the ambition goes well beyond it. "How do we then expand, build the brand, so that people self-serve? You want it to be - how do I set up my 'Arrival' when I move home?"

The banking infrastructure underneath the platform is where the ambition gets interesting. Arrival currently operates through an e-money licence via a company called Keel. Each customer gets a KYC'd account in their name, with full visibility of bills, payments, and balances. The longer-term play is that interest earned on customer deposits could eventually replace the management fee entirely. Scale 10,000 customers holding a few hundred pounds each, and the maths starts to work.

On the team, Hanlon is unusually candid. There are six of them. He and Rosie Kirk operate as co-CEOs - no titles, deliberately - alongside a CTO, a director of operations, and two remote engineers. Kirk is 24. She left school at 16 and never went to university, worked as a property manager in a local estate agent, joined the same company early, and worked her way up. "I came up through the more traditional route - university, startup Kool-Aid, watched The Social Network, drank it all in," Hanlon says. "Rosie is the opposite. She doesn't care for that world. But she's incredibly consumer-focused. I get overly geeky about the banking infrastructure, and she's very good at cutting through the bullshit - what does a consumer actually get out of this?"

AI comes up naturally, not as a pitch but as a practical reality. "That kind of feature would have taken weeks at most companies," he says, describing a recent build. "Full-time engineer, sprint planning, maybe next quarter. We did it in 20 minutes. Unbelievable." He thinks the implications are significant. "Those big SaaS companies everyone's been investing in are now really easy to replicate. The moat becomes brand. Brand is a promise of a customer experience."

The latest fundraise itself was fast and, in its own way, a homecoming. Arrival had been self-funded - personal money and credit cards - while they chased enterprise contracts big enough to bootstrap on. When that took longer than hoped, Keel introduced Hanlon to Blackfinch Capital. Blackfinch liked what they saw but were writing cheques too large for the stage. They emailed Fuel and linked Hanlon up with the pre-seed team. Three weeks after the first meeting, they had a term sheet and money in the bank. "I told Mark the other day - I used to walk past the Fuel desks every day. It came true ten years later."

I ask about standing charges - Hanlon had started to rant about them earlier before catching himself. He does not hold back now. "Standing charges are a regressive tax. The less you use, the higher the percentage of your bill is standing charge. You're paying just for the right to have energy in your home." He concedes there are metering costs baked in, but says it is the mechanism through which competitors extract the most. "They can offer a standing charge of a pound a day, two pounds a day. You're spending 30 to 60 pounds a month extra that they're just pocketing."

When I ask what keeps him going when things feel fragile, Hanlon gives two answers. The first is half-joking. "When I was a management consultant, someone told me - just keep turning up. Bring a notebook. Even if you don't have a clue what's going on in the room, sit there, write notes, and just turn up. Being there is half of it." The second is sharper. "Add value at every stage. Hiring - make sure every person is raising the bar. It's really easy when times get tough to say we need a bum on a seat, but actually, how are they making the car go faster?" He has seen what happens when you get it wrong. "One bad hire, and it becomes a cancer. Hire slow, fire fast."

Optimise for the long term. Do what's right for the customer.

For his most valuable piece of advice, he returns to the founding principle. "Optimise for the long term. Do what's right for the customer. The value in a startup lies in the future anyway - it's just about how big you can make it." There have been plenty of moments, he says, where it looked like it might not work. "If this deal doesn't come through, this investment round doesn't land... and then it sort of keeps going. You keep going through those series of moments." He pauses. "I don't switch off now, but they're problems I want. The stress I've got now is the stress I've asked for. That's a positive stress."

Outside, Electric Boulevard is waking up properly now, the Monday morning commuters streaming past towards offices that fill the old turbine halls. Hanlon has somewhere to be - a meeting with his banking provider later, a major partnership to close, a team of six to keep pointing in the same direction. It is early days, and he knows it. But for an industry built on profiting from confusion, Arrival's bet is that clarity is the product. And that eventually, the market will come to them.

Visit Arrival

New Street Square is quiet at breakfast. The lunch crowds haven't arrived yet and the chairs are still stacked outside the neighbouring units. Kaana doesn't serve breakfast - not yet, anyway - so Symron Mehan Bedi orders two house chais and sits down across from me in a room she designed to feel like the opposite of every fast casual restaurant I've ever been in. The lighting is low and warm. The walls are the colour of Rajasthani sandstone. Behind the counter, a piece of concrete is inspired by a rock formation in Kerala. An art piece on the wall, commissioned from an Indian artist who grew up in India and moved to London, is inspired by both the Ganges and the Thames. None of it is loud. None of it is orange and gold and red. That's the point.

I was introduced to Bedi through Arabella Turner at the Jaggard Collective, who helped with Kaana's strategy and design pre-launch. When I arrive she has just finished a meeting with the consultant behind Farmer J, and his view is clear - Indian-inspired fast casual is about to be the next significant wave in London's lunch market. Bedi thinks he's right.

Bedi grew up around business. Her grandfather started a fashion company, her parents took it over and still run it. The expectation was always that she would join the family. "My parents said, why would you go to university? Why wouldn't you just work in the business?" she says. She went to Harvard instead, then McKinsey, then Aesop. She calls herself the rebel of the family and then laughs at the absurdity of that sentence. "I went to Harvard, I went to McKinsey, went to Aesop. I'm the least rebellious rebel, really."

I'm the least rebellious rebel, really.

The McKinsey years gave her pattern recognition across best-in-class businesses. Aesop gave her something more specific - an education in how a physical space makes someone feel. "They really are leaders in the retail experience," she says. "Their stores are the experience of the brand. When you go in, you don't feel pressure to buy. They'll wash your hands at the sink, the music sounds a certain way, it smells a certain way. It teaches you about hospitality, because the way they host people is very similar to how a hospitality brand should operate." It's a thread you can trace directly into Kaana - the dimmed lighting calibrated for warmth, the music that never rushes you out, the decision not to time the queue or set bonuses based on throughput. "We are not timing our service line and constantly trying to speed it up," she says. "I never want the customer service to be compromised by us trying to get through customers so fast that there's no time to speak to them."

The idea itself came from a visit to Chipotle. Bedi was eating there with her husband and the question arrived fully formed - why has nobody done this for Indian food? She'd always taken her ideas to her father first. He was the receptive one, the encourager, the one who told his daughters that being a girl was no different from being a boy when it came to ambition. But he was also rigorous. Every previous idea she'd brought him, he'd found the flaws and she'd walked away knowing he was right. "This was the first idea where he said, you're right. Why hasn't this happened before?" she says. He told her to go and speak to more people. She did. What she kept hearing confirmed the gap.

The gap is this: Indian food in Britain is associated with heaviness. Butter chicken and naan and garlic and oil. And while that is genuinely one part of the cuisine, it is not what people eat every day in India. "India is a really hot country," Bedi says. "Could you imagine if people were eating big, heavy butter chickens and naan all day in almost fifty degree heat? That's not what people are eating every day." She grew up on her grandmother's cooking - the garam masala recipe is on the Kaana menu - and it was food that left you energised, not lethargic. Kaana is an attempt to bring that side of the story into the fast casual format - thalis, bowls, wraps, everything made fresh in house with no stabilisers and no preservatives. The wraps are water, salt, a little oil and regeneratively-farmed wheat. "They cost a lot more to make," she says, "but I would rather pay the price and give good quality than something that doesn't feel true to our brand."

The name means food in Hindi, though the original transliteration was impossible to trademark for a food business, so Bedi changed the spelling. "The double A looked a lot nicer," she says. "And I'm from Manchester - I didn't want people pronouncing it as Canna." It reminds me of Kricket, but on the go. The format is fast casual rather than sit-down, pitched at the lunchtime office crowd in high-footfall locations. It opened in November and the repeat trade has already built. Bedi talks about regular customers by name - team members noticing someone's changed their hair, asking how their week is going. That is not accidental. It echoes something Lucía Larragoiti Fisher of La Maritxu told me over breakfast - that the time you spend with the customer is as important as the product itself, and that without it everything becomes purely transactional. Bedi has deliberately restructured Kaana's KPIs so that speed of service is never prioritised at the expense of that connection. "If you feel pressured because your bonus is linked to how fast you get people through the line, you're not going to stop for those moments," she says.

Before launching, Bedi took a front-of-house job at The Salad Project to understand the sector from the inside. She was also in her first trimester. The timing was not part of the plan. She had her first baby and launched the business in the same window - and when I ask whether that was difficult she reframes it entirely. "I looked at pregnancy as, well, no one's actually waiting for me at home," she says. "I can work all the hours God gives me and it doesn't matter. Actually, working distracted me from worrying about being pregnant all the time." The logic was that in a few years she'd have a toddler who would notice her absence. Better to build now.

Funding was SEIS and EIS - "the most amazing scheme," she says, combined with also investing personally. "It's as much psychological as it is financial," she says of putting skin in the game. "It just changes the way that you engage." She had investors who wanted in but wanted too much equity for a pre-revenue concept. She turned them away. The maths was simple: give away too much now and by site ten you own one percent of the business and the passion goes. She wanted to build site one as a tight, repeatable playbook and prove it before diluting. The store itself doubles as Kaana's marketing, and social media is entirely organic with no paid spend yet. "People walk past and they walk in just because of how it looks on the outside," she says. "We don't have to spend as much on marketing because we have the space. This is our biggest marketing platform."

The structural frustration is VAT. The UK charges the full twenty percent on hospitality while most of Europe offers reduced rates, and yet the core ingredients - fruit, vegetables - are zero-rated, meaning Kaana cannot reclaim input VAT on much of what it buys. "You can't zero rate our supplies and then make us pay full VAT on the end product," Bedi says. "Either VAT the basic ingredients or reduce our rate to make it more equitable." It's a disadvantage baked into the system and it gets passed on to the customer - twelve pounds for a bowl that has to cover ingredients, labour, rent, rates and a twenty percent tax that competitors in Paris or Madrid don't pay.

The vision is global. She wouldn't have left McKinsey for anything smaller. London first, then Manchester - she's from there, that's non-negotiable - then the rest of the UK, then the Middle East, Europe, South Asia, America. "There's no similar concept to this anywhere in the world," she says. "We're not just limited to the UK." She studied in the US and knows the fast casual landscape there better than most, and nobody is doing what Kaana does.

When I ask about leadership in the hard moments she gives me two things. The first is a base principle: everything happens for a reason. The second is more specific. "You have to believe in your idea so much that it borders on delusion," she says - a sentiment that Bob Wigley described to me as clinical delusion, the quality he looks for in every founder he backs. But for Bedi it's not just the idea. "You have to believe in yourself as the one to execute it, just as much and even more strongly." The jockey and the horse, she says. You have to bet on both. A great idea without self-belief won't get far, and self-belief without conviction in the idea won't either. "When times are tough and things are stressful, I always think - this business is bigger than just the day-to-day of what's going on. We are building something much bigger than that."

You have to believe in your idea so much that it borders on delusion.

Her most valuable piece of advice is the same thing she's lived. There is never a right time. She spent years at McKinsey and Aesop telling herself she needed a bit more experience, a bit more of this before she could start something. "What I've learned is, when you have the idea and you've started working on it, you've got to just take a leap at some point," she says. Being pregnant and launching a business was definitively not the right time. She did it anyway, and now she cannot imagine it any other way.

We finish our chais in the quiet of New Street Square. It's not yet nine, and the room won't fill for another two hours, but when it does it will be with exactly the kind of people Bedi built this for - office workers looking for something that tastes like it matters, made by someone who clearly thinks it does. She heads behind the counter to check in with the team. I walk out past the sandstone walls and into the morning air, already thinking about what I'll order when I come back for lunch another day.

Visit Kaana

The King's Road on a Wednesday morning has its own rhythm - dog walkers, pram pushers, the odd person with nowhere to be and seemingly all the time in the world. I'm sitting near the window when Ghita El Haitmy arrives - phone already mid-dictation, not typing. She hasn't typed in weeks, she tells me. The Wispr app does it all. "I don't type. I don't talk to type. I just talk," she says, like it's obvious and I'm the last person in the world still using my thumbs.

El Haitmy is the founder of Eli, a platform that started life as a discovery engine - a database of over a hundred thousand software tools mapped into a knowledge graph showing relationships between features, tasks and roles. It was useful, interesting, but it wasn't a business. The business revealed itself when El Haitmy noticed something more fundamental. "Most of the problems in relation to how we adopt software start with we don't know what software we currently have," she says. "We don't know what we spend on. We don't know what our teams have embedded in their workflow on a day to day basis." So she pivoted. Eli became a stack tracking platform - Enterprise Layer Intelligence - a control layer for the entire cost of running a modern business. It connects to identity, maps every tool a company is paying for, and then takes direct control of vendor spend through a dedicated payment infrastructure.

The target is SMEs - teams of five to thirty. The segment everyone else writes off as too small to bother with, which El Haitmy thinks is exactly backwards. The number of small businesses is exploding because of AI - one person, two people, five - running operations that used to need thirty, and every one of them is spending more on AI every month than the last. El Haitmy is a sole founder, and she built the product for herself first. "What's the best ideal customer profile (ICB) to have if you're building something? You should try to build it for yourself," she tells me. The logic is that procurement and finance tools have traditionally been expensive and process-heavy, designed for companies north of a hundred people. Eli is the AI-native version - auto-detection, context gathering, automated negotiation, recommendations - built for the companies that would never have had a head of procurement in the first place. And the bet underneath is bigger than procurement. In less than 24 months, AI spend will be larger than salary spend. The companies stacking agents and models from day one need a control layer before they need a finance team.

The pricing model is where it gets interesting. El Haitmy has been through subscriptions, she has paying users, but she thinks per-seat pricing is dying. "Workspace culture, or to charge for a seat, is dying," she says. Eli's structure is borrowed from FinOps, moving toward outcome-based pricing - a percentage of the savings Eli generates. If the platform finds you're wasting three thousand pounds a month on redundant tools, Eli takes a cut of that saving. It's cleaner, it aligns incentives, and it reflects a broader shift she sees across the entire software market, where consumption-based models are replacing the old seat-by-seat logic. "The entire software market is reinventing itself right now, and pricing modelling is the first thing."

Workspace culture, or to charge for a seat, is dying.

Before Eli, El Haitmy worked in digital transformation for large enterprises. CEOs would hand her a budget - $300K to $1M, increase the efficiency of this department, use it however you see fit. She would research options, negotiate terms, implement internally. Some of these were companies with forty thousand employees. The scale of impact was enormous, and she fell in love with the feedback loop. "You give individuals a tool and they're efficiently way better," she says. "A year later they come around - thank you, this is helping me so much, saving me so much time." She moved to the other side - tried building a community around computer vision in healthcare, which didn't work out. Joined a company as their first non-technical hire, selling software to enterprises. And then realised she was sitting in the middle. She could make deals on both sides, and she had deep awareness of the process people go through before they adopt anything - the evaluation, the second-guessing, the fear of getting it wrong. She started making content, the audience grew, and Eli followed naturally.

That audience is not small - over two hundred thousand followers on TikTok, close to two hundred thousand on Instagram. El Haitmy's thesis is simple - sell before you build. "I've never had a business just for the sake of having it," she says. "It was always because I need the revenue." Social media is her distribution channel. One Instagram video reaches a hundred thousand people in two days. It costs five minutes and a willingness to put her face on camera - the media platform came first, the product came second. The relationships she built through content - with teams at companies like Granola, with Google - gave her not just reach but native integration opportunities. Eli's agents need to execute actions on other software platforms, so those relationships are structural, not just promotional.

We talk about what AI is doing to organisations, and El Haitmy is blunt about it - any role that is not relational and not contributing to the core product should be a candidate for automation. "I know that sounds kind of brutal," she admits. She frames it not as displacement but transformation. She gives the example of a sales team she worked with - people who used to spend their days updating CRM sheets, chasing LinkedIn follow-ups, managing subscriptions for Zoom and HubSpot. After the review, the team's main focus became booking in-person meetings. Going to visit clients. Higher value. More human. I tell her I see the same dynamic in venture capital - more volume, more automated outreach on both sides, but the actual relationships, the ones that lead to investment decisions, are still face-to-face. She agrees. "The entire essence of a business is the relationships," she says. "That's the most expensive thing a founder will spend time and money on - the time to be away from the screen, doing actual technical output, versus building the relationships that will pull smart contracts in the future."

There's a paradox in there that we both find energising. The best outcome of the AI revolution might be that we spend less time on screens and more time with each other. Not smart glasses. Not another interface. Just condensing the typing, the spreadsheets, the outreach, so that the hours freed up go toward genuinely high-value human interaction.

I ask her about the concept she recently wrote about - disposable intelligence. "Nothing we think is smart right now is going to be the smartest," she says. "Everything we're building right now, every model that came out for the last two years, is disposable." Nothing sticks for more than six months - the pace of change is too fast. Until we reach some stable level of AGI, everything before it is draft work. She thinks historians will look back and marvel at how long it took us to adopt what was already in front of us. "I still have to go into meetings and convince people that this works. It's not a joke. The outcome is reliable."

Everything we're building right now, every model that came out for the last two years, is disposable.

I ask whether there's a risk that all of this blunts us. I've been using Claude at weekends for wedding planning - seating charts, logistics - and it's extraordinary, but I don't understand the formulas underneath. Do we lose something when we skip the friction of learning? El Haitmy has been thinking about this too. She had a conversation with a researcher about age guardrails - the idea that for people under eighteen, AI should guide them toward the answer rather than giving it immediately, because young people need the process of struggling with a skill to actually develop it. But she thinks the broader trajectory is clear. "We're going to slowly become generalists, everyone," she says. "Intelligence is now being completely democratised. Everyone for twenty pounds a month has got access to PhD-level intelligence." Expertise becomes a choice rather than a requirement - you can still pursue depth in something, but you have the tools to learn it at your own pace, faster than any six-month course. "AI has given us the power of choice," she adds. "We just need to have agency to do that."

Eli is a team of ten, including contractors. Bootstrapped. Cash flow positive. El Haitmy has never raised - but she's heading to San Francisco with Propeller, the Boston-based VC, and a handful of other investors. This might be the round where she takes external capital, but only if the terms make sense. The money would go toward GTM and engineering - specifically knowledge graph engineers, who are in high demand, and a strong closer for sales. "Anyone who's good at closing is already closing somewhere else, so you want to drag them," she says. "It's kind of expensive." She's not in a rush - the business doesn't need it to survive, it needs it to scale at the speed she wants.

On building in the UK, El Haitmy is bullish. She's Moroccan, this is her first business built here, and she plans to stay. "I love building businesses here," she says. "My fellow founders are all going to San Francisco. I'm going to stay and keep both feet in SF and in London." She sees the ecosystem opening up - funds more accessible to founders who didn't come through elite schools, the government investing in AI growth zones, the recently announced five hundred million pound fund for AI startups. She acknowledges the perennial problem - the UK starts companies well but struggles to keep them as they scale, and the value migrates. But she thinks the script is changing - people are talking openly about their failures, people from traditional, conservative backgrounds are starting companies. "Even if this doesn't work, I will do something else," she says. "We don't have to stay in law." She keeps a Delaware entity alongside the UK one. The American market is bigger, the risk appetite higher, but London has talent density, tax breaks, stability. She's not delusional about San Francisco's lead. She just doesn't think it has to be either-or.

I ask her what she relies on when things get difficult - when uncertainty spikes and the problems feel concentrated. She talks about community. Co-working days with other founders and their teams, exchanging ideas, pulling in people who have been through the same thing before. She had an experience early on - her first employee issue, a trademark lawsuit at the same time. "It had always been a very smooth ride, and now we're having all of these problems," she recalls. She called a friend who was a corporate lawyer, spoke to a founder who had scaled to six hundred people, and the problem shrank immediately. "You need to defuse it. It's very concentrated, and if you don't diffuse it, then it can grow," she says. "Isolation is enemy number one - fight that, and then you can take on everyone else."

Her most valuable piece of advice is three words. "Detach from outcomes." She caught herself last year having earned more in a month than her old salary used to pay, and she didn't stop to celebrate it. She was already on to the next thing. "If you attach yourself too much to the outcome - this needs to be a unicorn, this has to work in this specific way - you kind of miss out on everything in the meantime," she says. The journey is the process. The feelings along the way - the first hire, the first angel cheque, the grant that comes through - those are the golden moments. The assets stay when you go, and the relationships and the joy don't have a balance sheet, but they're the whole point.

Detach from outcomes.

We finish our coffees on the King's Road. El Haitmy picks up her phone - still not typing - and heads toward whatever the rest of her Wednesday looks like before San Francisco. I pull out mine and start thumbing a message the old-fashioned way. I really need to look into Wispr.

Visit Eli

The Breakfast Club in Seven Dials has a menu that feels like it hasn't changed since 2006. Laminated edges, full English variations stacked in a column, smoothie names that probably stopped being funny around the same time. It is loud in here - every table seems to be running its own parallel conversation with the kitchen - and the healthy option is hard to spot. I order a plate of Turkish eggs which seems like the best option.

