As a VC at Episode 1 and co-host of Riding Unicorns, I’ve had the privilege of meeting over 25 unicorn founders as well as around 75 ‘soonicorn’ founders. Along the way, I’ve learnt about building great company culture, hiring world-class talent, launching in new geographies and raising hundreds of millions from VCs. I’ve also learned a huge amount about the founders themselves. I recently sat down and went through all my notes to see what all these remarkable people had in common. At Episode 1, we invest in startups at Pre-Seed and Seed, so it’s important that we’re able t ..read more

What’s your name and where are you from? Hi – I’m Adam. Half-Irish, half-Pakistani. Nomadic childhood living in the U.K., Ireland, Pakistan, Canada and Brunei Three words to describe yourself?  Obsessive, relentless, unconventional What has been your biggest success in your life so far? Getting a full scholarship for my PhD studies at Cambridge, without which I wouldn’t have been able to quit my previous role at J.P. Morgan and pull off the esoteric pivot from bond trading to VC What’s your biggest failure? Waiting till my late teens before learning to code. Like any language, true flue ..read more

What’s your name and where are you from?Steph. Born in Guildford. Decade in London. Now in Hampshire Three words to describe yourself?Curious, Hard working, Adventurous What has been your biggest success in your life so far?At work, closing the largest and fiendishly complex counterparty settlement within the Lehman administration.  Personally, winning the non-pro London Triathlon. What’s your biggest failure?Not maintaining the same progression/ trajectory at work after having 2 wonderful daughters. I also see this as my epiphany moment! If you weren’t doing your job ..read more

Yesterday, Omnipresent announced their $120M Series B led by Kinnevik and Tencent.  We’ve had a front row seat since co-leading the Seed round alongside Playfair in early 2020.  Back then, I had a strong belief that the structural advantages of hiring globally would gradually become obvious and that global remote teams would eventually become the norm.  I also firmly believed (from first-hand experience) that the old way of growing international teams was far too painful. Since writing our first cheque, the pandemic has accelerated this inevitable shift to global teams.  A ..read more

We are very excited to announce that portfolio company PassFort has been acquired by US financial giant Moodys and will now become part of Moodys Analytics.  Proceeds to the fund represent a 0.4 DPI and an approximately 11.5 multiple / 65% IRR on our investment of £1.5m You can read a full announcement here This is an outstanding result for the company and its founders as well as for the fund. We first invested in PassFort at the end of 2015 after meeting them through Entrepreneur First. The founders had great energy and ambition and most importantly had insight into the ..read more

CEO of Opteran This week we interviewed David to understand all things Opteran and where it all began. Opteran reverse-engineers biological systems onto silicon, enabling machines to see, sense, navigate and make decisions better than existing AI approaches, calling it ‘natural intelligence’. It’s fascinating, science fiction in reality, David can explain all below. Can you give us an overview of Opteran and what do they do? Opteran is pioneering a radical small, lightweight, and ultra-low powered silicon-based approach to autonomy called Natural Intelligence. Based on eight years of resear ..read more

Paul Bennett, Co-Founder & CEO at Perchpeek Paul is one of our awesome Episode 1 CEO’s. He loves his sport, he’s super positive and he wears his Perchpeek merch with pride. Find out all about what makes this CEO tick… What’s your name and where do you come from? Paul Bennett & I’m that well known hybrid of half Serbian & half Irish 2. Give us a quick overview of your company and what it does. Perchpeek is a digital relocation platform that helps anyone, live anywhere. From Seattle to Singapore, we guide people through every stage of their relocation & make it the enjoyable p ..read more

The team at Opteran are planning to put a honeybee brain on a chip. No, this is not an attempt to replace our endangered pollinators with robot equivalents, and while it might sound like the stuff of science fiction it turns out to be a very useful idea – and just the thing to unlock the next generation of digital applications, increasingly deployed at the edge of the Internet. Autonomous vehicles, drones or robots have to make decisions all the time in response to rapidly evolving situations. How do I avoid that bird; the left hand turn on my route map is blocked; there is an obstacle in fro ..read more

This week we interviewed Patrick Short, he’s American, he studied his Phd at Cambridge and he’s now the Co- Founder and CEO of Sano Genetics. A startup that allows users to safely and simply get involved in medical trials by using at home DNA testing. They are currently researching into long COVID and its effects. What’s your name and where do you come from? I’m Patrick, and I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina in the US. I’ve lived in Cambridge UK for almost 7 years after moving here for my PhD in 2014.2. 2. Give us a quick overview of your company and what it does. Sano Genetics enables p ..read more

We are delighted to be backing Phasecraft in the largest seed funding round for a UK quantum computing company as they announce a new quantum algorithm breakthrough. I’ve spent long enough working with emerging technologies to know just how rare it is for internationally renowned scientists at the very top of their field to step back from their academic career and instead focus decisively on real-world application of their research. It is a bold move. And one that we at Episode1 are excited to back. Here’s why: We are bumping up against the ceiling of Moore’s law. As classical computing chips ..read more