Senu grew up in Walthamstow, in north-east London, the son of working-class Nigerian immigrants, in council housing. It was not the kind of place that pointed you anywhere in particular. There was no careers advice at his secondary school. No obvious pipeline to anything. But there was community, and there was a Sutton Trust summer school at Cambridge that changed the trajectory of his life - a mock trial that lit something up in a teenager who had never considered the Bar as a possibility. What followed was an extraordinary academic run. A first-class degree from the LSE. A Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 2020. A BCL at Oxford. Published article in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies before he had finished studying. And then a pupillage at Blackstone Chambers - one of the most prestigious sets in the country - which he announced on Twitter with three words: "Tears of joy."

And then he walked away from all of it.

He turned down a career at the commercial Bar and received hate mail for the decision. His father - "a very traditional Nigerian man" - had a strong view on what constituted a serious profession, and startups were not on the list. "Over time, as I've been in this world, I've convinced him more and more that there's something legitimate here." It is said with a grin rather than any residual frustration. The convincing, you sense, is still ongoing.

Before Zuba, Senu was an early employee at Teya, the pan-European payments decacorn, and a repeat founder with an exit behind him. He had also taught contract law, tort and jurisprudence at the LSE, as well as started a PhD which he quickly dropped out of. The breadth of the CV is almost absurd. But what comes through most clearly at breakfast is not the credentials - it is the scale of the ambition that sits underneath them. "We move money across the world," he says. "The simplest idea in the world." A beat. "But the hardest to execute."

Zuba is building stablecoin-native cross-border payment infrastructure for the Global South, starting in Africa and connecting it to the rest of the world. One API. Thirty-five countries and going. Bank transfers and mobile money. Settlement in minutes rather than weeks. The thesis starts with demographics. Africa has the youngest population on the planet - an average age of around twenty-one. It has roughly 1.5 billion people today and is projected to reach four billion by the end of the century. There are around 330 million mobile money accounts, but over half the population is unbanked. And the continent has one of the fastest-growing economies of any region on earth. "You put those factors together," Senu says, "and what you have is an extremely large youth population that will be incredibly economically active, sitting on infrastructure that just isn't built for them yet."

It's 2026, and the plumbing doesn't work.

The infrastructure gap is not abstract. He offers a concrete example that sticks with me long after we leave. How many African merchants today can reliably purchase a subscription to Claude, or Figma, or any other USD-denominated SaaS service? They struggle, not because those platforms don't serve Africa, but because the banking rails between Africa and the rest of the world are broken. Often, for them to pay, they need a dollar account to do so, and it's a pain to set up. "It's 2026," he says. "And the plumbing doesn't work." Zuba's answer is what he calls the stablecoin sandwich - converting local currency into USDC or USDT as a transfer mechanism, moving it across borders on blockchain rails, and converting it back into local currency at the other end. The consumer never sees the crypto. "If we do this magic correctly, you won't even know." Fiat in, fiat out, stablecoin in the middle. Cheaper, faster, more reliable than the correspondent banking networks and SWIFT messaging systems that have governed international money movement for the last fifty years without meaningful innovation.

I ask whether stablecoins really matter to someone in the UK who already taps their contactless card and gets an instant transaction. Senu is generous with the question. In developed markets, he concedes, the consumer experience is already good. The gains are more structural - faster settlement for merchants, lower interchange costs, downstream benefits to pricing. "It's not a shock in terms of its value towards you as a consumer, because you already experience real-time payments." But in emerging markets, the case is obvious. Two-week settlement windows. Businesses that cannot pay employees in other jurisdictions. Working capital delays that kill companies before they have a chance to grow. "Those are working capital delays which, as an early business, you're super sensitive to."

He frames the opportunity in terms that go beyond fintech. "This is genuinely one of the most important technological innovations outside of AI happening today," he says. "People will still have to move money - including agents that may be operating on behalf of individuals. We are getting to dictate the future of agentic finance through our platform." If Zuba succeeds, the downstream effects compound - more African merchants able to sell to European and American customers, more bilateral trade, more entrepreneurs in Lagos and Nairobi and Cape Town with the infrastructure to compete globally. "If we succeed, we will actually be changing people's lives. It's the joy of seeing the customer being able to do things that, for the rest of the world, feel easy."

We talk about the UK's position in all of this - the fertile ground of SEIS and EIS tax relief, the deep talent pool, the world-class institutions - and why, despite all of it, the country keeps producing companies that incubate here and scale elsewhere. Senu's diagnosis is structural. "The UK has failed, in my opinion, to create the critical infrastructure to bring everyone together." He points to Silicon Valley - a small enclave where the best companies geolocate, where founders and investors collide in coffee shops, where the culture of paying it forward is real rather than aspirational. "If you go to any Blue Bottle Cafe in the Valley, you'll see investors, founders - you'll see the founder of Cursor, of OpenAI - walking around. And you, as a random individual, can walk up to them and talk about your company, and they will give you five or ten minutes of their time." London, for all its strengths, does not have that. There is still a stigma around failure here that does not exist in America. He is pointed about it. "The British are famous for the stiff upper lip - soldier through, don't let people see that you're failing. That's great about Britain. Resilience. But the UK needs to remind itself that it's responsible for some of the greatest innovations, generation after generation."

I share my own experience - the company I built and sold, the people I had to let go, the well-meaning condolences from friends who treated the outcome like a funeral rather than a foundation. Senu nods. "The cycles of failure in the US are higher," he says. "And that's a positive thing." He tells me what America has that Britain does not. "The American dream. That's what Britain needs to create for itself."

The American dream. That's what Britain needs to create for itself.

Zuba raised what is possibly one of the largest seed rounds for a fintech company with its origin story in Africa. The platform went live only weeks before we met, and has already processed over a million in volume. The team is growing. And the next move is already in motion - a relocation to the United States before the next round. "We want to be a large business," he says, "and capital is an important point of leverage that a business like ours can have. If you want to attract the best employees in the world, the best investors in the world, you've got to be in an environment saturated with that quality." He wants Zuba to be a generational company. He is unembarrassed about saying so.

I ask for the most valuable piece of advice he lives by. He asks if he can give two. The first is a principle. Never give up. He frames it through the lens of the infinite game - life as endurance rather than a zero-sum competition. "If you're someone who will just continuously build forever, there's no such thing as failure. It doesn't exist. Every ending of a chapter is a learning that you take away and open into your next chapter." The second is an operating framework. What is the one thing I can do to achieve a goal such that, by doing it, everything else either becomes easier or unnecessary? He explains it through the domino theory - linear and geometric progression, the compounding effect of knocking over the first piece - and through Pareto efficiency, the recognition that twenty percent of the effort often drives eighty percent of the outcome. "You don't have to worry about success number two, three, four, five, six, seven. Just worry about success number one."

The Breakfast Club is still loud as we settle up. Senu has the energy of someone who has not yet fully processed how far he has come from Walthamstow - or perhaps someone who has processed it completely and decided the only appropriate response is to keep going. A council estate boy who collected scholarships like stamps, who turned down the Bar and took the hate mail, who built and sold a company before most people have paid off their student loans, and who is now building the payment infrastructure for an entire continent.

Visit Zuba

Rose and Rose sits on a quiet stretch of Upper Street where Angel starts to feel more residential than retail. It is early on a weekday morning, and I am ordering Early Rounds' first ever decaf coffee during a caffeine detox - noticeably more expensive than a regular one, and an unfair premium for attempted self-discipline. Bianca Rangecroft is the founder and sole architect of Whering, a digital wardrobe and styling app that has quietly amassed over half a million organic installs a month. She describes herself, without irony, as an "ex-banker and recovering hypocrite". Both labels turn out to be load-bearing.

The banking part came first. Rangecroft spent four years in the sector, firstly at Barclays and then Goldman Sachs, the kind of methodical slog that ends with either a promotion to associate or a crisis of nerve. For her it was both, arriving on the same bus ride home. "I was just about to get promoted at Goldman, and I remember sitting on the bus thinking - is this it? Am I gunning for VP, for director? Do I respect my bosses? Do I want to be them?" She does not dismiss the people around her - she calls them trailblazers, the smartest in the industry - but the conviction that there had to be something else had been building for months. She had already been running focus groups with women across the bank, from analysts to managing directors earning millions, and the insights were surreal. Women keeping Excel macros to track outfits they had worn to meetings. Camera rolls full of clothes laid out on beds. "Surely someone is going to crack this," she kept thinking. Nobody did.

Her parents are South African. Her father came from a family of ice entrepreneurs in Rhodesia and South Africa - "ice, as in frozen water" - a different generation, a completely different kind of business. They were thrilled she had made it into Goldman, and the decision to leave was not an easy conversation. But Rangecroft had reached the point where staying another day felt like entering a system she would never leave. She walked out, took herself to the Hackney Job Centre, signed on for Universal Credit, and received a £500 allowance to set up a business. The staff kept looking at her CV in confusion. "They didn't understand. I've started a business but needed income - what do you guys have?"

She joined an accelerator called Startup Boot Camp, and for two years built in relative obscurity. Her mother, a bestselling author, called it her "project". Then, roughly two years in, Whering landed a full cover in Vogue, syndicated across ten countries. Ex-banker launches digital wardrobe app. Rangecroft printed the piece, mailed it to her mother in Geneva with a post-it note. She had written "project", crossed it out, and written "company" underneath. "That was really the moment. We'd done it."

The recovering hypocrite part is more interesting, and it is the thing that makes Whering feel different from the wave of fashion-tech startups that preceded it and failed. The phrase was borrowed from an activist called Venetia La Manna, but Rangecroft adopted it as a foundational brand principle. "We are all recovering hypocrites in the sense that we all have too much stuff. We'll continue to buy fast fashion. Not everything you own is second-hand or vintage or handed down from parents. And no brand or product can claim they are going to help you stop consuming." What Whering offers instead is closer to a personal stylist and shopper for your wardrobe - not someone who rewrites your life overnight, but a system that nudges you towards better habits, measures your progress, and holds you accountable through data. The average person uses roughly twenty per cent of what they own. Rangecroft wants to double the wear count of your wardrobe by 2030, and she has built an entire product philosophy around that metric.

The app itself is free and deceptively simple. You digitise your wardrobe - photographs, email receipt syncing, eventually RFID tag scanning, where tiny chips embedded in clothing labels allow a phone to identify a garment instantly without needing a photograph at all - and Whering builds what Rangecroft calls a "wardrobe graph". Sizing preferences, styling preferences, gaps in your wardrobe, brands you wear, things you resell, how often you wear each piece. A subscription tier puts AI styling and premium insights behind a paywall, like an Oura or a Spotify for personal style. There is clear enterprise potential in selected parts of the platform, particularly where they can enhance personalisation and user relevance for partners. Over time, the product could also play a more direct role in connecting users with relevant products in a way that feels native to the experience. The focus throughout is utility: helping users make better decisions, not simply exposing them to more content. The aim is a play environment where the consumer stays in control of their consumption rather than getting spammed by two hundred brands demanding an email address.

We are all recovering hypocrites in the sense that we all have too much stuff. No brand or product can claim they are going to help you stop consuming.

The numbers underneath are striking. Customer acquisition cost of forty pence. Eighty to a hundred per cent of traffic is organic. Over half a million installs a month, entirely free. The growth was cracked through a repeatable go-to-market with essentially no budget - securing press in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Forbes, syndicated into Latin America and Continental Europe, which triggered micro and major influencers to try the app organically and create viral content that would drive a couple of hundred thousand downloads from a single TikTok video. "We wanted to create a repeatable go-to-market with absolutely no money," Rangecroft says, as though the constraint were a feature rather than a limitation. In many ways it was.

The critical retention insight is forty items. Once a user digitises forty pieces, retention becomes exponential. Below that threshold they drift. The roadmap is centred on streamlining onboarding and making it easy for users to establish a useful wardrobe profile in their first interaction. It is the kind of single-metric obsession that makes investors pay attention, and it explains why strategic partners may start to take notice. "How can we get you to digitise forty items in your first session? If we're doing that, we've nailed the retention piece."

Getting to this point was not straightforward. Rangecroft is a solo founder, non-technical, female, building a consumer product in a market that most UK venture capitalists will not touch. She is candid about how difficult fundraising was and how naïve she had been about it. "I thought it would be much easier than it was. I'd worked in the world of investing - how can VC be so tough to break through?" She had no network in the venture world, no network of other founders, and the product was a hard sell before the AI hype wave made the underlying technology feel inevitable. Every early investor conversation followed the same pattern of scepticism. "You're going to take pictures of clothes, use computer vision to crop backgrounds, automatically tag this pipeline of images with rich metadata, build a bespoke styling algorithm - you've got no IP, you're non-technical. How are you going to build this business?"

Her answer was to route around the VC world entirely. She leaned into family offices and angels from the fashion industry - people she already knew or could reach through the Goldman network. One investor was a Whering super-user who put in millions as an angel. The cap table became a deliberate mix of people who understood the product viscerally and strategic backers who could unlock distribution. Rangecroft's stance to potential suitors is clear: "Who are the best strategic partners that can help unlock the challenges we're facing that the VC world can't help with?"

She is sharp on the structural problems facing consumer founders in the UK. The risk tolerance among European VCs, she argues, is simply not there. "They all want you to be doing a million ARR, a couple of hundred thousand active users, twenty per cent retention at week four. And you're thinking - how? It's not going to work." She spent years caught in a chicken-and-egg cycle of shifting goalposts - "You are told, 'Hit these milestones and we'll back you.' Then, when you do, the message changes - what was growth at all costs suddenly becomes a demand for monetisation." Her suggestions are practical rather than ideological: more government match funding, better accelerator models for consumer entrepreneurs, peer networks, and more women investors in consumer-packaged goods and consumer tech more broadly, because "they get it in ways that traditional VC doesn't".

They all want you to be doing a million ARR, a couple of hundred thousand active users, twenty per cent retention at week four. And you're thinking - how?

There is a Goldman Sachs inheritance that runs through everything she does, and she is honest about it. A partner in her division had a motto he repeated to every analyst class - "no points for second best". Rangecroft rattles off the ingredients that banking gave her as a founder: insanity, a slight chip on the shoulder, a refusal to stop. "Insanity, plus really ambitious, plus a slight I've-got-something-to-prove mentality, plus I will stop at nothing - those are great, great ingredients." She became close friends with Gina Farran, the very first Early Rounds interviewee and another ex-Goldman founder in the beauty-tech space, introduced through a mutual colleague in March 2020. They talk constantly about the particular psychology of the non-technical generalist founder - the person hiring specialists while acting as a generalist, never quite sure what deep value they are adding. "What am I actually doing? What am I learning? What value am I adding, versus a very clear corporate career where there are clear signals that you're being promoted, that you're doing well?" It is the thing that keeps her up at night.

When the water gets choppy - and there have been months of single-month runway, raising on open SAFEs, trying to be honest with the team without triggering an exodus - she falls back on three things. The first is that Goldman-derived conviction that when one door closes there is always another. "I've been faced with an absolute storm before, and I survived and found a way through. I've built my own track record. I've done it before. I can do it again." The second is something her father used to say. He was not a religious man, but he held deeply to what Rangecroft describes as very Anglo-Saxon Christian values - the turn-the-other-cheek, give-your-time-freely kind. Pay it forward. Not the Silicon Valley version of the phrase, which tends to come loaded with expectations of reciprocity and network leverage, but something older and less transactional. He had been chair of the Guide Dogs Association, always giving time, always connecting people, and his argument was simple - "if you can mentally tap into giving your time to helping other people, whether it's helping other entrepreneurs or whoever, being a super connector, always saying how can I help - you build a better version of yourself every time you do that." Rangecroft credits this instinct for the fact that Whering has never used a headhunter. Every hire has come from the community. The third principle is hiring for genuine product obsession. One of Whering's recruiting criteria is that you must be a daily active user of the app. If you cannot demonstrate that over a sustained period, you do not even get a conversation.

Her parting advice comes in two parts. The first is to learn to flex the no muscle. "There are so many expectations - content, personal brand, looking and feeling and interacting with the market in a certain way. If you don't flex the no muscle, you can get pulled in different directions. Things seem like they're opening doors, but they actually aren't." The second is to invest in your superpowers rather than trying to learn everything. Find what you are world-class at, triangulate it against what actually moves the needle, and leave the rest to the people you hire. And underneath both of those, the oldest and most clichéd piece of advice she has ever received, which she now considers the most important thing she has ever done: "it's not what you know, but who you know". For a solo, non-technical, female founder building a consumer product that most of the market dismissed for years, investing in a network that has a network turned out to be the thing that made everything else possible.

If you don't flex the no muscle, you can get pulled in different directions. Things seem like they're opening doors, but they actually aren't.

Outside, Angel is filling up with its weekday commuters heading into the city. Rangecroft checks her phone for the first time in forty minutes. Somewhere in the app, half a million people this month will photograph a pair of jeans they forgot they owned, and Whering's algorithm will suggest three outfits they have never tried. Five years ago, Rangecroft printed out a Vogue cover, crossed out "project" on a Post-it note, and wrote "company" underneath. Everything since has been proving that correction right.

Visit Whering

It's refreshing to be talking about booze. After months immersed in all things AI, there's something grounding about a founder whose product you can actually pour into a glass. I'm meeting Rohan Radhakrishnan at the Sharky & George offices on Berghem Mews in Hammersmith - a shared workspace that doubles as the headquarters of the children's party event planning company. The juxtaposition is hard to ignore: children's party apparel and mid-strength tequila, separated by a partition wall. We've grabbed coffees and pastries from Debbie Jo's across the road, and settled into a corner to talk about Quarter Proof - the brand Radhakrishnan co-founded with Fabian Clark, and one of the UK's most visible pioneers in a category that barely existed five years ago.

The two met at school down the road in Hammersmith, 25 years ago. Their professional paths diverged - Radhakrishnan into branding, Clark into hospitality, running a seafood restaurant in Soho and Covent Garden - but the founding insight came from a convergence of personal experience. Clark, while running his restaurant, had been pitched a string of non-alcoholic spirits to stock. As someone who drank, he found them unconvincing. "They didn't really deliver on experience," Radhakrishnan recalls. "To replicate a full-strength spirit without alcohol is very difficult." Meanwhile, Radhakrishnan had gone completely sober for over a year - doubling down on health, running his own branding agency, and trying to be the best version of himself. But something was missing.

"I found myself missing the middle ground," he says. "It's not just flavour and ritual. It's the feeling - the relaxant, the social lubricant, the celebratory element. The non-alc journey just didn't give me that."

Clark rang one day with an idea for a mid-strength spirit. How strong? Quarter proof. The name stuck. That was four years ago. What they're building now is a whole new category of spirits - a London Dry, a Blanco Agave, and a Three Grain, all at 15% ABV - designed to sit between full-strength cocktails and non-alcoholic alternatives. They spent 18 months developing the liquid with one of the best distillers in the world. "It's not a case of just diluting a full-strength spirit," he says. "You have to re-craft it from scratch."

It's not just flavour and ritual. It's the feeling - the relaxant, the social lubricant, the celebratory element. The non-alc journey just didn't give me that.

The non-alcoholic spirits market has come a long way since Seedlip broke the category open. But Radhakrishnan draws a sharp distinction. The brands pulling through, he argues, aren't the ones mimicking gin or tequila without alcohol - they're the ones creating entirely new liquids with intense, standalone flavour. Mid-strength occupies different territory again: a genuine buzz, a lighter footprint, and what Quarter Proof calls "the social sweet spot." Two or three drinks on an occasion - a Negroni, a margarita - with all the pleasure and none of the write-off the following morning. The industry's current answer to moderation is "zebra striping" - alternating between a full-strength drink and a non-alcoholic one throughout the evening, a trend drinks giant Diageo has actively promoted. Radhakrishnan is unconvinced. The idea that people will toggle one-on-one-off across multiple drinks strikes him as a bit far-fetched. Quarter Proof's alternative is what he calls "coasting" - drinking mid-strength for the whole occasion, rather than treating moderation as a maths problem.

It resonates personally and I'm sure the calculus feels familiar to many people. The relationship between alcohol and how we feel the next day - and the week after, and the month after - is better understood now than at any point in our adult lives. Several pints on a Wednesday night to watch the Champions League, once entirely normal in your early twenties, now registers as a serious commitment. "Senseless consumption has shifted," Radhakrishnan agrees. "People want balance." The question is whether the industry can offer something more sophisticated than abstinence or excess. That's the gap Quarter Proof is designed to fill.

The commercial traction supports the thesis. Quarter Proof now has dedicated space on menus between full-strength and non-alcoholic cocktails at venues including Soho House, Sexy Fish, Swingers, and the Big Mamma Group. They're listed with Whole Foods and Total Wine & More in the US, expanding into Australia, Canada, and European markets. Earlier this year, they led Mid-Strength March for its second year running - a brass band parade through London with Small Beer and 6Percent to champion the category. It's a long way from running around London with a bottle in a bag, pouring it out to anyone who would listen.

On the question of why nobody had addressed the mid-strength gap in spirits before, Radhakrishnan points to a combination of innovation inertia and brand caution. "For the big guys to have pushed full-strength alcohol for hundreds of years and then say, here's Gordon's at 15% - it probably dilutes their brand." Non-alcoholic was safer territory: Seedlip had already built the category, and Diageo - who part-owned Seedlip and later acquired it fully - could extend existing brands into zero without undermining the core proposition. Mid-strength demands a different kind of conviction, one that incumbents haven't yet been willing to show. Pernod Ricard has a Beefeater Light at 20%, sold only in Spain, but it hasn't landed with the same authenticity. "If they don't come," Radhakrishnan says of the majors, "then we don't have a business. It's only a good idea if someone tries to mimic it."

Competition is now arriving - particularly in the agave space - and he welcomes it. "The size we are, with the budgets we have, we can't build a category on our own." He draws a parallel with non-alcoholic beer: every time Guinness Zero or Heineken Zero sponsors the Six Nations or the Premier League, someone reads about an indie B Corp craft alternative in a Guardian supplement and reaches for that instead. The halo effect lifts all boats.

I spent the first chapter of my career in the drinks industry - including a university summer job at Sipsmith when it was still an eight-person operation in a residential street not far from where we're sitting. Watching Sam Galsworthy and the team build a category-defining brand from that scale gave me an early, close-up understanding of what conviction looks like when it compounds over time. I recall advice from Galsworthy that has stayed with me since: always back yourself 100%, even if you don't believe it. Whether you're right or wrong doesn't matter - you've just got to show conviction and move forward.

It's a thread that also runs through everything Radhakrishnan says. He's candid about the contrast with my own experience at Floe, where the founding motivation at times felt more commercially driven than personal. "When you don't have real personal conviction, the bumpy moments become very hard," he says. "You're purely doing things on a transactional level." He puts it in the context of training bartenders: if you stand up and say you spotted an opportunity to make money, they switch off. If you stand up and say you went sober, found the middle ground missing, and built something to fill it - they lean in. "People can always smell conviction," he says. "Every time we pitch - investor, new account, new distributor - they need to feel there's a personal angle."

People can always smell conviction. Every time we pitch - investor, new account, new distributor - they need to feel there's a personal angle.

The Dragon's Den appearance captures that instinct well. Quarter Proof went on with barely £15,000 in sales, three months into trading, and a valuation Radhakrishnan freely admits was "absolutely bonkers" for where they were. The producers even came into the green room beforehand and asked if they were sure about the number. That was the point. "We wanted the drama," he says. They went in with a genuine strategy to win Steven Bartlett as an investor, turned down two offers for all the money, and walked away with a 10-minute feature seen by three million people. Record DTC days followed. The clip still sits in their pitch decks. "How much would you have to pay to get three million eyeballs? You're never going to have that budget." It's an accelerator - provided you've already got distribution and a story to tell.

Funding has come through angels and family offices, raised via SEIS and EIS - a route he finds effective in the UK. Consumer-sector veterans invested early alongside a range of C-suite individuals from household name global companies. Radhakrishnan values those investors not for passive capital but for strategic weight. "To sit down with them and talk through your ideas is invaluable," he says. "They've been to the highest level. When they say, be bold, go faster - that gives you a confidence you wouldn't have otherwise."

The co-founder dynamic is a recurring theme. Radhakrishnan handles brand, marketing, and sales; Clark - who studied economics and ran multi-site hospitality - takes operations, production, logistics, and international expansion. "Our skill sets and interests are very split," Radhakrishnan says. "I'm not trying to get involved in his stuff, and he's not trying to get involved in mine." It's a model I recognise from my own experience - when founders overlap too much on capability, decisions slow and egos collide. Twenty-five years of friendship doesn't eliminate tension, and he acknowledges the social relationship inevitably takes a hit when every conversation defaults to the business. But the underlying trust compensates. "He knows I'm doing everything I can with the best interest of the company, and I know that of him. We lay out our reasoning, make the call quickly, and don't dwell on it."

When you don't have real personal conviction, the bumpy moments become very hard. You're purely doing things on a transactional level.

On resilience, Radhakrishnan is refreshingly blunt. "We could find out we've missed a game-changing account and dwell on it for all of about 10 seconds." He attributes this partly to a decade in sales before founding - thick skin, high rejection tolerance - and partly to natural optimism. It mirrors earlier interviews and the need for entrepreneurs to have a level of clinical optimism almost to the point of excess. The maths of startup life is brutal: nine out of ten interactions are heavy blows. "If you can't wear it," he says, "you'll be asking what's the point. You've got to be able to sleep at night."

For the best advice he's ever received, Radhakrishnan doesn't reach for a business book or a podcast. He reaches for his father. "If you don't back yourself, no one else will." It's simple, and it echoes everything we've just discussed - but he insists it applies beyond startups. "Any situation - big pitch, investor meeting, presentation - you have to believe that what you're doing is true and right. If there's a chink in that armour, people will see it and feel it, and then you're done."

If you don't back yourself, no one else will.

It's a fitting conclusion over pain au chocolats and flat whites. Radhakrishnan heads into the office, and I leave thinking about the momentum of what Quarter Proof is building. The mid-strength category is still early, still being shaped. But if consumption data is anything to go by - every major category in decline, health consciousness rising, and a generation unwilling to choose between all or nothing - the middle ground is exactly where the next wave is heading.

Visit Quarter Proof

The Booking Office at St Pancras opened in 1869 as the original ticket hall of the station - the point at which Victorian travellers made their arrangements before heading north, or south to the Channel and on into Europe. George Gilbert Scott's Gothic spires overhead, the platforms stretching behind you, and at the counter: the practicalities of getting somewhere ambitious. It closed as a hotel in 1935, fell into disrepair, and reopened in 2021 as a bar and restaurant - high arches, bold fabrics, a Victorian winter garden aesthetic that carries the weight of the room without being crushed by it. It's an apt setting for a conversation about what comes next in computing.

Dr. Ricky Patel has come down from Leicester on the morning train. We find a table, order coffee, and get into it fairly quickly. Patel is the co-founder and CEO of Project Legacy, a neuromorphic computing company building what he believes is the hardware architecture that AI actually needs, rather than the one it's currently stuck with. He has a PhD in clinical neuroscience, spent years advising single-family offices on technical due diligence across Europe, Asia, USA, and built a separate AI-powered investment analysis platform (Point Science Analytics) in the gaps between. He is not, in any obvious sense, the person you'd expect to be taking on Nvidia. That, he'd argue, is exactly the point.

He starts with energy - not as an abstract sustainability concern, but as the core constraint on what AI is actually capable of becoming. "The electricity and water consumption is getting super exponential," he says. "And what people are doing is formulating solutions around the core problem. The core problem is the hardware." The GPU - the workhorse of modern AI - is approaching a physical ceiling. Transistors can only be packed so densely onto a chip. Moore's Law, the principle that reliably doubled computing power every two years for half a century, has effectively stalled. At CES (Consumer Electronics Show) earlier this year, Nvidia didn't unveil a new GPU for the first time in five years. What they showed instead was the Rubin platform - multiple chips stacked together into something resembling a supercomputer, achieving through brute assembly what individual chips can no longer deliver alone. "Fancy marketing," Patel says, "dressing up a fundamental problem." The energy crisis that follows gets the same treatment: data centres are now being proposed for orbit, where the cold of space handles the cooling along with continuous solar energy access. He doesn't dismiss it outright, but he doesn't take it seriously either. "Maybe that buys three to five years. But you've still got the cost of getting them up there, the maintenance, the turnover. It's a cover-up for the truly difficult problem, which is that the hardware, at a fundamental level, is not very good. And I think internally, Nvidia knows that. AI is limited by compute power. That's it. If we don't work on the hardware problem, everything else is theatre."

The electricity and water consumption is getting super exponential. And what people are doing is formulating solutions around the core problem. The core problem is the hardware.

Neuromorphic computing - hardware modelled on biological neural architecture - is not a new idea. The field has existed for decades. But Patel's argument is that it has been approached with exactly the same incremental mindset as the GPU it's supposed to replace. "The existing neuromorphic approach was the same thinking," he says. "Put loads of silicon neurons on a chip. Get to thousands, then millions. You end up at the exact same saturation point." Project Legacy's approach starts from a different reading of biological neuroscience. The brain doesn't work through uniform accumulation of the same neurons. It has distinct regions, each governing specific functions, within which particular neurons with particular roles are grouped into micro-circuits - clusters that fire together. The company's Silicon Neuronal Clusters architecture attempts to replicate that structural logic in silicon: not more neurons, but the right neurons, wired together in the right way.

The practical consequence is hardware that can process multiple sensory inputs - visual, auditory, tactile - simultaneously and in real time, without the latency that currently makes autonomous systems unsafe in dynamic environments. "For a robot to safely operate alongside a human being, it needs to react in real time. You can't get that with current hardware. Even Nvidia's Jetson systems - you've got one for visual processing, one for motor, one for auditory. That's the problem." The longer vision reaches further still: individual neurons as self-contained processors, data as a power source, and eventually an architecture that changes how data centres themselves are built. He is clear-eyed about the distance between here and there. "We're starting with autonomous systems (robotics). Baby steps." But the ambition is emphatically not baby steps. It is a new computing architecture, built from scratch, rooted in what neuroscience actually understands about how the brain works - not what it understood twenty years ago.

The incumbents, he points out, are structurally unable to make the move he's making. Nvidia's business is GPUs. Its customer base, its revenue model, its entire identity is GPU-shaped. "They could turn around tomorrow and say we're building an LLM and wipe the floor with everyone. But they've got a base they need to service. They're a tanker trying to turn one degree. We're a speedboat." He doesn't say this with any particular aggression. He says it the way someone describes a fact about the physical world.

They're a tanker trying to turn one degree. We're a speedboat.

The venture funding landscape for hardware is a different kind of constraint, and one he's clearly spent more time thinking about. "Early stage investment in hardware is now being treated like B2B SaaS investment. Same metrics, same timelines, same expectations." The problem, he says, is that hardware is not SaaS. You can't build an MVP overnight, send it to your network and start charging by Friday. A chip requires architecture, simulation, fabrication - and fabrication, at the level of TSMC, costs money that no seed round is currently structured to provide. "These days, a software founder can get to seed in weeks. Hardware needs a million and a half, two million just to build the chip. It's a fundamentally different bet. Whoever solves the hardware problem controls the future of AI. Everything else is renting someone else's foundation."

The common response from European VCs, he says, is a specific kind of retreat: we can't build conviction in this space. "When I've pressed on what that actually means, it's one of two things. Either: we don't know enough about this - in which case, you don't need to, because we're the ones building and obsessing over it. Or they just don't believe in us. Which is also fine. I'm sure someone will, and they will." Family offices, he finds more naturally aligned. Patient capital, generational time horizons, less pressure to mark a portfolio to a fund cycle. "They're looking for generational wealth increases. That maps directly onto what we're building."

He mentions Bessemer Venture Partners' anti-portfolio - the firm's public record of deals they passed on, including early Google. One of the partners' friends had rented their garage to two men building something called Google. She told the investor he should meet them. He skipped the meeting. One of the biggest losses of my life, the firm wrote about it. "Some of the people who've passed on us," Patel says, "will look back on that. I guarantee." Not a threat. A statement of physics.

Whoever solves the hardware problem controls the future of AI. Everything else is renting someone else's foundation.

What would he change about the UK early-stage ecosystem, if he could change one thing? Less time wasting on both sides - founders who don't know their ideal investor profile, funds that maintain deliberately ambiguous theses to avoid saying no outright. "I'd like to see people understand who they actually need. Because right now, too often, ships are just passing in the night."

But his view of where the current wave ends is precise, and he holds it with some firmness. "LLMs, are a support system. An assistant. They simplify workflows and make life easier. For genuine autonomy - for the things that actually change how the world operates - you need compute power we don't yet have." He offers a thought experiment that stops the conversation for a moment. If AI had existed when the Wright brothers were proposing powered flight, it would have concluded the proposition was not feasible - no training data existed to support the idea that flight was possible. The same would have applied to heliocentrism (the astronomical model placing the Sun at the centre of the solar system, with Earth and other planets orbiting it) in the 1600s. "All today's AI is trained on data from what we've already done. It cannot create something genuinely new. And to get to that, you need better compute. Everything else is iterative refinement."

He is more thoughtful than I expect about the psychological consequences of the current adoption wave. Resilience, he thinks, is built through friction - through getting something wrong, working it out, trying again. "If that process is bypassed from the start, you lose the muscle before it's built. Short-form video was the last version of this, rewiring attention, building dependency. AI dependency is the next wave. We want the answers fast, and now." Asked what future generations will look back on and misunderstand about this moment, his answer is quick. "We were so fixated on who could build the biggest LLM that we didn't account for the wattage needed to do it. We consumed enormous resources chasing scale - and had nothing left to feed the thing. Water and electricity were the fundamental constraints, and we ignored them." A pause. "Which is, of course, full circle to what we're building. We were building the biggest LLMs we could. We should have been paying attention to the hardware. Those two things were always going to collide."

All today's AI is trained on data from what we've already done. It cannot create something genuinely new. And to get to that, you need better compute. Everything else is iterative refinement.

On leadership and the rhythm of a long build, he reaches for two frameworks that sit in deliberate contrast. The first is military. "We are not a family. We're not a sports team. We're a special forces unit." In a special forces unit, if one person falls, the next must be able to cover their function. The C-suite especially. "I've ingrained that into everyone around me." The second is, on the surface, its opposite: the Navy SEALs' Hell Week framework. During Hell Week, candidates sleep roughly four hours across an entire week. The way they survive it - don't think about the week. Get to your next meal. "When you're building a ten or fifteen year vision, you can't hold it in your head at once. You go crazy. So you break it down. What do I need to get done this morning? What did I finish this week? Your next meal. That's it." He's also made a particular peace with the nature of a founder's brain. Ideas arrive at 10pm. The mind doesn't separate work from not-work, and trying to force it to is its own kind of energy drain. "Normalising that - accepting that it's okay to be the person who's always thinking about the problem - that's been freeing."

The last question is always the same: the most valuable piece of advice. Not necessarily about the company or building one, but about life more broadly.

He told me he'd had an answer prepared - logical, business-framed - and then, somewhere on the train down, had a thought and changed his mind.

"Winter always turns to spring." It's a Buddhist principle said by Nichiren Daishonin, a 13th-century Japanese Buddhist monk. At no point in recorded history has winter reversed back to autumn. "When things are at their worst, the sun will always appear again after. It has to. Bad times don't last forever. They just feel like they do." He came to Buddhism from Hinduism, during a period several years ago he describes only as the hardest of his life - one that took a small number of close friends and family to navigate through. He doesn't dwell on it. What he holds onto is what came after: the recognition that the pattern holds, and that it always will. "Everything I've put my mind to, I've eventually achieved," he says. "It's just taken a lot of hard work and a non-stop attitude." He applies the same frame to fundraising setbacks, to term sheets pulled after diligence when he conducted due diligence for SFOs, to investors who can't build conviction in a space they don't yet understand. "Something better follows. Your job is to hold steady long enough to spot it."

Winter always turns to spring. When things are at their worst, the sun will always appear again after. It has to. Bad times don't last forever. They just feel like they do.

We finish our coffees as the Booking Office fills around us. Patel had said, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, that all today's AI is trained on what we've already done - that it cannot predict what it has no data for. The Wright Brothers, heliocentrism, flight itself. The things that change everything tend to arrive before anyone has the framework to see them coming. With that we both go our separate ways, a fitting note to finish on in the same week that the clocks go forward and Spring finally arrives.

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Brad Jones is catching an early train back north, which is why we're meeting at Gest restaurant - tucked inside the Euston Square Hotel - before most of London has properly woken up. It's bright and early, but if you want time with a founder who splits his life between the UK and Brazil, has built and sold two companies, runs an angel syndicate of over one hundred investors, and recently closed pre-seed funding for his latest venture in just two weeks, needs must.

That latest venture is ThatRound, a matchmaking platform for founders and investors - and the problem it exists to solve will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has spent time on either side of early-stage investing. "Signal over noise," Jones says, when I ask for the one-liner. "Every hundred founders out there, probably ninety-five of them are running around submitting forms to VC websites, hearing nothing back, sitting there hoping - and it takes six months to find out they were pitching the wrong people the whole time."

I can relate to this from the inside. Even with a structured approach, fundraising for Floe Oral Care was at times exhausting and demoralising - time lost pitching people who were never going to write a cheque, relationships burned before they'd really begun. LinkedIn has made it worse. Founders now feel compelled to kiss a thousand frogs just to land one cheque, peppering investors through automated outreach with no thesis alignment on either side. Everyone's busy, nobody's winning. ThatRound's answer to this is structurally simple, technically complex: flip the model so founders hold the power.

Rather than submitting a pitch deck into the ether and waiting, founders browse a curated marketplace of investors, see their options, and reach out selectively. "Think Booking.com," Jones says. "Or Airbnb. You see your options, you message a few, you get some feedback, you speak to another ten." The consumer-grade experience applied to something that has historically felt like shouting into a void.

Every hundred founders out there, probably ninety-five of them are running around submitting forms to VC websites, hearing nothing back, sitting there hoping - and it takes six months to find out they were pitching the wrong people the whole time.

The investor side is where it gets technically interesting. Old-school matching platforms have always failed for the same reason: database filters can't capture the qualitative texture of early-stage investing. Tick boxes for sector, stage, and ticket size miss everything that matters - and investors end up bombarded with pre-seed tech companies' miles from their actual thesis. "You can't have interdependent conditions with database matching," Jones explains. "With a hotel you need location and Wi-Fi. With a startup investment, everything is connected." Large language models change that. Preferences expressed in language, matching done in language, feedback loops that update automatically. "The market wasn't broken," he says. "The technology to fix it just didn't exist until now."

There's a quieter function ThatRound serves that Jones is particularly proud of: telling founders the truth, early. A nineteen-question onboarding process captures detailed investor preferences across every attribute; a rigorous AI extraction process interrogates every startup deck. When those two datasets meet, the platform can tell a first-time founder - quickly, clearly, and with specific reasons - that ninety-nine percent of investors in the network aren't going to bite. "We've done them a service," he says. "They figure out in a week what would otherwise take six months of wasted energy."

This connects to something Jones feels strongly about: the predatory layer that has grown up around the fundraising process. Upfront-fee scammers, introduction services that add no real value, brokers who build trust with investors only to extract fees from founders. Jones experienced this directly when investing in CROSSIP, the non-alcoholic spirits brand, where a contact on his cap table recommended a broker who turned out to be defrauding the recommender too. The guy took the fee and disappeared. "Everyone in this market has a version of that story." His longer-term thesis is that AI makes the human broker redundant anyway. "The only reason that trust existed was because the broker had the human intelligence to learn investor preferences. We can do that now."

CROSSIP was Jones's introduction to the FMCG world - he invested in the non-alcoholic spirits brand, became a Co-Founder and then helped with its fundraising - and it taught him something his earlier career hadn't. His first company was a B2B software business selling to banks and business schools, bootstrapped and sold in 2016 when he was twenty-six. The exit came after an unusual route in a first-class mathematics degree from Imperial College London, followed by eight years as a European equities trader at JPMorgan. "So, I came away with this preconception that it was quite easy to build things and make money from it." Watching CROSSIP navigate a physical product in a nascent category, sold into bars and restaurants with a sales cycle unlike anything he'd encountered, disabused him of that quickly. "Don't have unrealistic expectations of hockey-stick growth in a physical product business." CROSSIP is now profitable and selling in twenty-five countries - a good outcome, if not the one anyone originally envisioned.

The market wasn't broken. The technology to fix it just didn't exist until now.

The angel syndicate Jones built after his first exit - fifty investors from his network, deploying capital together - is what eventually seeded ThatRound's pre-seed round. Earlier this year it merged with OVC Ventures, co-founded by Harrison Faull, who had spent years building deal flow, analysing startups, and investing family capital. The combined group is now called Aligned Syndicate. The partnership started not with a pitch but with two people independently arriving at the same idea: that early-stage investing improves when founders can find the right investors faster, and when angels have better signal before committing capital. Jones brought the founder and operator experience; Faull brought the infrastructure and the investor network. Jones then sent one message to those fifty angels, looking to raise £300,000 and leading with £100,000 himself, and closed at over double that target in just two weeks. He smiles slightly at the obvious irony. "Unfortunately, we didn't use our own platform. Just didn't need to. But we will."

On the UK ecosystem, Jones is more nuanced than the prevailing narrative tends to allow. He pushes back on the lazy comparison to the US. "We're a little blob on the map in terms of population. Of course, the biggest companies in the world are going to be there." Compare the UK to the rest of Europe, he argues, and the picture looks very different - fintech being the obvious example. The more pressing structural concern for him is what I'd frame as the incubator economy trap: nurturing brilliant companies only to lose the economic benefit when they reach scale. I felt this acutely with Floe - a post-seed funding gap that left us with limited options. His fix, if he had a moment at the dispatch box: raise the SEIS limit, currently set at £250,000. "Most pre-seed companies need more than that to get going, and there's a psychological barrier for angels at the limit too."

Where his own investment attention currently sits is revealing. He describes getting "the ick" on AI-powered startups as a one-liner - the Love Island framing lands precisely. "Everything is AI-powered at the moment. Unless it's genuinely proprietary, saying it doesn't differentiate." What interests him instead is hardware: he's recently backed a quantum computing company and a photonics chip spinout from Bristol University building photonic-powered chips aimed at the AI inference market. "Everyone's focused on training - Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs. My view is that inference is going to be a massive market." As the volume of AI queries scales globally, faster and cheaper inference compute becomes critical infrastructure.

Everything is AI-powered at the moment. Unless it's genuinely proprietary, saying it doesn't differentiate.

On AI adoption more broadly, Jones applies a principle he picked up early in his founder journey, from an investor on his first board who caught him off guard without an answer in a board meeting: "Your job is to have your finger on the pulse. You should know the answer to that question." It has lived with him ever since. The equivalent today: any task where delegating to AI means you stop understanding your own business is a line crossed. "If AI is building my financial model, I don't actually know what assumption has been tweaked." Not a case against AI - but a guardrail around the things that require you to stay close.

The conversation turns to leadership under pressure - what to lean on when things get difficult. Jones describes a framework borrowed from Arnold Schwarzenegger of all people: vision, action, celebration. A ten-year personal vision, annual goals that build toward it, a clear sense of what you're building for beyond the day-to-day grind. In his own life that looks specific: a house in Brazil, a house in the UK, time split evenly between the two. His wife is Brazilian; they're currently settling into six months each way. All ten of his employees hold equity and have taken pay cuts to join, perhaps buying into their own ten-year journeys. "I only wanted people who could see it and genuinely wanted to be part of building it." When things get hard, the instruction is simple therefore: zoom out and re-calibrate.

It's a philosophy shaped in part through adversity. One of the most formative periods of his life, he says, wasn't building or selling a company, but a prolonged legal dispute with his former employer, JPMorgan. The case lasted several years and was ultimately resolved in his favour. It was a demanding period, both personally and financially, and at times he considered walking away. During one of those moments, he spoke to a mentor who had faced a similar situation. The advice he received - blunt but memorable - stayed with him, and is crude enough to need paraphrasing in print: "Don't be a 'coward'." It's a phrase he later put on his office wall as a reminder to stay resilient when things get difficult. He kept going, and the experience left a lasting impact on how he approaches challenges today. "When I have weak moments, I look up and see it." He kept going. He won. There's a long tradition of simple truths cutting through where careful reasoning fails…

Your job is to have your finger on the pulse. You should know the answer to that question.

We wrap up as the morning sun starts to cut through the windows - a rare thing for March in London, but welcome. I settle the bill as he gathers his things, and we step out into an unexpectedly bright morning - him heading on foot to Euston after a couple of days of meetings in London, back north to where he's based; me heading into the city. ThatRound is entering a market that has needed fixing for a long time, and the tools to fix it have only recently arrived. Whether it captures that opportunity will come down to the team, the thesis, and - as one board member told him early on - firmly keeping your finger on the pulse. Something tells me he won't need the framed quote to remind him…

Visit ThatRound

I haven't met Ernst Dolce in person before this morning, though his company has been on my radar since Fuel Ventures backed Banqora last year. We're at the bar at Electric Bar & Diner in The Ned - the former Midland Bank headquarters on Poultry, all high ceilings, heavy stone and old-school City grandeur - which makes a fittingly cinematic backdrop for a conversation about tearing down the financial services infrastructure that institutions like this helped build. Dolce arrives early, and bursts into gear before the coffees have even arrived - the man radiates energy.

Banqora's thesis starts somewhere most people don't look: the middle and back office. Not the glamorous end of finance. Not front-of-house trading desks or client-facing apps, but the engine room - post-trade settlement, reconciliation, compliance processing - the part that still, in 2026, runs on infrastructure built before the internet existed. "If you look at the market," Dolce says, "roughly half of all financial infrastructure is still written in COBOL." (For context: a programming language designed in the 1950s that underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions and the majority of the world's financial systems).

He says it with the air of someone who has watched audiences react to this fact and now enjoys the pause that follows.

The frustration is personal. Before co-founding Banqora, Dolce ran one of the leanest trading teams in the market - seven people on the desk managing 300 billion in assets. Yet they were juggling six different trading tools that barely spoke to each other, plus hundreds of daily emails and chats. Each day the team hit the same walls: overlapping front-office systems, poor interoperability, fragmented workflows and manual post-trade processes handled by a large middle and back-office team. That persistent friction became the seed of Banqora. The trigger came in 2018, when Dolce was in the US and saw early-stage AI development gathering pace. "I said to myself, there is no way the infrastructure and the way we run the activity will remain the same." That was pre-COVID, pre-mainstream AI adoption. He'd clocked it early.

I said to myself, there is no way the infrastructure and the way we run the activity will remain the same.

The company was incorporated in March 2024. By June they had built the first version of an AI agent for the repo market. The banks and asset managers they pitched were unconvinced. "They said the market will never move to that." Dolce smiles at this. By November, the full platform with autonomous decision-making agents was live. "Do you know how long it took us to build something ten times more complex after that?" He pauses. "Three weeks."

The speed differential he's describing - six months to three weeks - isn't just a product story. It points to a structural shift in what it means to build software at all. Today, 80% of any financial institution's technology budget goes towards maintaining legacy infrastructure. Twenty percent, at best, funds innovation. "If you are my boss," Dolce says, "and you give me a hundred pounds to invest in tech, I'm forced to spend eighty just keeping the old stack alive. That leaves innovation as an afterthought." AI, in his reading, breaks that equation open. A junior developer with an LLM can now do in a week what once required months of senior engineering time. The old defense - "that's not possible," "that will take six months," "we don't have capacity" - have lost their cover.

He is impatient with the cultural resistance this exposes, but not unsympathetic to it. He draws a distinction between the technology changing and the system changing. Culture, he insists, is the much harder problem. "If you tell someone to change but don't tell them why, nobody moves," he says. He prefers a different approach: one where you don't tell a back-office employee their job is being replaced, but instead show them that the bulk of their role - the repetitive, low-value - can be handed to a machine, so they can focus on the part that is genuinely high-value. "People will listen to that," he says. "Some will not. They are the ones who will lose their jobs. But that is their choice."

Your biggest enemy is inside of you. Fight him first.

He reaches for a line from his childhood - something from Haitian Creole: your biggest enemy is inside of you; fight him first before you fight me. It resurfaces several times across breakfast, applied to employees resisting change, to founders second-guessing themselves, to anyone projecting external obstacles onto internal reluctance. "It's not the technology that takes you out," he says. "You took yourself out."

Dolce left Haiti at twelve. Civil war, seven presidents in three months, an army that killed people in the streets. "I grew up where you don't know tomorrow," he says, without drama. His family moved. He studied in Paris, worked in fixed income at Natixis and then AXA, moved to London in September 2010 - the first evening, at a drinks event with his new trading team, he found himself surrounded by thirty strangers, some of them running asset managers. "I knew nobody. Same day, I was having a drink with people who could accelerate my life." That openness - the instinctive accessibility of the London professional ecosystem - still strikes him as remarkable. "In France, you need to earn your way into the group. Here, I would see someone on LinkedIn and reach out without even thinking they would say no." I love the sentiment, but in 2026, that kind of faith in LinkedIn's inbox requires either genuine charm or a very high spam tolerance - probably both…

He has been in the UK for sixteen years and is unequivocal about its advantages for founders building in financial services. The talent pool is here, English sells everywhere, and the City means clients are a walk away. "If you have a good idea in the UK and you can deliver, you win." He holds France up as a deliberate contrast, with affection but little illusion: "If you start a company in France, be my guest. It's going to take time." The comparison isn't flattering.

That said, he has a pointed structural critique. European startups in many jurisdictions receive tax holidays in their earliest years - exemptions designed to protect fragile companies before they have the cash flow to absorb full corporate tax obligations. The UK doesn't do this. "A startup pays the same as a company that has been there for ten years." He frames it as a fundamental misalignment of incentive and risk. "You don't ask a baby to walk when they can barely crawl. You protect the small companies to create the ecosystem that eventually produces the large ones." He's clear-eyed about the implication: if the tax burden makes it rational to relocate once a company reaches scale, entrepreneurs will. "I will go where it is best for my company, for my investors, for my clients. If you don't create the right incentive, they will say goodbye."

You don't ask a baby to walk when they can barely crawl. You protect the small companies to create the ecosystem that eventually produces the large ones.

We spend time on AI adoption more broadly - the noise of it, the velocity, the low-grade anxiety of trying to keep pace. Dolce cuts through this with characteristic bluntness: "You cannot keep the pace. It's impossible. Even the engineers building these models can't keep up. If you think you're going to keep pace, you're lying to yourself." His prescription is not to track every model release or rotate subscriptions between ChatGPT and Claude, but to change the philosophy of how you work altogether. Banqora itself is the example: they started with APIs, built their first version over six months, then discovered MCP protocol (an open source standard introduced by Anthropic that allows AI models to seamlessly connect with external data sources, like a universal USB-C port for AI), and the integration that would have required ten separate technical connections collapsed into one. "Overnight," he says, leaning in slightly, "it became: enjoy the ride."

There's a genuine tension in his thinking here, though, and he doesn't elide it. He worries about what gets lost when AI absorbs not just the manual but the cognitive work. He recalls his early years as a quantitative analyst in fixed income - struggling through complex models, spending nights decoding them. "If I had had AI, it would have accelerated my output. But the thing I would have missed is the true understanding of what was going on." The calculator metaphor is fitting in this respect: access to a calculator doesn't produce more mathematicians. You get the right answer. And then what? "Critical thinking," he says, "will be the thing that makes the difference." It's not a Luddite position - he's building the automation layer - but it is a considered one. He connects it back to his view on young people working from home: without proximity to senior colleagues, without sitting next to someone who will hand you something they'd normally do and say try it, the muscle atrophies before it's built.

Critical thinking will be the thing that makes the difference.

Leadership, trust, the fragility of both in a moment of technological disruption. I ask him what principle he falls back on when things get difficult. "Transparency," he says, immediately. "Open the box. Show people what's inside." In financial services - where auditability is the first word in any conversation about AI adoption - this is both practical and philosophical. If clients can see how a model makes decisions, the fear of the black box dissolves. If teams can see why the business is changing direction, the resistance softens. "There is nothing magical," he says. "If I show you what's inside the box, you work with me again."

His co-founder and CTO, Nicholas Holden, a British veteran finance technologist and machine learning PhD who he'd worked with before founding Banqora - comes up repeatedly as the embodiment of this. Different temperaments, same commitment. "I do not queue," Dolce says, grinning. "He will be very polite and queue. I'm saying to him, you don't have to queue here." But he is effusive about what his co-founder brings: the skill set, the domain expertise, the volume of work. "I can go anywhere with this guy by my side and we will survive." The talent he values most, in anyone, is the capacity to learn new things. "If you're always telling me the same story, I'll stop listening."

When I ask for the most valuable piece of advice he's ever received, he goes back to being seventeen, in French Guiana, telling his parents he wanted to join the Foreign Legion. A Portuguese teacher - whose name he still remembers fondly - sat with him and worked through it methodically. Five years in the Legion. Then what? You like finance. You have an uncle in finance. What's stopping you from doing both? "It's the best advice I ever received," he says. "You CAN. Sometimes in life, you believe you have only one choice. It's not true." He repeats it like a refrain he's worn smooth over years: you can, so go. He says he passes it on to his children in exactly those terms. The simplest possible antidote to thought paralysis.

As for the fears that don't exist yet - the ones founders manufacture and then find themselves trapped by - he is consistent on the remedy: "Worry about the things you can control. On the things you cannot control, what is your impact?" When you're running a company with less money, fewer people, and leaner resources than those arrayed against you, he says, you have one move. "Find your niche and fight like hell. The rest, no one cares."

Find your niche and fight like hell. The rest, no one cares.

We wrap up over the fading warmth of a Ned breakfast, the City already in full Tuesday stride outside the stone arches of what was once the Midland's main hall. There's even some morning warmth from the sun as spring finally threatens to appear. This is the kind of conversation that leaves you feeling slightly re-calibrated: not because of the AI thesis, which is sharp and well-argued, but because of the clarity that runs beneath it. Dolce grew up somewhere where tomorrow genuinely wasn't guaranteed, moved to places that demanded constant adaptation, and built a company predicated on the idea that the future rewards those who change their philosophy of working rather than just their tools. The Creole phrase he quoted comes back on the walk out: biggest enemy is inside of you, fight him first. For a man who left Haiti at twelve and is now rebuilding the back office of global finance, it doesn't feel like a metaphor.

Visit Banqora

At the beginning of the month, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey warned of the growing urgency for workers to learn how to use AI effectively. Amid the excitement around productivity gains, there is also a quieter, more structural challenge: choosing the right tools, integrating them coherently, and ensuring people evolve alongside them rather than being left behind. It feels like an appropriate moment, then, to sit down with Johnnie Ball - someone working at precisely this fault line. Ball has spent years operating inside AI. He co-founded cashflow forecasting platform Fluidly, scaling it through to acquisition by OakNorth Bank, one of the UK's most successful fintech stories of the last decade. We meet at the Polo Bar opposite Liverpool Street station - an unfussy London institution that has been operating continuously since 1959. It feels like an appropriate setting to discuss a technology cycle moving at a pace that makes most organisations feel permanently behind. Ball has seen the transition from both sides: building AI products, and now helping companies adapt to them.

Fluidly's acquisition by OakNorth gave Ball what he describes as "a front row seat in how to apply AI within a scaled, regulated environment." No matter how entrepreneurial the business, or how ambitious the leadership, there is friction in staying current with technology - especially when it is moving at the pace of AI. This friction is universal, but particularly acute inside regulated institutions where change must coexist with compliance, risk, and legacy systems. Despite OakNorth's pace, Ball felt the pull back toward the frontier. "I realised that to genuinely stay at the edge, I had to get out and move independently - to apply these tools across different organisations, different industries, different contexts." Distance, paradoxically, provides perspective. And with AI, perspective compounds quickly.

Ball's background has always been rooted in machine learning, but more than technical interest, there is a sense of responsibility in his decision to start Axiiom. At its core, it's a specialist AI consultancy that helps companies actually put AI to work. The focus is less on simply embedding tools and more on the transformation that surrounds them - training teams, reshaping workflows, and helping businesses navigate a landscape that is evolving by the month. It's about keeping organisations clear on what good actually looks like, maximising effectiveness rather than experimentation for its own sake, and ensuring new tools are integrated not just technically, but culturally.

I happen to be living in an era where AI is finally taking hold. Sitting on the sidelines would be crazy. This is one of the most important technological revolutions of our lifetime - possibly ever.

Axiiom exists to help organisations navigate that shift. Its work is part diagnostic, part operational, and part educational - ensuring companies do not just adopt AI tools superficially but reorganise themselves to use them effectively. Because the real risk is not lack of access. It is incoherence. "The real problem is coherence," Ball says. "Without it, you get froth. Everyone is experimenting, but nothing compounds." This is particularly visible in SMEs, where dozens of disconnected initiatives emerge simultaneously. Tools are trialled. Agents are built. But without structure, momentum dissipates. To counter this, Axiiom focuses heavily on champion training. "We tend to start training the top 10 or 15 people in a company to lead adoption within their function. Otherwise, you get fragmentation - lots of activity, but no real progress." AI adoption is perhaps becoming less about the tools themselves, and more about sufficient leadership.

A phrase that surfaces repeatedly in AI circles is the "jagged frontier" - coined by Professor Ethan Mollick of Wharton, one of the leading academic voices on AI and work - to describe the uneven, unpredictable capabilities of modern models. They can outperform humans dramatically in one domain, and fail embarrassingly in another. This unevenness creates both opportunity and confusion. Ball is clear about what it means. "Your job is not disappearing. It is transforming into managing AI at the edge of its capabilities." The organisations that succeed will be those that learn to operate at that edge - delegating what machines do best, while retaining human judgment where it matters most.

But mindset is everything. "Most companies approach AI through the lens of cost-cutting. That is a mistake. If you operate from scarcity, you lose to competitors operating from abundance." In his view, AI is not fundamentally about reduction. It is about expansion. "These tools give people leverage. They augment human capability. They do not remove the need for humans - they change what humans spend their time doing." Workflows that existed for decades will be torn up. Roles will evolve. Entire categories of work will compress. And those willing to embrace it will move disproportionately faster.

Most companies approach AI through the lens of cost-cutting. That is a mistake. If you operate from scarcity, you lose to competitors operating from abundance.

One of the more counterintuitive consequences of AI, Ball believes, is that it may empower the ambitious more than anyone else. "There has never been a better time to be an ambitious 21-year-old. You have access to the world's best tutor in almost any subject for £20 a month." What once required institutions, gatekeepers, or years of trial and error can now be accelerated dramatically. Starting companies, in particular, has fundamentally changed. "What used to take months and thousands of pounds can now be done in days." This compresses iteration cycles. It lowers barriers. It shifts advantage toward those willing to move. The constraint is no longer access. It is initiative.

Ball remains fundamentally optimistic about the UK as a starting point for companies. "The UK has extraordinary talent density, a robust legal system, and world-class financial infrastructure." Graduates from institutions like Imperial, UCL, and Oxbridge etc. provide a deep pool of technical capability. Tax incentives like SEIS and EIS reinforce early-stage formation. "It is arguably the best place in the world to start a company."

Scaling, however, is another matter. "People do not realise how rare unicorn outcomes actually are." He offers a striking comparison. "For every UK unicorn created, there have been roughly 40 new Premier League football players." It's not hyperbole. Over the past decade, the UK has produced somewhere in the region of 60 - 70 new billion-dollar companies. In that same period, between 2,500 and 3,000 individual players have made at least one appearance in the Premier League. The maths is blunt: roughly 40 players for every one unicorn minted. The implication lands heavily. Building a billion-pound company is not just difficult - it is statistically rarer than making it onto a Premier League pitch. And becoming a Premier League footballer is already the kind of outcome most people would consider vanishingly improbable.

For every UK unicorn created, there have been roughly 40 new Premier League football players.

The UK excels at creation but struggles with scale. "Government support tends to drop off too early. The support rails need to extend beyond Series A." Ball is not calling for open-ended state backing, but for better investor incentives. Early-stage schemes like SEIS and EIS are strong; growth-stage risk capital is not. Without aligned incentives for domestic investors to back companies through the scaling phase, firms plateau, fail, sell early, or move abroad. Government's role is to shape the environment - not subsidise endlessly - so that taking scale risk becomes rational. And increasingly, scaling is as much about intelligent adaptation as it is about capital.

As AI systems become more capable, a deeper philosophical question emerges: how much thinking should humans delegate as we adapt? Ball frames the question differently. "Why would you deliberately limit your own capabilities?" He points to medicine as an example. "The best outcomes come from combining human expertise with machine intelligence." In his view, the future is collaborative, not substitutive. Doctors will not disappear. But their role will evolve. The same is true across industries. The individuals and organisations that thrive will be those that learn to orchestrate intelligence - not compete with it.

Having navigated acquisitions, integrations, and multiple company-building cycles, Ball's leadership philosophy is simple. "Be honest and direct - from a position of care." Clarity builds trust. Particularly when conditions are unstable. "When people know you are being truthful, and that you care about them and the organisation, it steadies things." It is not charisma that sustains teams through uncertainty. It is integrity.

Ball is drawn to difficult challenges - including rowing unsupported across the Atlantic. His reasoning is straightforward: "Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life," to borrow a quote from four-time Olympic weightlifting champion Jerzy Gregorek. Difficulty, properly chosen, compounds into resilience, perspective, and capability. And waiting for perfect readiness is a trap. "You are never ready. So, start before you are."

The Atlantic row itself began as a smaller idea, before expanding into something far more ambitious. There's an established, well-supported route each year from the Canary Islands to Antigua, but that version didn't quite land. The route shifted to something far rarer: from the tip of Portugal to South America. Longer by roughly 1,000 to 1,500 miles. Trade winds down to the Canaries, then Cape Verde, then west across open ocean. Only ten boats had ever completed that Europe-to-South America passage.

The row was also anchored in something far more personal than endurance. Ball's father was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia - a degenerative condition that alters personality, behaviour and language long before memory fully fades. The experience reshaped his understanding of time, agency and what really matters. He became a trustee of Dementia UK, and the crossing was undertaken in his father's memory, raising significant funds to support families navigating the same diagnosis.

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

As we leave the Polo Bar and step back into the churn of Liverpool Street, the pace of the AI cycle feels no slower. But the framing is clearer. This is not a moment defined by replacement. It is one defined by leverage. The frontier is jagged. Uneven. Disorienting. But for those willing to move toward it - even before they feel ready - the opportunity is extraordinary. Keep rowing…

Visit Axiiom

I'm meeting Nick Perrett at Soho Mews House, tucked away on a quiet cobbled street behind Bond Street, on a wet February morning. It feels deliberately different from the rest of the Soho House ecosystem. Less noise. No laptops. More personal. Opened as a thank-you to early members who helped build the group, it's effectively a club within a club. It doesn't feel like bubble and squeak will be making an appearance this week…

Perrett brings more than two decades of experience as both entrepreneur and investor across banking, venture capital, technology, media, and gaming - making him unusually well-placed to offer genuine perspective to Early Rounds readers. We begin with what pushed him to found Prosper, and what itch another startup is really scratching.

Most people experience something annoying and put up with it. If you're an entrepreneur, you don't accept the status quo.

That frustration - excessive fees of around 3%, outdated technology, and a poor user experience - was what led him to build Prosper, a digital-first wealth management platform designed for a new generation. In a world where in where other FinTechs have transformed payments, currency exchange and banking, wealth management has lagged badly behind. Old tech and high fees are a tough sell in 2026.

Perrett radiates energy. "If you're an entrepreneur, it's very hard to put your gloves down," he says, nodding to both industry frustration and an ingrained creative compulsion to build. He jokes about athletes who refuse to retire - think Novak Djokovic still reaching Grand Slam finals late into his career - but the underlying point is serious: the fire still burns.

Wealth management, if you're lucky, is often inherited rather than chosen. People stick with advisors out of habit, family ties, or inertia. I ask how deep that lock-in really is, and what finally causes someone to break away. The answer isn't ideology, he suggests, but friction. A moment when the experience no longer fits how people live their lives.

Perrett describes himself - with a smile - as "one of the oldest digital natives." The first at university to have an email address, a laptop, a mobile phone. For Gen Z this borders on fiction, but it gives him a genuinely cross-generational lens. "Our lives are now coordinated through our phones," he says. "So, the idea of someone coming round to your house to manage your wealth feels very dated."

Prosper is built around a digital-first experience: shared accounts, automated top-ups, gifting, all through a native platform. Cost matters too - Prosper promises low or zero fees, retaining interest on cash left uninvested. "The internet is a great leveller," Perrett reflects. "It shines a light on cost, and the impact fees really have." Over a 30-year horizon, that compounds dramatically.

Prosper is also naturally embracing AI across customer service and operations, using automation to streamline everything from onboarding to portfolio construction. I push Perrett on where automation stops making sense - because money, after all, is rarely rational. It's tied up with fear, security, identity, and control. People don't just worry about performance; they worry about making the wrong decision, about timing, about explaining those decisions to a partner, family member. Perrett's view is that this is where technology reaches its natural limit: "The need for human reassurance is still very strong," he says. "Even if AI can calculate the optimal plan and execute it perfectly, some people still want to talk to someone before hitting go." That pause isn't about information - it's about confidence.

That tension isn't new. A century ago, professions like bank clerks, travel agents, insurance brokers, even switchboard operators existed largely to provide trust and reassurance. Technology removed the mechanics, but not immediately the human need. The question now is whether that need fades for future generations - or simply shifts. AI may excel at consistency, speed, and removing friction, but reassurance may remain stubbornly human.

The need for human reassurance is still very strong. Even if AI can calculate the optimal plan and execute it perfectly, some people still want to talk to someone before hitting go.

Breakfast at Soho Mews is quietly buzzing - calm, purposeful, restrained. It mirrors Prosper's philosophy. Perrett founded the company with Ricky Knox, having previously built green digital bank Tandem together. Second- and third-time founders who've worked together before usually have an outsized chance of success. I ask how much that history really matters.

Perrett draws on his time in gaming, mentored by the former CEO of Vivendi Games, which was sold to Activision. "Game publishing is a hits-driven business - just like venture capital," he says. Vivendi ran extensive research across every major game ever made. The strongest predictor of success wasn't genre, platform, or budget. It was whether the team had worked together before.

Everything else paled in comparison. Don't ask shooter experts to build a driving game.

The analogy lands. In a world obsessed with speed and hustle, it's a reminder that durable success still compounds around teams. "The longer Ricky and I work together, the better we'll get," Perrett says. "Ironically, I didn't understand compounding properly when I was younger - and now we've built a business entirely around it."

Prosper's investors include Fuel Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, MMC Ventures, and Connect Ventures, alongside high-profile athletes and public figures. I ask how much value the latter really add. "Anyone at the top of their field wants to give back or do something exciting," Perrett says. "The question is how founders capture that value." In consumer businesses especially, attention is currency. Authenticity is everything.

Having built in both the US and UK, Perrett has a nuanced view of British innovation. He jokes that Europe's entrepreneurial gene pool may have partially emigrated centuries ago - a reference to the waves of risk-takers, dissenters, and economic migrants who left for the New World in search of opportunity. From merchants and industrialists to religious non-conformists, many of those willing to gamble on the unknown boarded ships for America, drawn by the promise of upside unconstrained by class or tradition. What remained in Europe was no lack of intelligence or creativity, but a culture shaped more heavily by hierarchy, stability, and preservation. That legacy still echoes today. In the US, risk-taking became culturally rewarded, in the UK failure carried longer memory. The result is not an absence of ambition here but a different expression of it - one that often favours craft, resilience, and durability over speed alone. He points to Michael Moritz, the Welsh-born Sequoia partner who moved to the US long before venture capital even existed as a real industry here. Moritz didn't leave because of a lack of talent at home, but because the US was structurally 10-15 years ahead - with deeper pools of capital, a faster-moving ecosystem, and a greater cultural tolerance for risk. It was where ambitious ideas could scale quickly, and where speed - not just quality - was consistently rewarded.

The UK has continued to punch above its weight however - particularly in the creative industries - where constraint is bred by originality rather than caution. While the ecosystem has matured, Perrett believes we still need more entrepreneurs-turned-investors - people who've been deep in the trenches. Government has a role too. Few people realise that the UK now has a sovereign wealth fund-style vehicle designed to back areas of genuine national advantage. Not as a short-term stimulus tool, but as a long-horizon capital allocator focused on sectors where the UK can realistically win: life sciences, fintech, and the creative industries - all increasingly underpinned by AI. Perrett sees this as a quiet but important shift. If the US built its advantage on speed and risk appetite, the UK is now trying to pair its traditional strengths - discipline, creativity, resilience - with deeper, more coordinated capital. Done well, it gives founders a reason not just to start companies here, but to build them here for the long term. In a world where AI is collapsing time-to-scale and tighter venture funding, that combination may prove decisive. The ecosystem doesn't need to be faster than the US in every dimension - it needs to be good at backing the right businesses, for long enough, in the areas where it already punches above its weight.

We finish on leadership and resilience. "Managing your own energy is the most important thing as a founder," Perrett says. "People smell fear. You must show them a path forward." Vulnerability matters, but action matters more. Acknowledge what's wrong - then demonstrate what you're going to do about it.

The world doesn't want change. It likes the status quo.

His closing advice isn't just for founders; it carries broader weight. In any meaningful pursuit, the odds are stacked against you by default. Resilience matters, he says - but passion matters more. It's the fuel that sustains resilience when progress is slow and outcomes are uncertain.

He likens founders to buskers or actors: endless rejection, but they keep showing up. Keep moving. Keep the passion. You'll find your people. You'll find your investors. You'll find your team…Plenty to digest over a hearty breakfast, before heading back out into a drizzly February morning.

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Anyone who has founded a company before will understand the pain of finding the right investors. Endless networking, trawling through LinkedIn, Beauhurst and other vast pools of often unstructured data - all while trying to build the business in the first place. This is one of the core problems Rob Cossins, founder of Scribe, has set out to solve. I'm meeting him this morning at the Pop Inn Café in Bermondsey, adding a traditional full English to the growing list of Early Round breakfast locations.

Having spent several years at Barclays working in corporate risk, Cossins envisaged a better way to manage this process - not just for banks, but also for asset managers, funds and founders - in a more automated and efficient way. This was pre Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude etc. and the recent explosion of AI tooling, making Scribe genuinely ahead of the curve and capable of replacing hours of manual work. At its core, Scribe uses machine learning to map activity across private markets - analysing who invests, when, why, and alongside whom - turning opaque, relationship-driven fundraising into a structured, data-led process. The platform serves both sides of the market: founders use Scribe to target the most relevant investors, while funds, banks and lenders use it to source, assess and track private companies at scale - replacing manual research with real-time insight.

Partnering with a technical co-founder through venture builder Antler, Cossins reflects on the importance of timing - and the reality that "being too early is not always a good thing." It's a familiar risk in the current climate: building a technically elegant solution before the problem truly exists. Antler plays a critical role here, particularly in solving one of the hardest early-stage challenges - finding the right co-founder. "It's unparalleled in value because it brings a ton of smart, ambitious people into one room who all want to build businesses at the same time. It removes the timing risk from what is an incredibly vulnerable moment in anyone's career."

Not every team or company that emerges from Antler will succeed, but coupled with its ability to write the first cheque, it's a powerful launchpad - enabling founders to find the right person at the right time, alongside early capital. Scribe has since gone on to raise further funding from angels and Fuel Ventures, forming part of a 2021/22 Pre-Seed SEIS portfolio where investors gained exposure to Scribe alongside 10+ other high-potential early bets. They've also secured non-dilutive Innovate UK funding to develop a deep-learning model that uncovers revenue rationale across private companies.

Scribe's platform has clear global scalability, but I ask Cossins for his perspective on building the company in the UK. The platform is trained on Companies House data - "the best globally for available information" - alongside a European data platform. While London's economy has faced challenges since 2008, it was recently described by The Economist as "the rest of the world's startup capital" - a far cry from the familiar narrative of a city living off former glories. "The UK has two or three major advantages that very few people in the world have," Cossins says. "EIS and SEIS mean investors get access to effectively half-price deals, and the density of talent is completely unmatched."

London often gets compared to Silicon Valley, but it's arguably something different - a city capable of bringing almost anyone and anything together. I ask about the risk, however, of the UK and Europe becoming an incubator economy: a testing ground for category-defining companies that are then forced to scale in the US. Cossins doesn't claim to have the answer, but offers an interesting perspective on the DNA of UK-born companies:

They're often more resilient because there's greater risk aversion here. There's much less cultural acceptance of failure than in the US. So, when they do work, they're resilient as hell.

The US is more consumption-led - which in many ways is a strength - but beyond tax breaks and talent, truly competing may require a more adoptive market across consumers and businesses alike. Cossins points to savings rates as a telling indicator: "It's 4-5% in the US versus around 20% here. That means people aren't really deploying capital towards innovation and new ideas - which ultimately makes us poorer." When you compare growth rates between the two economies, the argument holds weight.

EIS and SEIS mean investors get access to effectively half-price deals, and the density of talent is completely unmatched.

There's a deeper cultural layer too. A lingering post-war scarcity mindset and fear of failure contrasts sharply with the US, where failure is often worn as a badge of honour. It's a contradiction: world-class talent density and globally competitive tax incentives, set against an embedded aversion to risk. That said, SEIS and EIS investing is clearly on the rise. Over 2,000 S/EIS-approved businesses raised funding last year - a signal that capital is gradually shifting from preservation to innovation.

So where are we in the cycle? "Crowdfunding kick-started the democratisation of early-stage investing," Cossins says, "but many platforms are now struggling as people move towards more direct investing - in some ways becoming victims of their own success." Scribe has benefitted from this shift, giving both investors and founders access to data that was previously locked away, enabling faster, better-informed decisions. Their broader mission is to increase liquidity in private markets by shining more light on them: "The more transparency we can bring to private ecosystems, the better."

Two full English breakfasts later - Bubble and Squeak included (for the uninitiated: shallow-fried leftover vegetables, mainly mashed potato and cabbage - perhaps an unintended nod to post-war scarcity) - I ask Cossins for his parting advice to founders. It's simple, but timely in a market flooded with AI-first solutions still searching for a problem. "Build something people want. Founders - particularly in the UK - are perfectionists. Speak to as many people as you can. They won't tell you exactly what to build, but they'll help you understand the problem."

Build something people want. Founders - particularly in the UK - are perfectionists. Speak to as many people as you can.

His final thought is more philosophical. Scribe may help founders secure those crucial early cheques, but building any business from scratch is brutally hard - whether that's a Bermondsey café or an AI co-pilot. "Think deeply about whether it's for you. Building any kind of business is extremely tough. Entrepreneurship is glamorised, but not everyone has to - or should - do it." For those who do and are wondering where those all-important cheques might come from, they may want to start with Scribe.

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It's another grey, wet January morning and I'm meeting Dini McGrath at Popina in Mayfair, arriving suitably damp after the short walk from Bond Street to Duke Street. The café is the evolution of Isidora Popovic's market stalls, a fixture across the capital for nearly two decades, now moving decisively into bricks and mortar. The name comes from the Latin popina - a tavern serving simple food and wine - neatly reflecting a vision of bringing fresh, unfussy food to the city.

The menu offers a welcome diversion from the poached egg–avocado staples that have appeared on more than a few Early Rounds bills to date. Hot Dinners raves about a standout kedgeree, though it's absent today. Instead, there's plenty of original fare, and with only forty minutes before McGrath's next supplier meeting, we settle on a bowls of porridge and granola respectively.

I first met McGrath over fifteen years ago in entrepreneurial circles, when we both crossed paths at craft distiller Sipsmith. At the time, the company was still operating with a sub-ten team out of a residential street in Hammersmith, housing London's first copper gin still in over 200 years - Prudence, aptly named after Gordon Brown's flagship economic policy in 2008, the year founders Sam Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall launched the brand.

I was there briefly, delivering gin to the on-trade via Zipcar (RIP) and doing a bit of everything before starting a graduate role at Diageo. McGrath, however, stayed on, helping scale Sipsmith into a global spirits powerhouse and riding the first major wave of the craft gin boom, before its eventual sale to Beam Suntory. Alongside the obvious entrepreneurial osmosis of building a fast-growing brand, the experience exposed her to a less visible but pervasive problem across food and drink: supply chain waste.

Manufacturers are often trapped in a supply chain where retailers hold the power. You commit upfront - buying ingredients and building inventory - but when retailers don't take the full allocation, the impact isn't just lost margin. They inherit the waste, with perfectly usable inputs ending up thrown away.

Today, around 40% of food produced in the UK never reaches shop shelves, with a further 7% wasted during manufacturing rather than retail. Across the EU, £18.4bn worth of perfectly good surplus food is discarded each year, adding roughly 10% to the cost of goods - not to mention the environmental impact. This is the problem McGrath set out to tackle.

Zest began life as The Wonki Collective, initially focused on buying finished surplus goods from manufacturers and selling them directly to consumers - think OddBox, but broader. The market need was clear, but the economics weren't.

"Last-mile delivery costs, customer acquisition, short shelf life…" McGrath lists. The challenges quickly highlighted the fragility of consumer-facing logistics-heavy models and why many investors gravitate toward B2B solutions. The team pivoted.

While working with more than 25 food manufacturers to redistribute surplus finished goods, a pattern emerged.

Suppliers started calling saying they had 80 tonnes of excess flour and asking if we could find a buyer. That felt far more sustainable.

That moment reframed the opportunity: re-distributing and selling surplus ingredients to other food businesses and charities at scale. Doing that efficiently required data, technology, and speed. The company hired a CTO - still with Zest today - and rebranded to the sharper, more focused name it operates under now.

Zest began building a proprietary algorithm that scrapes vast amounts of publicly available data across the food industry, allowing the platform to rapidly match surplus supply with potential buyers. For a long period, the company remained in test mode - no fees for suppliers or buyers, instead taking a small cut on transactions to validate the model, build datasets, and train the system. Precision was critical: when shelf life is ticking, a missed match means lost value.

The R&D-heavy approach caught the attention of Innovate UK, which awarded Zest (and partners) a £1.9m non-dilutive grant to build industry leading waste identification technology as well as to support their redistribution mechanic at scale. McGrath also received a Women in Innovation award, followed by a pilot with Nestlé that allowed Zest to test its AI-powered models at scale and generate meaningful revenue.

Founded by McGrath and co-founder Alina Sartago - Zest has evolved into a lean, data-led team approaching the end of its grant period and the cusp of wider commercial adoption. Non-dilutive funding is the envy of many early-stage founders. It preserves cap tables, builds credibility, and provides a genuine runway to develop proprietary technology. For Zest, it has enabled a productive pivot and a clear mission.

We're building simple digital twins - digitalised waste maps that show manufacturers where waste occurs in real time, not in hindsight.

Unlike sectors burdened by regulation, much of Zest's data is publicly available, allowing the company to move faster and monetise sooner. I ask McGrath how she's found building in the UK, a view shaped partly by Sartago's continental perspective.

"We've been lucky with Innovate UK support, but I don't think quitting a job to start a company is as appealing here as it is in other places in Europe, like France."

While UK investors benefit from SEIS/EIS relief, France directly compensates founders for starting companies - a meaningful distinction. That said, McGrath notes the UK becomes far more supportive once traction is established, particularly for businesses aligned with government priorities.

As seed-stage expectations shift amid geopolitical and economic uncertainty, investors increasingly favour revenue visibility over promise - a challenge for R&D-led, grant-backed companies exiting long build phases. With partners like Nestlé and FareShare, however, Zest appears well positioned.

As we hit a hard stop, I ask McGrath for her biggest takeaway from the journey.

Be restrained with advisors early on. We had so many people wanting equity for advice - but the model changed completely. They'd be less useful to Zest now.

It's a reminder that progress in complex systems rarely comes from speed alone. Zest's journey has been one of restraint, iteration, and learning where value is really lost - not at the shelf, but far earlier in the system. Now, as the company emerges from a major innovation grant with proven technology, credible partners, and a disciplined cap table, it feels less like a beginning than a moment of alignment - where patience, timing, and conviction finally meet.

Visit Zest

I'm meeting Johnny Keeling on a brisk but dry mid-January morning at Caravan's Bankside outpost, tucked between Waterloo and London Bridge. Caravan is another well-established all-day dining and coffee fixture with Antipodean roots, deepening its footprint across the UK in a similar mould to Ozone. Big coffee, bold flavours - and here, a cavernous space inside a converted 19th-century grain store.

It also happens to sit just around the corner from Ministry of Sound - which, perhaps surprisingly, is now home to flexible workspace. That's where Keeling is based in his role as a Partner at Haatch, a pre-seed B2B SaaS fund backed by retail investors. Our paths last crossed almost twenty years ago at the same school, where - niche fact - we both played double bass in the orchestra. Taller teenage frames perhaps offering an advantage when wrestling with instruments of that size.

Today, though, we're discussing how Keeling has navigated the rise - and growing pains - of retail venture investing. He has a rare vantage point, shaped by nearly a decade at Crowdcube, from its infancy in the mid-2010s through to broader adoption, and the slow but meaningful shift of venture capital from a closed shop to a more accessible asset class.

Keeling joined Crowdcube as one of its earliest employees, at a time when "crowdfunding" meant little to most people. While the platform launched in 2011, 2015 marked a turning point for the category. Equity crowdfunding was hailed by Goldman Sachs as "one of the most disruptive models in modern finance." The platform surged, passing £100m invested, attracting institutional backing from firms like Balderton and government support via the London Co-Investment Fund.

That year also saw the world's first full exit of a crowdfunded business, when E-Car Club was acquired - a landmark moment. It validated the model, proved returns were possible, and helped usher in a new era of retail participation in venture investing. A wave of household-name fundraises soon followed.

We then did Monzo, Revolut, Moneybox, Freetrade. The explosion of fintech happened alongside the craft beer movement - and they worked in tandem. The beachhead for a business like Crowdcube was brands.

"We then did Monzo, Revolut, Moneybox, Freetrade," Keeling says. "The explosion of fintech happened alongside the craft beer movement - and they worked in tandem. The beachhead for a business like Crowdcube was brands. The brands did the storytelling for the crowd."

The model was simple and powerful: attract consumer brands people already loved, and the investors would follow - cheaply and at speed. "You could create 20,000 new Crowdcube accounts in under four hours," he recalls. Compared to the time and cost required to cultivate traditional angel or VC investors, the efficiency was orders of magnitude greater.

As competitors such as Seedrs (now Republic) entered the market, competition intensified - particularly on price. Then came the reset. Or crash, depending on your perspective. By 2021, amid Covid-era exuberance, capital was flooding in, valuations ballooned, and discipline thinned. Record sums were deployed across private markets, crowdfunding included. In hindsight, the pace was unsustainable.

Crowdcube responded by exploring new products and asset classes. "We got EU regulation that allowed us to crowdfund in Europe - we were the first platform to get it, without fully realising the significance at the time," Keeling notes. As capital inflows slowed, platforms became more cost-conscious, but innovation continued. Investors could now access venture funds via crowdfunding platforms, broadening engagement and blurring old boundaries.

Fuel Ventures raising its first fund through Seedrs marked another inflection point - professional investors opening their pipelines to the public for the first time. Until then, venture capital exposure had been reserved for a narrow group. Awareness has since grown steadily, alongside a clearer understanding of tax reliefs, even if many still underestimate how accessible the asset class has become.

Keeling believes the trajectory is clear.

I don't believe we'll be in a world five years from now where you can't access venture capital seamlessly from your phone. Banks like Revolut have broken down barriers - crypto, public equities, all one click away. Why can't I do the same for UK venture, diversified, and offset income tax?

"I don't believe we'll be in a world five years from now where you can't access venture capital seamlessly from your phone," he says. "Banks like Revolut have broken down barriers - crypto, public equities, all one click away. Why can't I do the same for UK venture, diversified, and offset income tax?"

It's a vision I buy into. But what needs to change for broader adoption? Many people remain cautious - startups are high-risk, illiquid, and poorly understood. Venture is often seen as a punt rather than a deliberate, high-risk/high-return component of a balanced portfolio. The capital exists, but allocation remains small.

Keeling sees challenger banks and investment platforms - Revolut, Monzo, Chip - as the catalysts. Just as they've normalised trading ETFs, crypto, and commodities, private investments could follow.

I think the ten-year overnight success story is now in play. It's a case of when, not if - but it'll take time.

"I think the ten-year overnight success story is now in play," he says. "It's a case of when, not if - but it'll take time."

Education remains key. Entrepreneurship has boomed over the last two decades; venture literacy has lagged behind. Founding a company is now aspirational, even fashionable, and increasingly viewed as a path to wealth creation. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to open a newspaper and read about a startup bank becoming one of the UK's most valuable companies - or its founder among Europe's wealthiest.

Retail venture, in Keeling's view, has exited its first cycle. After the 2021 trough - inflated valuations, excess optimism - it's entered a more mature, post-adolescent phase. Crowdfunding platforms are now established parts of the ecosystem, and there are genuine success stories. Chip, valued north of £200m, reached scale without traditional top-tier VC backing, delivering meaningful returns for early retail investors.

Of course, for every Chip or Revolut, there are many also-rans. Education - and expectation-setting - remains paramount.

Beyond Haatch, Keeling runs Edge, a consultancy helping consumer brands optimise crowdfunding campaigns, drawing on years of frontline experience. He's also a Non-Executive Director at Wine-Fi, a fine-wine investing platform that allows individuals to build fully owned, bespoke wine portfolios via syndicates rather than funds. The business is part-backed by Coterie Holdings, a major fine-wine group, leveraging its broader ecosystem.

A clear theme runs through Keeling's work: a belief that access to venture-stage investing should be democratised - and that progress, while uneven, is real.

With two flat whites and two Americanos down, we begin to wrap up. It's peak season for EIS and SEIS managers deploying capital, with seasoned retail investors maximising allocations before the March tax deadline, and first-timers writing their maiden angel cheques - whether into funds like Haatch or Fuel, or directly into companies they believe in.

I finish with a quick-fire question: the best advice he's absorbed over the years - his "if I could tell you one thing" maxim.

There are two. Always compound. Make the top 1% of small things marginally better every day - by the end of the year, you'll be in a better place. And don't overcomplicate your product or go-to-market. Keep it simple.

"There are two," he says. "Always compound. Make the top 1% of small things marginally better every day - by the end of the year, you'll be in a better place. And don't overcomplicate your product or go-to-market. Keep it simple."

Small things add up - whether that's early crowdfunded tickets into Chip, or the slow, steady democratisation of venture investing itself. It's an exciting moment not just for the industry, but for the individuals only just beginning to lean in.

Visit Haatch

Visit Wine-Fi

Visit Edge

I'm meeting Lucía Larragoiti Fisher at Potter & Reid, just behind Spitalfields Market. It's an unfussy but chic neighbourhood café founded by two friends who met while working at Allpress in Shoreditch. It's also a short walk from the headquarters of La Maritxu, the company Lucía founded five years ago and has since grown to several sites across London.

A Basque Country native, Larragoiti studied architecture at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, before moving to London to pursue a career in the industry. While Spanish food and culture are well represented in the UK, she was surprised to see Basque cheesecake - a dessert deeply ingrained in her native culture - appearing on pub and restaurant menus with little emphasis on provenance or quality, and rarely in the format she recognised. That gap proved the spark for La Maritxu.

The business technically began in Ecuador, where Larragoiti's sister María is based. She started baking cheesecakes informally for parties and events, and demand quickly followed. Requests kept coming. If there was an appetite in South America, why not test the same idea in London? The seed was planted, and La Maritxu - a combination of María's name and "txu", a Basque suffix used as a term of endearment and affection - was born.

They began baking in Larragoiti's Earl's Court flat and selling cakes at parties on weekends. The first customers were friends and family, but after formally setting up the company and creating a Google profile, an unfamiliar customer turned up on her doorstep to buy a cake. While relatively normal for the customer, it was a clear inflection point for Larragoiti: there was demand beyond Spanish friends living in London, and without any external marketing.

Markets followed. After months of waiting for a slot - notoriously competitive in London - they secured a last-minute place at Duke of York Square off the King's Road in Chelsea. Larragoiti and her now-husband Ignacio, a data analyst by trade, turned up with 16 cakes, all baked at home.

We could only bake three at a time in the oven. We thought 16 was a lot. But by 1pm they were all sold.

"We could only bake three at a time in the oven," she says. "We thought 16 was a lot. But by 1pm they were all sold."

At that stage, La Maritxu still felt like a hobby with distant commercial potential. Ignacio, she admits on the other hand, "100% wanted to build a business." They began travelling to markets across London at weekends, and before long were baking over 100 cakes a week - all from a single oven in their flat.

That was when capacity became the constraint. Larragoiti bought a second oven and plugged it into the living room, but refrigeration quickly became the bottleneck. Cheesecake needs to settle overnight, so they removed the sofa and replaced it with a second fridge. The flat gradually transformed into a full production line.

Demand continued to grow, and Larragoiti realised they were at a crossroads. She quit her job in architecture and opened La Maritxu's first store on Connaught Street. She had no prior retail experience and, at that stage, "didn't even know what footfall was," she says. A simple business plan showed they needed to sell around 20 cakes a day and raise £100k to fund the fit-out and working capital. Within a week, they had raised the money from friends and family who had supported them from the beginning.

Connaught Street was not an obvious winner. Other shop owners warned her that "nothing happens here." But La Maritxu struck a chord with a viral marketing moment that leaned into the growing appetite for Spanish food in London. Queues followed. To keep up, Larragoiti baked through the night before hiring a full-time chef and increasing capacity to 150 cakes a day.

The company quickly encountered the challenges of hiring and retaining staff in the food and drink industry, a problem exacerbated post-Brexit and by rising employment rights and minimum wages. Larragoiti leaned on her Spanish roots to source willing workers, tapping into Hakuna - a Catholic youth movement and prayer group founded in 2013 during World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro. Through a WhatsApp Hakuna group for Spaniards living in London, mainly students looking for part-time and flexible work, she was able to build an evergreen cohort of bakers and shop staff to run the stores.

A year later, and newly married, they opened a second site in Soho's Kingly Court. The unit was half the size and double the rent, so production remained in Connaught Street and was delivered daily. Since then, the business has expanded to sites in Greenwich and Mercato Metropolitano in Mayfair, alongside a central production facility under the railway arches in Bethnal Green, close to where we're having breakfast this morning. Capacity can now scale to up to 2,000 cheesecakes a day if demand allows. Another site in King's Cross opens next month. It's an impressive trajectory in a competitive sector, all funded from the original £100k friends-and-family round.

Spanish food culture continues to grow in popularity in the UK - something Larragoiti says she underestimated before starting the business. I ask whether she ever considered building La Maritxu in Spain instead.

In Spain, you set up a company and immediately have huge, fixed costs, whether you sell anything or not. It feels like the system doesn't want you to succeed. In the UK, it's much simpler.

"In Spain, you set up a company and immediately have huge, fixed costs, whether you sell anything or not," she says. "Administrators, paperwork, monthly payments. It feels like the system doesn't want you to succeed. In the UK, it's much simpler. You pay based on what you earn. It still hurts, but it scales with you."

Early investors also benefited from SEIS relief, which Lucía credits with making early risk-taking easier. As the business grows, I ask what she refuses to compromise on. Quality is an obvious answer, but she is quick to focus on service.

The three minutes you spend talking to the customer are part of the product. We're not just selling cheesecake - we're selling Spanish warmth.

"We recently discussed adding more tills to speed things up," she says. "But the three minutes you spend talking to the customer are part of the product. We're not just selling cheesecake - we're selling Spanish warmth."

Her advice to other founders, particularly those bringing a cultural product into a new market, is simple: keep things uncomplicated. Start doing rather than overthinking minor details. Test demand before worrying about polish.

Today, Larragoiti's role looks very different. Ignacio has joined the business full-time, and her focus has shifted from baking through the night to managing teams and building structure for the next phase of growth. As we wrap up, she reflects on recent advice from an early investor who visited their HQ. As the team has scaled, she admits to occasionally worrying about the lack of decoration or formal branding in the space. The investor pushed back: the moment you start obsessing over back-end details rather than the customer and the experience you're delivering, you begin to lose sight of what really makes this industry work.

"That's when you know priorities might be shifting," she says. "A nice workspace matters, but the product and the service have to stay at the centre."

With that, she heads back under the railway arches to start the day - another site opening imminently, a packed schedule ahead, and a business that's come a long way from a weekend hobby, bringing a truly authentic slice of Basque culture into London.

Visit La Maritxu

I first met Victoria Sampson around three years ago, while we were building the MVP for Floe Oral Care's protein-focused saliva test. As we put together a team and advisory board with deep credentials in the oral–systemic link and salivary diagnostics, she had already established herself as one of the UK's leading pioneers in the space. A growing body of published research, alongside the launch of her own dental practice, The Health Society, had positioned her at the centre of a broader shift in how oral health is understood - not as a standalone concern, but as a portal into overall wellness.

A visit to her practice bears little resemblance to a traditional dental appointment. My first consultation included a full Oral Health MOT: oral microbiome testing, collagen breakdown markers, vitamin D levels and blood pressure, alongside the dental examinations we're all familiar with. It felt closer to preventative medicine than dentistry - systematic, personalised, and rooted in measurement.

We're meeting this morning over breakfast at The Twenty Two, tucked into the corner of Grosvenor Square, a short walk from The Health Society's Mayfair clinic. Part hotel, part members' club, it blends New York and London elegance, with two giant Nutcrackers flanking the front door. Oscar Wilde lived here briefly in the 1880s, and you can imagine he'd approve of how the former Edwardian townhouse has evolved. It's a fitting setting to talk about ORALIS, the oral microbiome test Sampson founded two years ago - and about why dentistry may be on the cusp of a much larger role in healthcare.

To understand ORALIS, you need to understand Sampson's path into it. After graduating, she practised across both NHS and private clinics, giving her exposure to the full spectrum of patients in the UK. When Covid hit and clinical dentistry paused, her research accelerated. "Dentists weren't working, and I started writing a lot," she says. "I had a hypothesis that there was a connection between severe Covid complications and poor oral health - something both dentists and the public still don't fully understand."

With no access to ICUs, her team began collecting saliva samples from patients and running oral microbiome tests. What emerged was a realisation that saliva could offer insight into what was happening not just in the mouth, but across the body - remotely, non-invasively, and at scale. That work led her to collaborate with microbiome company Invivo, translating something that had largely lived in academia into a commercial application. While gut health testing had already entered the mainstream, oral health remained comparatively overlooked.

Dentistry became very aesthetic. Cosmetics, veneers, smile makeovers - while medical colleagues weren't really learning about dentistry at all.

Part of the issue, Sampson argues, is dentistry's own identity crisis. "Dentistry became very aesthetic," she says. "Cosmetics, veneers, smile makeovers - while medical colleagues weren't really learning about dentistry at all." More fundamentally, dentistry has existed in parallel to medicine rather than alongside it. "We don't speak the same language as doctors."

Saliva testing, she believes, can change that - acting as a shared biological language between dentistry and medicine. But implementing it in practice exposed a deeper insight. Patients could present with the same bacterial profiles yet have entirely different clinical outcomes. "That's when I realised it's not the bacteria causing disease," she says. "It's how the body responds."

That realisation became the foundation for both ORALIS and The Health Society. ORALIS has been built using data from hundreds of patients within the clinic, allowing the team to continuously refine and validate results - effectively running live clinical trials inside a functioning dental practice. It's a neat model: real patients, real outcomes, and constant iteration.

The US led the charge on cosmetic dentistry, and the proliferation of well-funded saliva testing companies reflects that first-mover momentum. Sampson feels the UK is now starting to catch up. "Patients want a full-body picture. Everyone's into longevity - dentistry has to catch up." But she's realistic about the pace of change. ORALIS costs £350, and prevention demands a different economic model to traditional dentistry. "You can make four grand from a smile makeover and not see someone for five years," she says. "That's not prevention."

Patients want a full-body picture. Everyone's into longevity - dentistry has to catch up.

The stakes are increasingly clear. Oral health is now linked not just to gum disease, but to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's. Dentists see patients more regularly than GPs, and many clinics are already screening for type 2 and pre-diabetes. If patients attend twice a year, dentists have a unique opportunity to track health over time - and to intervene early.

That preventative focus is a major draw for patients at The Health Society. Many travel from around the world, Sampson says, because they feel failed elsewhere and want answers. Testing is central, particularly for those with stubborn gum disease or early metabolic dysfunction who want personalised, measurable recommendations. There's also a strong family thread running through the practice, with Sampson's sister - also a dentist - and her mother both co-founders. Like many physical clinics, staffing and rising consumer expectations have been challenges. Dentistry sits somewhere between healthcare and hospitality, and standards are rising. The clinic reflects that ambition, even offering infrared saunas, IV drips and personal training alongside dental care.

ORALIS has been bootstrapped to date and is now raising a seed round. The test is sold in 12 countries, but expansion into the US will require local labs - likely in California - alongside a European base in Germany to reduce regulatory and shipping friction. The long-term commercial value may also lie in data. As companies like Zoe sit on vast metabolic datasets, validated oral health data could become critical infrastructure for biotech and pharma. "Dentists don't realise how important they can be," Sampson says. "Reducing oral inflammation can have a huge impact on systemic health."

Dentists don't realise how important they can be. Reducing oral inflammation can have a huge impact on systemic health.

Nearly half of adults globally have some form of gum disease. Periodontal disease is the sixth most common inflammatory condition worldwide, one of the most preventable, and linked to more than 50 systemic diseases. Treat it properly and the knock-on effects across overall health are enormous. Sampson envisages a future where people see their dentist and hygienist more regularly than their doctor - where risk is spotted early, and prevention doesn't fall through the cracks of a fragmented system.

Running a clinic while scaling a diagnostics company is a lot to juggle. Over the next five years, Sampson wants ORALIS fully operational in the US, the mouth–body connection firmly embedded in mainstream medicine, and cheaper re-testing options available. "There are loads of things you can do with saliva," she says, pointing to prostate cancer as a future vertical where saliva may outperform blood in diagnosis.

As we wrap up, I ask for the best advice she's ever been given. Sampson, who has Iranian heritage, laughs and recalls a Persian expression her mother used to say to her often: Ageh badtarin besheh chi misheh - roughly meaning "what's the worst that could happen," with a distinctly more defiant edge. It's unexpected, but fitting. For a founder whose world revolves around precision and prevention, it captures a rare and necessary instinct: the willingness to take risks and move forward, even in the face of uncertainty. It reminds me of In Praise of Risk, the book by French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle that I'm currently reading - a meditation on how modern society has come to fear uncertainty, mistaking security for progress, when in reality it's risk that opens up new frontiers. Sampson would offer the same advice to entrepreneurs and investors alike: don't obsess over hypothetical consequences that haven't even happened yet.

With that, she heads back to Mayfair - patients waiting. Dentistry may still be seen as traditional, even cosmetic. But if Sampson is right, it's quietly becoming one of the most important front lines in preventive healthcare.

Visit ORALIS

Visit The Health Society

Ozone Coffee has several branches across London now, and on a particularly grey, drizzly morning I'm meeting Ed Vickers of SUMS Speciality Running Socks at the Shoreditch outpost, tucked just behind Silicon Roundabout. The Kiwi-owned coffee chain has been a runaway success since setting up shop in 2012, and today there's barely a spare seat in the house. We manage to carve out some space at the counter to talk about the growth of the apparel brand Vickers launched three years ago - and one I've also invested in as an angel via the SEIS/EIS scheme.

SUMS sits at the intersection of performance wear and social purpose, riding the surge in running culture that has exploded over the past few years. The brand launched with a tightly focused first product: high-quality, technical running socks. But the product is only half the story. SUMS enables customers to connect their Strava accounts and unlock a blend of store credit and charitable donations based on the number of runs they clock each month. Every run generates in-store credit for the runner, and SUMS donates the equivalent value to a monthly charity pot, which is then awarded to a runner fundraising through a challenge. It's a smart, behaviour-driven loop - one that taps directly into the motivations of modern runners: performance, consistency, community, and meaning.

Socks may sound modest, but they are an increasingly technical - and crucial - part of a runner's kit. SUMS has used this narrow entry point as a wedge, with plans to expand into other speciality running gear over time. The strategy is deliberate: earn trust on an accessible product before broadening the range.

Running culture and charitable culture are completely interlinked. And there's been a digital revolution through wearables, Strava, social media, and the way running is celebrated.

He's well placed to comment. Vickers previously founded a sock brand at university and is a strong advocate for people at least testing their entrepreneurial mettle early on. That experience, coupled with his own immersion in running culture, pushed him to build a community-led brand - starting with what he calls "the unsung hero of the runner's kit bag."

It's a competitive space, but by focusing on a single niche first, SUMS has been able to build partnerships with household-name brands that would have been far harder to access if they'd launched with a broader apparel range. Patagonia is a clear inspiration. Vickers admires how the brand began by solving a specific problem - durable rugby shirts for climbers - before earning the right to expand across the wider outdoor category. SUMS is taking a similar long-term view: build trust and loyalty through a relatively low-cost, high-touch product, then grow from there.

The running landscape itself has changed dramatically, fuelled by digital community, marginal gains, and a sharper eye for aesthetics. I can personally vouch for the socks' performance - and for spotting an increasing number of distinctive SUMS pairs disappearing into the distance on weekend park runs. Perhaps the most high-profile fan is Harry Styles, now a committed endurance runner, who was spotted completing the Tokyo and Berlin Marathons wearing SUMS socks - proving they're not just a sign of the times, but built for serious miles.

We had no idea he was wearing them.

"We had no idea he was wearing them," Vickers says, stressing that there was no PR, gifting, or product placement involved. They only discovered it later while in Berlin activating a partnership with HOKA. Moments like that are pure gold for consumer brands - organic validation that deepens brand equity overnight.

SUMS operates in a fiercely competitive market, acquiring customers through a blend of partnerships, paid social, retail, and events. Vickers is clear that performance marketing alone isn't enough. "You have to build an emotional connection to drive word of mouth marketing," he says. "That's the engine."

The journey so far has been funded through angel investment, including high-profile backers such as Octopus founder Simon Rogerson, alongside other keen runners. Given the capital intensity of consumer brands, I ask how external pressures - macro conditions, tax changes, cost inflation, national insurance hikes - have shaped his thinking.

Vickers is characteristically straight-talking. "If a business is overly exposed to external shifts, it may be worth concentrating on the areas where management can still make a difference - i.e try and not lose sleep on things that are outside your control." The priority right now is focus: a lean team of fewer than ten people, clarity on brand, and building a running company designed for long-term loyalty rather than short-term hype.

A key pillar of that strategy is trail running. Ultra-runner Tom Evans competed in SUMS socks and co-designed a bespoke pair with the brand. Vickers describes trail running as "an exciting subculture that gets far less attention than road running," but one that's primed for growth as runners look beyond PBs for new, nature-led experiences. Festivals like Love Trails are proof of that shift.

There's a big migration from runners who've done a few marathons and nailed their PBs, towards something more experimental, more social, more travel-oriented.

"There's a big migration," he says, "from runners who've done a few marathons and nailed their PBs, towards something more experimental, more social, more travel-oriented." SUMS wants to own that space - what Vickers calls a "muddy, authentic trail-running brand true to the sport."

Vickers is a solo founder, but acutely aware that ambition requires the right mix of capital and people. "From day one, I wanted a multi-channel route to market - DTC, retail, and events," he says. "To build the brand I have in my head, I need specialists across each of those touchpoints."

There's a clear positivity to SUMS that mirrors the adoption curves of platforms like Strava and Runna. "Runners are very altruistically minded animals," he says, noting the irony that digital platforms are often pushing people offline. Strava's latest wrap-up highlighted just how many hours users spend actively recording activities - time spent away from screens.

In an era where investors and consumers are increasingly preoccupied with AI, there's something grounding about a brand tackling a fundamentally human need. "Running kit isn't going anywhere," Vickers says. "They're stable. They're human. People will always need that product - and brands to deliver it properly."

I ask what advice he'd offer from the journey so far. He's sceptical of advice in general, preferring lived experience. "Learning by doing is everything," he says. "I honestly think curiosity trumps passion. We're told to follow our passion, but that assumes you already know what that is. A lot of people don't - until they start doing."

Learning by doing is everything. I honestly think curiosity trumps passion.

SUMS doesn't have a long list of company values. Just one statement: Let's Go Find Out. It's about momentum, action, and discovery - whether that's going for a run rather than thinking about one, or building a brand step by step. Vickers does, however, recall one piece of advice that stuck, from Simon Rogerson: All business boils down to how you make people feel - investors, employees, customers. It's about creating a unified entity.

It's a fitting note to end on. A deeply human message, from a brand rooted in movement, community, and purpose. With that, we wrap up. He's got to run. An honest conversation about a running brand breaking new ground - powered by excellent coffee and a butternut squash and goat's curd omelette that I'm still thinking about.

Visit SUMS

I first met Gina Farran over coffee in Soho when she after she had recently launched, Glaize, her custom-made gels business challenging replacing the need for an expensive and time intensive manicures. At the time she was part of Antler's residency programme, and we were able to share challenges/ solutions on the growing pains of consumer start-ups. Today we're meeting for breakfast in Jusu Brothers in Elephant & Castle, a stone's throw from the in-house production facilities where Glaize now produce their gels in. The Japanese/ Asian style chain has recently expanded from its Notting Hill origins and now sits on the ground floor of the newly renovated Grade II Walworth Town Hall, with co-working space on the floors above.

Farran is full of energy in spite of recovering from bunion surgery on one foot with the other booked imminently. She transmits the confidence of an entrepreneur who has managed to strike the balance between perseverance and flexibility and is now able to look back and appreciate what she has built. Investor sensibility towards consumer businesses that strongly rely on social media for customer acquisition can be luke warm, but Glaize has built a sustainable model coupled with awareness on Dragons Den and mainstream PR. Farran's passion for the sector and hunger for iteration comes across a key part of the fuel behind this: "Glaize has been a self discovery journey as much as building a business, and I have discovered that I have a true passion for building consumer brands. We are now constantly iterating and the way we do things is almost like software in my head, rolling out new formulations like an IoS update every 6 months"

Despite her husband joining the Glaize team in a formal capacity to handle all things tech, legal, operational, there is no impression that Farran is looking to build a lifestyle business, and the hunger/ single-mindedness to achieve a multi-million pound exit burns strong. Having studied in Paris, before starting her career in banking for Goldman Sachs in London, and Dubai, she is under no illusions that building a company is a much tougher journey where the risk/reward on lifestyle often feels significantly more strained than within the corporate environment. "There is definitely some magic involved in not knowing what you're getting yourself into" she muses, in a way that will resonate with any first-time founders who have recently blooded themselves.

I really feel like resilience is a muscle that you exercise every day building a business, and it only gets stronger and stronger.

Farran was born and raised in Lebanon during a period when political assassinations, electricity cuts, and bombs going off were commonplace. There is a sense that the injustice and instability of that period has fuelled a deep-rooted sense of resilience and desire to challenge the status quo. "The city was so alive, despite everything it's been through, but it's a nightmare to live in and I grew up yearning to leave." Her parents echo the sentiment of Lebanese resilience, her father having built businesses across the middle east whilst forced to re-locate, re-build, and go again. Whilst this ethic clearly seems to have rubbed off on her, she paints an interesting perspective on the "privilege" of being able to choose and build a business in the UK, where day-to-day decisions that may feel existential and generate sleepless night pale in comparison to the environment she grew up even more so today. "A lot of people in my region don't have the luxury of waking up and knowing how to plan their day and build their business, because they might not even be alive."

It certainly puts the challenges facing UK growth and productivity into perspective, and outlines the advantages that a more diverse background can have in terms of attacking the gruelling construction of a start-up with the emotional right tool-kit and wider vision. "I'm very grateful for the UK, and don't take it for granted at all, though do I see myself here in 10 years' time? Not necessarily." Like many business owners and those seeking to escape high taxes and low growth, she sees the appeal of places like Dubai, having witnessed its evolution from the "much more bubbly" phase of the 2010's whilst working for Goldman Sachs there, to the optimism that now surrounds for those seeking better growth conditions both professionally and personally.

I ask her for her view on whether it's easier or harder to start and scale a company in the UK; some commentators are concerned that the UK is at risk of becoming an incubator economy - good at getting new companies off the ground only for them to be sold to overseas buyers. "Scaling is definitely getting harder", she says. Glaize owns its own production process in factories in the viaduct arches underneath Elephant & Castle station, and is accordingly reliant on low-skilled workers to produce their gels. "I don't think it's a good idea to give people protection from day one, and there's now not one side of the business that does not get taxed." People will often try and play the system for jobs like this in order to prove they're looking for job, only to maintain claiming benefits. It is hard not to wonder about the profile of who's claiming them as well – unskilled and skilled immigration remains crucial to the UK economy and multiple sectors have no doubt suffered since Brexit. "I've never seen had a British Deliveroo driver deliver a pizza in the pouring rain on a Friday night." It certainly paints a thoughtful consideration of UK productivity, and where both the gaps and abuse of the system are really being driven from.

In the current environment too, many business owners, investors, and consumers will increasingly wonder where the taxes are being allocated. To borrow a quote from the French economist and statesman Jean Baptise Colbert, "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." The UK's small businesses should be fuelling this county's growth ambitions, but government funding and regulation are increasingly out of step with the reality SME's, choking their potential to boost GDP growth. There is an irony here given that early-stage businesses consistently punch above their weight in terms of private sector employment and total business turnover. Despite this, Farran maintains that setting up a company in the UK remains 'super easy', from the support HMRC offer for start-ups navigating painful early cash-flow squeezes to collaborating with Southwark council. This belief is certainly bolstered by an infectious determination for creating something now and seeing that through the lens of privilege rather than pain.

Everything passes. The bad moments, and the good ones as well. Reflect where you are on the journey and make time to stop.

I ask what the most valuable piece of wisdom she would impart is, and the best piece of advice she's received. Either in business or life more broadly. "Everything passes. The bad moments, and the good ones as well. Reflect where you are on the journey and make time to stop." I get the feeling that Glaize is only one chapter in Farran's life story. To walk away from a well-paid job and into the trenches of start-up life could be perceived as risky, but she sees this is a virtue that many people wouldn't even be able to consider. Or the resilience, I would hasten to add, a spark that flickers brightly throughout breakfast on a damp November morning. As a source of inspiration, she references Vicky Tsai, founder of Japanese skincare brand Tatcha, who quit a high paying Wall-Street job to start the company, before facing spiralling debt to fund it and even selling her engagement ring at one stage.

As we finish breakfast, Farran reflects on the privilege of even being able to build at all. The emotional and physical toll of climbing the beauty industry's highest mountains is not for the faint-hearted, but you get the feeling she's only just begun.

Visit Glaize

I've known Sam Stirrat since childhood. Beyond being a close friend, he's the founder of Blackacre, an award winning bespoke luxury jewellery house built around a lifelong passion for precious stones. In a world where most founders are chasing the next AI breakthrough, Stirrat's story is refreshingly human. His business isn't about scale, but soul - creating one-of-a-kind pieces where design, emotion, and experience meet. We meet for breakfast at 45 Jermyn Street, the room alive with morning conversation and the clink of cutlery on a grey November morning.

Blackacre began with Stirrat's childhood hobby of collecting pebbles on the beach. "It was my mother, an artist herself, who was the one that first suggested I have a go at making jewellery" following a chance encounter with a jeweller at a local craft fair. "Looking back, it was the perfect means of combining my love of rocks and art".Self-taught through his teenage years, Stirrat learnt the craft of making jewellery, working with inexpensive materials like copper wire and glass beads. Fifteen years on, Blackacre represents the evolution of that journey, a company widely recognised for its craftsmanship in bespoke engagement rings and fine jewellery.

A B Corp–certified business built entirely organically, Blackacre has grown through a steady stream of loyal clients drawn to Stirrat's understated approach. "This has never been about me. We're happy working quietly, away from the limelight. What I want is to build a community of people who share the same values."Specialising in deeply personal commissions made to order jewellery tailored to individual or couples stories remain at its foundation, but the company is now expanding into pieces that express Stirrat's own artistic instincts.

Within the luxury world, you have to offer one of two things, or ideally both. Your creations have to be an art form, or, you have to offer a special experience.

"Within the luxury world, you have to offer one of two things, or ideally both," he says. "Your creations have to be an art form, or, you have to offer a special experience. We want to achieve both by immersing people in our world as creations unfold."That world now exists in a showroom off Chancery Lane, where clients - some flying in from overseas - come for private consultations. The company was recently awarded 'Bespoke Jeweller Of The Year' by the National Association of Jewellers, formal recognition of a journey defined by quiet excellence and conviction.

Stirrat launched Blackacre solo and without external funding - a rarity in any industry, but especially in luxury, where brand credibility and upfront costs are notoriously steep.On growing from a standing start in the UK he notes "It's immensely challenging for small companies without financial backing to grow". When I ask what he thinks it takes, the answer is "unrelenting hard work and determination". When I press him on what he thinks is needed in the UK, "People need to be inspired and aspire towards something. These are the true motivators and it is about having the right role models and environment in place to encourage this".Markets like the Middle East and China may have more appetite for luxury, but Blackacre's strength lies in its authenticity - in heritage, craftsmanship, and personal service.

A good business looks after people - its customers, its team, and itself financially.

When asked what makes a good business, Stirrat's answer has little to do with revenue or growth. "A good business looks after people - its customers, its team, and itself financially."It's an unhurried philosophy that feels almost rebellious in a startup world obsessed with blitzscaling and valuations. "I have a clear vision that may be harder to achieve with investors," he says. "Jewellery is about emotion and purpose. Once you start chasing volume and money, the soul gets lost. It is not about the money, it is about creating something beautiful that people love."It's a quietly radical stance: that some products - especially those defined by intimacy and meaning - simply can't be rapidly industrialised in his view. For many entrepreneurs, a relentless focus on the customer is the true north of building a successful business - echoing Warren Buffett's enduring belief that companies will succeed if they delight rather than satisfy their customer base.

Creative freedom is the reward of independence, loneliness perhaps, its cost. Most founders share the journey with investors or boards. Stirrat carries it alone."We aspire to be the best in the world," he says simply. "The ultimate vision is to bring joy to people across the world by immersing them in the creative journey of making meaningful pieces of jewellery."The embryo of that vision came to life earlier this year at Sessions Arts Club in Farringdon, where Blackacre hosted clients to unveil its Origins collection - Colombian emeralds sourced and designed entirely in-house. The evening felt less like a product launch and more like a celebration of artistry and belonging. "We want every single person connected to the brand to have an amazing experience," Stirrat says.

Blackacre Origins film showcasing the new collection.

I ask whether the absence of co-founders or shareholders risks narrowing perspective as the company grows. Stirrat shakes his head. "We are laser focused on doing the best possible job for each client."He hires specialists, not salespeople. "If someone's buying something expensive, they want to talk to an expert." Growth at Blackacre isn't about efficiency; it's about excellence. Rising costs may bite, but cutting corners isn't part of the equation. When asked to describe his legacy in one word, he pauses. "Growth." Not just financial, but personal - for the team, the clients, and the relationships forged through each piece.

There's no silver bullet. You can have the best idea in the world, but unless someone behind it is determined beyond belief, tenacious, unrelenting - it's going nowhere.

As the rain begins to fall outside, I ask what advice he'd give to other founders. "There's no silver bullet," he says. "You can have the best idea in the world, but unless someone behind it is determined beyond belief, tenacious, unrelenting - it's going nowhere. You just have to work really hard. I don't think people talk about that enough."The best advice he's received came from Andrew Dunn, founder of luxury travel operator Scott Dunn. "Pick one small thing and do it better than anyone else."It's an ethos that runs through everything Blackacre does. In luxury, perfection is the product - and when something goes wrong, it's a chance to go above and beyond. "If a customer has an imperfect experience, it's a golden opportunity to turn it into a positive," he says. "That's how loyalty is built."

Blackacre's creative vision comes to life through immersive experiences that celebrate the journey of creating meaningful jewellery.

As we finish breakfast - a mushroom omelette, Full English, and flat whites justifying the £86.44 bill - Stirrat reflects on the Origins collection and what it represents. Engagement rings will always be Blackacre's foundation, but the brand is now flexing its creative muscle beyond that. It's a story of organic growth from a solo founder devoted to his craft - one building not at the speed of capital, but at the pace of conviction."We just want to create something beautiful and share in the joy of the creative process," he says, smiling.

Visit Blackacre

I first met Anil Stocker in 2019 at the Shoreditch offices of MarketFinance (now Kriya), where my co-founder and I were renting two desks after starting Floe Oral Care. Our time there was brief - derailed by Covid in early 2020 - but it offered a front-row seat into a fast-growing fintech and a wealth of inspiration for two newly minted founders. Today we're meeting over breakfast at The Emory overlooking Hyde Park - a gleaming glass box of a hotel with a nautical-industrial feel. It would be fun to explore, but we're here to talk about something far more interesting: the sale of Kriya to Allica Bank.

To understand Kriya's place in the financial ecosystem, you need to start with the 2008 crash. Stocker began his career at Lehman Brothers in 2006 and saw the "boom and bust" up close - along with the growing scrutiny of traditional finance. Against this backdrop he co-founded MarketInvoice.

Small businesses really bore the brunt of it. Credit was rationed, payment terms were extended. Everyone was busy bailing out the big banks - no one was helping the small businesses.

In a world where "fintech" wasn't a word and Revolut didn't exist, MarketInvoice used technology to serve SMEs - spotting how music, travel and retail were being transformed while financial services remained stubbornly analog. Peer-to-peer finance was gaining traction in the US, and invoice finance offered a clear gap where banks were retreating but demand was rising.Launching a financial services company with no brand or track record is no small feat. Stocker expected customer demand to be high and funding hard to find - but the opposite happened. "Interest rates were low. Funding came easier than we expected."

Today, SME lending is crowded and increasingly shaped by embedded finance, something Kriya has leaned into aggressively. "Finance is no longer controlled by centralised institutions - it's embedded within the product," he says. From point-of-sale apps to Uber drivers sourcing loans within the platform, embedded finance has gone mainstream. Kriya has evolved alongside the market, rebranding three times as its product range expanded. Its name now comes from the Sanskrit word for "flow."

Our ethos is to keep businesses flowing - brilliant things happen when business flows.

Kriya's mission has been to dismantle friction across lending and financial services. When Stocker started the business, the prevailing theme in fintech was the unbundling of banks - specialist companies solving one problem exceptionally well rather than many problems poorly. He compares it to the early internet: a shift from centralised portals to millions of specialised sites. Now he predicts the opposite trend is emerging: "We're entering a new era of banking re-bundling."

Kriya's sale to Allica Bank may be early evidence. Though Kriya predates Allica by nearly a decade, Stocker stresses that today's environment - higher rates, tougher fundraising conditions, macro uncertainty - creates new pressures and new opportunities. Kriya focuses on established SMEs, not sole traders or early-stage founders. Allica serves the same segment and shares Kriya's conviction in embedded finance. The result was one of the first meaningful fintech-to-bank acquisitions in this new consolidation cycle.

I ask how he maintained transparency and creativity across a nearly 100-person company during a complex M&A process - especially while pushing forward new products like embedded finance. He points to tight, cross-functional "early bet" teams and an unwavering focus on customers at all times. He recalls advice from a senior Stripe product manager: "You need to summarise the learnings from at least 200 customer calls before launching anything new." It's a reminder of how easily founders can get pulled into scaling fast before they've earned true product-market fit - no matter the size of the company.

We turn to the UK ecosystem. Stocker has built, scaled and exited a fintech over 14 years - long enough to see the landscape shift dramatically. "The overall package of incentives was better," he says of the early years. Pre-Brexit. David Cameron was in power. Cheaper visas. Lower NI and pension costs. Lighter regulation. Capital gains tax capped at 10% on the first £10m of an exit.Now, with high-profile entrepreneurs moving abroad and declining incentives to build here, he acknowledges the UK feels less aspirational. But he rejects the doom narrative.

The UK isn't broken. When the UK is open to capital and talent, it thrives. My advice to the government would be to make things simple, not more complicated. There's so much high-quality innovation here - but it's being choked. We still have the ability to course correct.

It's a balanced but pointed assessment: the UK's fundamentals remain strong - universities, talent, commercial and scientific heritage - but the next five years will be decisive.

Stocker has become an active angel investor, often investing through SEIS/EIS. He supports the schemes but insists incentives shouldn't be the primary driver. "You invest because of the problem being solved - and the quality of the team." SEIS/EIS have broadened access to venture as an asset class, but he remains clear-eyed: "They help, but they shouldn't be the reason you invest."

Fourteen years building Kriya have given Stocker an unusually long-term view of resilience. He echoes Kipling's line about treating the two imposters "triumph and disaster" the same. "A key thing I've learned is that a core part of the job of a leader is to calm things down - not add to the stress."

His advice to early-stage founders is direct: "Finding product-market fit is the job of the entrepreneur. Why are you building, and why do people care?" The stickiest lesson he's absorbed came from Paul Forster, Indeed.com founder and a former Kriya board member: "All entrepreneurship leans towards the recruitment of great people. Find and retain great people."

All entrepreneurship leans towards the recruitment of great people. Find and retain great people.

It's a message that resonates powerfully as the UK grapples with retaining world-class talent - a prerequisite for the kind of breakout companies that fuel future prosperity. Stocker remains bullish on fintech's next frontier, from stablecoins to blockchain-driven financial infrastructure. Whether his next act lies outside fintech remains to be seen, but for now his focus is on guiding Kriya's integration into Allica Bank.

We wrap up breakfast, and I leave feeling energised about the UK's future - not naïvely optimistic, but reminded of the reasons this country has produced so much ingenuity. Stocker's blend of realism and ambition captures that perfectly - even if a coconut-milk English breakfast tea remains one of the more unusual morning tonics to start the day....

Visit Kriya

I am meeting Walter Kerr at Café Phillies, tucked behind High Street Kensington. It's buzzing on a brisk Tuesday morning and, fittingly, it's where Oppidan Education - the company Kerr co-founded almost exactly a decade ago - first took shape. Over breakfast at the same table where their first business plan was sketched out, we speak about how Oppidan has grown from a kitchen-table idea into a global mentorship platform operating in the US, Seoul, and Thailand. No external funding. Profitable from day one. And built around a problem that feels increasingly urgent.

"We wrote our first business plan on this table," Kerr says, smiling at the contrast between the early vision and the business today. Oppidan focuses on the advisory layer of education - not tutoring, not therapy, but the middle ground young people increasingly need. Kerr recalls his own adolescence: "I had a privileged and happy upbringing, but at 16 I still didn't have someone I could speak to about university choices, careers, relationships… someone neutral."After university, he tried private tutoring and quickly realised he "wasn't much good at teaching English or Maths." Yet parents kept him on for something else - the human side. "There's a shadow that exists in the after-school market that isn't tutoring," he reflects. That shadow became the genesis of Oppidan, founded with a school friend.

Today, Oppidan is a marketplace of mentors and parents. Families choose from a range of programmes and profiles, while Oppidan takes a commission from every session. Minimal marketing spend, heavy referral momentum, and a wide pool of mentors from diverse backgrounds. Kerr still mentors himself: "It keeps me close to the product," he says - a guardrail against drifting into pure management and losing sight of the company's purpose. Profitability from day one has given them freedom. "Patience is massive to me. We've committed to this being a 20-year project."

Patience is massive to me. We've committed to this being a 20-year project.

Trust, naturally, is the central commodity. How do they maintain quality as they scale?"We take three out of every ten applicants, and we pay them well. It's deliberately hard to join. Looking after someone's child is the most important job in a parent's life."But this raises the obvious question: what about the vulnerable families who can't afford mentorship? Kerr acknowledges that early criticism stung. "Family and friends asked if we were exacerbating the divide between those who could and couldn't afford mentorship." Oppidan has since built programmes specifically for underserved communities, bridging the funding gap and expanding access. Mentorship may sound like a luxury, he notes, but the pressures facing young people - digital, emotional, societal - are intensifying. "We didn't talk this problem into existence." Their expansion into the US and Asia supports the thesis: the need is global.

We didn't talk this problem into existence.

Given proven demand and a working business model, why not bring in capital and scale aggressively? Kerr is philosophical. Growing without external funding is a privilege, but also a discipline. "Trust can't be rushed," he says. There's a disconnect, he feels, between the UK founder who grows quietly, organically, and the noise around the latest raise or valuation. Capital reshapes businesses, often wholly necessarily, but sometimes prematurely. Oppidan's ability to choose patience is the envy of many founders grinding through perpetual fundraising cycles.He's not blind to the ecosystem around him, though. Kerr actively backs other education businesses through SEIS, placing targeted bets on companies tackling other parts of the learning landscape.On macro headwinds, he's surprisingly unfazed. "I always wanted to build a business in the UK." Corporation tax has risen sharply since Oppidan's launch, and the rules around freelancing require constant vigilance, but he's not tempted by Dubai - or even New York, where they now have an office. High tax, low growth, rising costs for parents: will mentorship remain a priority? Kerr believes that staying lean and unencumbered will allow them to adapt. And despite no external shareholders, Oppidan has a formal board structure. "It provides accountability and challenges us," he says - an uncommon practice for a wholly founder-owned business, but an important one.

We turn to the philosophies that drive him. Kerr talks about the power of narrative and the importance of maintaining control over the trust parents place in them. He quotes a line from the book If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair by Anya Hindmarsh, something along the lines of "drop the pebble that leads to things" – alluding to the ripple effect where a single action can have far reaching and continuous consequences. He removes his watch to show me the engraving on the underside: a reminder to stay open, keep learning, and take his time. It was a wedding gift from his wife, and he returns to it often.After ten years of Oppidan, what advice has proved most reliable? He reaches for Mark Twain: "If I had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter." "I love the idea of clarity in communication," he says - whether with a spouse, a team, or a co-founder. It's deceptively hard, which is precisely the point. "Execution depends on it." There isn't space for that mantra on the watch, he jokes, so he'll need some new real estate.

If I had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter. I love the idea of clarity in communication.

"We've only got this far through patience," he says as we wrap up - an appropriate conclusion over Turkish eggs and mercifully modest coffee prices compared to the cafés edging toward Hyde Park. Kerr heads off into the next ten years of Oppidan: slow, steady, eyes forward; a curated, careful service for a generation navigating an overstimulated, hyper-digital childhood.

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Meeting Jacques Cockell at the R&H Gallery Café in Kensington feels fitting for a founder who sees the world - and oral care - through a creative lens. The art-infused café, founded by an ex-medical engineer and steeped in Persian influence, bills itself as a "sanctuary" rather than a coffee shop. Their call to arms - flavours that "embrace you like a warm melody" - sets the tone as we order a Persian omelette and a Mirza to start the conversation.

Cockell, the ambitious solo founder of Zing, never planned to build alone. A potential co-founder wobbled early, and he pressed ahead regardless. "I wasn't scared or daunted in the beginning, but in hindsight I definitely should have been," he admits - an observation that will resonate with many first-time founders. That early wide-eyed naïvety, he suggests, might be essential. Rationality alone would tell most people the odds are deeply unfavourable.

For Cockell, languages were the unlikely training ground for entrepreneurship. Fluent in French and German after studying and then living in both countries, he sees a direct analogy between linguistic immersion and company-building.

You move to a new country. Everything is new. Everything is overwhelming. You break it down. You get comfortable making mistakes because you have to. It's survival.

It's a compelling comparison. A classroom offers a soft landing; a foreign country does not. Founding a company, he argues, is the latter. "You need a minimum viable product to survive. Once you can survive, you start building your foundations. It's incredibly empowering."

Zing is part of a growing cohort of challenger toothpaste brands offering fresh flavours and clinically backed ingredients. I relate to the category from my time building Floe Oral Care, where differentiated formulations - like paired day and night pastes - proved the appeal of a product consumers use twice daily. Cockell, after a brief stint at another startup, felt the itch to build something of his own and chose oral care not out of dental expertise - unlike companies like Parla, founded by dentists - but because toothpaste sits in a rare sweet spot: huge market, habitual consumption, and little sensitivity to gender, age, culture, or economic cycles.

Product-market fit in the classical tech sense is less relevant here; taste, brand, and customer love are the levers. "We wanted to make a product that wasn't just novelty flavours but genuine quality inside the tube," he says. Zing uses ingredients like hydroxyapatite - a mineral found naturally in teeth and bone - while avoiding cheaper irritants like SLS. The company's raison d'être to borrow a French phrase is simple: make people smile.

That ethos extends to its partnerships. Cockell is inspired by how Red Bull turned "caffeine in a can" into a cultural phenomenon through extreme sports. "If Red Bull gives you wings, Zing makes you smile. We want to capture the emotion of sport - the winning moment, that winning smile." Zing has teamed up with world wingsuit champion Espen Fadnes, a man who regularly jumps off mountains and whose wife happens to be a Red Bull athlete.

If Red Bull gives you wings, Zing makes you smile. We want to capture the emotion of sport - the winning moment, that winning smile.

As a solo founder with no external shareholders - and a business built organically from his bedroom - Cockell enjoys total creative control. I ask whether that ever risks stifling creativity or accountability. He doesn't think so. Much like learning a foreign language on the streets rather than in a classroom, he embraces a "don't overthink it - test it" mentality. While Zing may eventually need outside capital, he's not focused on that now. "I feel grateful, rather than proud, that market conditions have allowed me to build at this pace."

Given his lean model, wider macro-economic pressures seem to concern him less than most. Brexit frustrates him, particularly the loss of the single market, but for now it hasn't clipped his wings. He remains engaged with the founder community but isn't writing angel cheques yet - everything is reinvested into Zing.

When asked for advice he'd impart to others, he circles back to languages. "I'm not saying everyone needs to learn a language, but the mindset it creates - the willingness to start from scratch, to be comfortable not knowing everything, to be curious - is incredibly powerful. If that excites you, you'll love building a company."

I'm not saying everyone needs to learn a language, but the mindset it creates - the willingness to start from scratch, to be comfortable not knowing everything, to be curious - is incredibly powerful.

It's a reminder of how diverse founders with varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds often outperform; they are battle trained in adaptability. English speakers, we discuss, are notorious for avoiding language learning - perhaps due to fear of failure or a lack of curiosity at times. Cockell, who has French heritage, seems somewhat of an outlier. "For many people, learning languages isn't optional. It's essential for survival and productivity." The parallels to entrepreneurship are obvious.

He laments cuts to arts and humanities, arguing that languages should be a foundational part of UK education for precisely these reasons. One wonders how the Zing mindset will evolve if the brand expands into new geographies and new tongues - even if toothpaste, as he notes, is remarkably culture-resistant.

Cockell feels lucky to still be building Zing: through creative partnerships like Fadnes, through his beloved Leeds United, and through charitable links to organisations such as Teenage Cancer Trust - a cause close to him after losing a friend to leukaemia in their twenties. So far, Zing has raised more than £10,000 for the charity, with plans to make this a lasting, defining pillar of the brand. "I'm lucky to be able to give this a go, even if it fails," he reflects.

It's a healthy, grounded perspective - acknowledging both the emotional conditions required to start something and the resilience needed to keep going. As we finish breakfast beneath a giant Persian rug with music humming softly in the background, it feels appropriate. I don't know whether Persian is the next language on Cockell's list, but I look forward to seeing how Zing's next chapter unfolds.

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Bob Wigley has a technique for people seeking his advice, time, or capital. Come and play squash with him at 7.30am, followed by breakfast. Then he'll talk.

I've managed to short-circuit the system - we both play at the same club - and fast-tracked straight to breakfast in the Brooklands Room at the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall. But the analogy stands. In Wigley's mind, the world divides into "administrators and entrepreneurs." Ninety-five percent are administrators. They won't risk a 7.30am squash game. Too much out of the comfort zone. Too uncomfortable. They'd rather go straight to breakfast. First rung cut out.

For the few who do show up, prior ability is irrelevant. It's about who you are. Are you on time? Have you brought the right kit? Do you give it a proper go? How do you react when you lose a point? How do you react when a let call doesn't go your way? By 8am, inside the four walls of a squash court, he's got a full working read on your character. Sport often mirrors life on multiple levels.

Wigley has spent decades at the core of British financial services and now chairs UK Finance, the trade body representing the UK's banking and financial sector. Alongside that sit multiple NED roles with the likes of Lightico and Seraphim Space, in addition to active angel investment and philanthropy interests. Few people have a clearer vantage point on the structural importance of financial services to UK prosperity. For all the noise about national decline, we remain the largest net exporter of financial services globally. The question is not whether we're strong therefore, it's whether we intend to stay that way.

We're still living with the legacy that fifteen years ago we led the world in payments technology. We built CHAPS and BACS and we built Faster Payments.

"We're still living with the legacy that fifteen years ago we led the world in payments technology," he says. "We built CHAPS and BACS and we built Faster Payments." The UK genuinely did set the benchmark - instant transfers, sophisticated clearing, infrastructure that many countries went on to copy. But speed created new vulnerabilities. Instant money movement also meant more opportunity for fraud. Governance splintered. Parts of the ecosystem were separated into different regulatory and operational bodies. Innovation therefore started to slow down.

Today, around two-thirds of UK payments run through Visa and Mastercard (which owns Vocalink). Consumers don't care – these systems and cards are reliable and we'll keep tapping away. Businesses do care on the other hand. Fee competitiveness and continual innovation are important. Across the whole of Europe, payment sovereignty has risen up the agenda. Conversations about alternatives - and reducing concentration risk - have started to gather pace.

The UK's 2024 National Payments Vision is an attempt to reset direction, and it feels even more relevant in 2026. The ambition is simple in theory: move more money directly between bank accounts, modernise legacy infrastructure, reduce cost and fraud, and regain control of domestic rails rather than defaulting to networks outside the UK. Systems like BACS and Faster Payments have been safe pairs of hands, but transaction volumes have exploded, expectations are 24/7, and fraudsters have evolved just as quickly. The old plumbing is starting to creak.

Crypto inevitably enters the conversation and does have a role to play - just not in the way many imagine. Wigley is measured. Despite the hype, the total crypto market is tiny relative to global equity and debt markets. Stablecoin circulation has grown but still represents a fraction of global flows. "It's not the speculative tokens that matter," he suggests. The real prize is the tokenisation of real-world assets - equities, bonds, foreign exchange, commodities, property - and settling them using regulated digital money.

He picks up his phone and places it on top of mine to show how it will work in future. Today, if he buys £200 of BP shares from me, a chain sits behind that trade: broker, clearing house, custodian, settlement cycle, reconciliation. It works, but it's layered, slow and costly. In a tokenised system, we both hold regulated digital wallets. A token represents ownership of the asset. When my £200 arrives, the share token transfers simultaneously via self-executing code. Payment and ownership move together. No settlement lag. No clearing house friction. Fewer intermediaries. Lower cost. A cleaner fraud and counterparty risk profile.

Last year, UK Finance launched a live pilot for tokenised sterling deposits (so called GBTD) to try and put this in practice - effectively digital representations of bank money operating within a regulated perimeter. The aim is to demonstrate tangible benefits: stronger fraud prevention, greater user control, faster settlement, and more efficient capital flows. If the UK gets this right, it does not just modernise - it reclaims payments, leadership and sovereignty.

There was no such word as 'digital asset' in English law.

But there are still big hurdles. "There was no such word as 'digital asset' in English law," he says. If programmable finance is to scale, two things must accelerate. First, digital assets needed to be clearly defined in law. Second, the UK must build world-leading regulation for digital exchange and settlement. Legal clarity plus regulatory confidence equals velocity. Without them, innovation drifts elsewhere.

Identity follows money. If payments and assets become programmable, identity must become digital too. That triggers predictable British resistance from some. ID cards have always felt like a step too far - towards the end of last year public support for them was sitting at -14% according to some media outlets. Wigley reframes it. Today's system is fragmented - passport scans, utility bills, repeated KYC uploads across multiple databases, each a vulnerability and often to companies that are not banks and don't have military grade security. A secure digital identity layer is not about surveillance; it's about simplicity, consumer convenience and security. "Think of it as a consumer passport." If we ever introduce a central bank digital currency, an electronic identity layer becomes essential. One encrypted, verified identity underpinning transactions, rather than dozens of insecure touchpoints. In a world of escalating cyber risk, coherence should be much safer than fragmentation. This feels even more pressing as the latest generation of AI models and agents make it trivial to construct convincing fake documents, spoof biometrics, or fabricate a digital footprint. The age of purely visual document checking feels like it's coming to an abrupt end.

It's a natural moment to widen the lens to AI more broadly. Adoption across banking is already deep - credit modelling, compliance, fraud detection. Wigley is upbeat but realistic. "Anywhere you're interrogating data against rules and drawing conclusions, AI will be transformative. But you will still need human judgement." Fraud detection is the obvious example: machines surface patterns at scale; humans apply context, judgement and can override.

His deeper concern sits in the attention economy. "The battle for attention was lost years ago," he says bluntly. Smartphones have delivered extraordinary utility but also engineered addiction. Yet he is quick to avoid blanket condemnation. Spending up to twelve hours a day in front of a screen is a lot by any stretch, but it could be coding, reading, learning - not purely doom-scrolling. He is working with King's College London to examine links between specific forms of digital consumption and biological markers such as inflammation, shifting the debate from moral panic to measurable science. They are trying to fill the academic gap in proving that certain types of social media can cause physical, not just mental, harm.

He has also written extensively on the subject in Born Digital: The Story of a Distracted Generation, which argues for a societal reset in our relationship with technology. The internet may have assumed all users are equal; children - and the vulnerable at different stages of life - are not however.

You have to be almost clinically optimistic. You've got to be naïve and very positive, almost to the point of being ill.

The conversation shifts back to entrepreneurs and what really excites him about backing companies at an early stage. His language sharpens. "You have to be almost clinically optimistic. You've got to be naïve and very positive, almost to the point of being ill." Otherwise, you have no chance. The best founders recognise their blind spots quickly. They hire people better than themselves. They surround themselves with complementary capability at speed. Angel relationships become meaningful because investors are backing not just a product, but a person they want to spend time with through inevitable volatility.

Distribution matters just as much. He dislikes the phrase "building a customer base." It's slow. Expensive. Instead, plug into someone who already has distribution and offer something so compelling that their customers feel compelled to switch. As we all bounce between the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude etc. the switching behaviour is instructive. None of us are 'building' loyalty from scratch - we move because something feels incrementally better, faster, cleaner. And that's Wigley's point. Don't build a customer base. Win one. Find where demand already sits and give people a reason to leave. It's as true in AI as it is in any other industry. Perhaps it mirrors his payment's philosophy: optimise existing rails rather than rebuild from scratch.

As breakfast chatter rises around us and Pall Mall buzzes into its Friday morning stride, the through-line from Wigley feels clear. Character first. Infrastructure second. Regulation close behind. The mechanics of money are evolving - faster, programmable, embedded in software rather than stone. For anyone wanting a crisp history of how money shapes - and is shaped by - civilisation, David McCloskey's Money is a reminder that payments infrastructure isn't technical plumbing; it's societal scaffolding. Every shift in how value moves has redrawn the boundaries of power, trust and growth.

Squash is simple in one respect: if you don't take the ball early, you're immediately on the back foot - scrambling, reacting, dictated to by someone else's pace. Speed matters. So does the ability to change direction quickly. Adapt or get pinned down. Payments sovereignty, digital identity, programmable assets - none of this is inevitable. It's a choice, and we're at a crucial point mid-rally. The UK can drift and react, or it can step forward and set the pace again. By the end of the year the rails beneath our economy may look very different. The only real question is whether we're serving - or stuck in the back corner chasing someone else's game.

Visit UK Finance

I last met Charlie Cowley when he was building Impala, the hotel API platform he co-founded in 2016 that went on to raise around $35 million, scale to 120 people, and work with some of the biggest names in global travel. That company didn't end the way anyone planned. The scars, by Cowley's own admission, run deep. Letting people go. Tough shareholder conversations. The kind of darkness founders rarely talk about publicly. So, when I heard he was building again - same co-founder, overlapping team, new sector - I wanted to understand what pulls someone back into the ring.

This morning's venue wasn't chosen by Cowley but by Sophie - his Dream-powered personal assistant. She sends us to Catalyst Café on Gray's Inn Road, a Scandi-style specialty coffee spot in Holborn where they roast their own beans in the basement. Sophie clearly has good taste, and - fortunately for me this morning - a light touch on breakfast: we've opted for two pain au chocolats between us rather than a larger spread…. excellent for the budget. Cowley arrives with his arm in a sling, collarbone recently broken playing football and now surgically repaired, organising his week almost entirely by voice note through the very product he's building. It's a fitting, if slightly theatrical, proof of concept.

Dream is an AI assistant platform for busy professionals & small businesses, recently backed by SpeedInvest in a seed round. Not another chatbot. Not another dashboard. The pitch is action, not conversation - assistants that send emails, book restaurants, update calendars, coordinate travel, and when the AI reaches its limits, spin up real humans behind the scenes to complete the task.

It's the action, the task, that people want value from. Not just another conversation with GPT.

The starting block is hyper-specific: AI Personal Assistant (for busy professionals) and AI Business Assistant (for small businesses). Dream's first consumer-facing product will be the personal assistant for London professionals - booking tables, sourcing flowers, coordinating dry cleaning, handling the kind of concierge tasks that previously required either a £20,000-a-year PA or a lot of personal admin. The idea is to prove the model in a single city, with deep local context, before expanding to Paris and beyond. "It's the action, the task, that people want value from," Cowley says. "Not just another conversation with GPT." Together, they form what he sees as the operational bedrock for any lean business or busy professional.

I push him on defensibility. The AI agent space is crowded, noisy, and moving at a pace that makes last month's innovation feel dated. Cowley is clear-eyed about the challenge. Dream has spent nine months building a platform layer that combines deep personal context - who you are, what your business does, how you like things done - with tooling that enables the assistant to actually execute. When the AI can't complete a task, a human-in-the-loop steps in, managed by the AI itself. It's a hybrid model: part software, part operations, designed to deliver outcomes rather than suggestions.

Once you build up that level of trust and it performs, you're off to the races.

There's something quietly radical about giving an AI assistant a name. Cowley admits the team was initially nervous about it - the psychological implications of attachment, reliance, even protectiveness. But what they've found is that a nickname, chosen personally by the user, accelerates trust dramatically. "Once you build up that level of trust and it performs, you're off to the races," he says. It's a small design choice with outsized consequences.

The conversation turns to Impala, and what building a second company with the same core team really means. Cowley and his co-founder Ben Stephenson started Dream together; Philip and Chris, early hires at Impala, came across too. They know how each other work under pressure. They've made the mistakes already. That institutional memory, Cowley argues, compounds - in speed, in decision-making, in knowing what not to do. "We have the battle scars. We have the learnings. Let's apply that to this one."

But he's honest about the counterweight. A team of thirty-somethings with families and different life stages doesn't carry the same raw energy as a group of twenty-four-year-olds. The 996 culture - nine to nine, six days a week - doesn't map onto a team with children and partners and a different relationship with time. Cowley doesn't romanticise the grind. "Some of the best work gets done going for a walk and just thinking through how you're approaching a problem," he says. The hours still have to be long, but they must be considered. At Impala, he prioritised work over everything - no proper holiday for four or five years, the gradual breakdown of boundaries. He's doing it differently this time.

If you're trying to build that next big thing, you need your own level of arrogance about what you're building. Otherwise, you end up regressing to the mean.

One of the sharpest lessons from Impala, he says, was favouring long-term vision over short-term execution. It sounds counterintuitive - isn't long-term thinking supposed to be the hallmark of a serious founder? Perhaps… but Cowley's point is more specific. In a world moving this fast, particularly in AI, getting lost in a grand five-year roadmap can blind you to what needs to happen this month. Revenue. Product. Optimised, tangible progress. Eyes on the road.

On building in the UK, Cowley is measured. The barriers to starting a company are low - SEIS and EIS remain among the best tax incentives for early-stage investment anywhere in the world. His wife started a handbag business alongside her job during Covid, and the ease of doing that shouldn't be taken for granted. But he's frustrated by the gap between starting and scaling. The UK incubates well but struggles to provide the framework - capital, consistency, conviction - that founders need at the next stage.

What irritates him most is the lack of clarity from government. Not the tax rates themselves, but the uncertainty. Even the rumour of a 50% capital gains hike in the last Budget was enough to rattle founders weighing up whether to stay. "You just need someone to come in, make the decision, follow through, and be clear," he says. "That's going to be the plan for the next five years. Rather than - I have no idea." He draws a light-hearted comparison to Trump: whatever you think of the politics, there's a directness and follow-through that gives people confidence to at least plan. The UK, by contrast, feels governed by politicians more afraid of losing their jobs than building long-term prosperity.

The deeper thread running through the conversation is one of cognitive outsourcing - what happens when we hand more and more of our thinking, our admin, our decision-making to AI. Cowley is building tools that accelerate exactly that, and yet he's thoughtful about the limits. Human connection, he says, is the obvious thing not to outsource. At Impala, the team worked fully remotely during Covid, and something essential was lost. You need to be able to turn around and have a beer at the end of a hard day. You need the unstructured, unoptimised moments.

You always want the end to sit within your own grasp.

His view is that AI should handle eighty percent of the heavy lifting - freeing people to spend more time on relationships, creativity, and the things that actually matter to them. But intent is key. "You always want the end to sit within your own grasp," he says. The blur between AI that amplifies human capability and AI that starts making decisions for you is where things get uncomfortable. Dream is building in that tension deliberately: proactive assistants that act on your behalf, but with you retaining control over what matters.

I ask about the speed of change, and whether even a founder building in AI can keep up. He laughs. "You can't keep up with absolutely everything." New models, new platforms, new competitors - the landscape shifts weekly. A company called Rent-a-Human recently launched a platform where AI agents can hire actual people to complete physical tasks. It's both thrilling and unsettling. Cowley's own engineering team uses AI to write code that would previously have required a team three times the size. The leverage is real. But so is the vertigo.

As we wrap up, I ask for the maxim he lives by. He references "strong opinions, loosely held" - the framework coined by Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo in the 1980s and since adopted as gospel across the tech world. The idea is simple: form a conviction quickly based on available evidence, then actively try to disprove it. Stay flexible. Update your view. Cowley firmly rejects it. "I don't agree with the loosely held part," he says. His version is strong opinions, strongly held. In a world full of noise, market shifts, and competitors building in every direction, a founder's job is to maintain conviction in their vision - not to be swayed by whatever everyone else is doing. "If you're trying to build that next big thing, you need your own level of arrogance about what you're building," he says. "Otherwise, you end up regressing to the mean."

It's a philosophy that carries risk - and he knows it. Sometimes the data will prove you wrong, and that's fine. But ninety percent of the time, it's conviction that sustains the iteration, the knock-downs, the slow route to building something that generates real value. With that, we're done. Cowley heads back out into a grey March morning in Holborn - arm in a sling, week managed by an AI agent, building his second company with the same team and a harder-won clarity about what matters. Dream is in private-beta and moving fast. If the product works as advertised, the irony is rich: a founder whose own assistant booked the café, coordinated the calendar, and handled the logistics - leaving him free to sit across the table and talk, human to human, about why that still matters most.

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