Channel 4 Ventures

We’re excited to be joining 35+ of Europe's top VCs in Impact<> Investor Office Hours on 30th October 2024, with Vinay Solanki, Lara Ismen and John Gagalang representing Channel 4 Ventures. Led by impact accelerator Unrest, in collaboration with Google Cloud and Carta, this initiative helps impact founders progress on their fundraising journey. 🚀 Link to apply in the comment below 👇 This is an exciting opportunity for impact founders to connect with top-tier investors—whether it’s to make connections, get advice, or pitch for funding. We'd love to see you there! 

Latest investment into fast growth AR entertainment space. We remain very active in media for equity space and expect to continue to deploy in 2024. It's been great working with Andrew McGuinness Suzy Hart Amy Farrant. And to John Gagalang, another one across the line!

Channel 4 Ventures is pleased to announce a £3 million Media for Equity investment into Fy!, the AI powered home and living marketplace. Our media and the unmatched reach of TV will allow Fy! to get in front of millions of consumers. It is an exciting deal for us and one that marks our second investment of the year in the home and living space category. Thomas Beverley Vinay Solanki John Gagalang Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eUXrjgyJ

Channel 4 Ventures is pleased to announce a £3m Media for Equity investment into Vinterior, the leading marketplace for vintage furniture. We are proud to make this investment as part of our continued strategy to support UK consumer businesses with our media. The deal willl allow Vinterior to reach our extensive audience and feature alongside shows such as Grand Designs. Sandrine Zhang Ferron Vinay Solanki John Gagalang Channel 4 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/epqYUski

Channel 4 Ventures is pleased to announce a £3m Media for Equity investment into Vinterior, the leading marketplace for vintage furniture. We are proud to make this investment as part of our continued strategy to support UK consumer businesses with our media. The deal willl allow Vinterior to reach our extensive audience and feature alongside shows such as Grand Designs. Sandrine Zhang Ferron Vinay Solanki John Gagalang Channel 4 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/epqYUski

🌟 Untapped Strategy Update 🌟 Thank you to everyone who has shown interest in our Untapped strategy. Your applications and queries have been pouring in, and we're thrilled by the response. In the coming weeks, our team will be reviewing applications and queries and will be getting back to you all shortly. Thanks for your patience while we do this.  Due to the remarkable interest in our strategy, we've decided to move to an "always on" approach. This means that we'll be continuously accepting and reviewing applications throughout the year. We are also planning a series of events across the UK to allow us to see you face to face! We’ll share more on these soon. Thank you once again for your enthusiasm and support.

Last night, we announced our initiative ‘Untapped’, to back founders at risk of being overlooked by the VC ecosystem. Informed by new research which shows that founders securing significant investment historically fall into a narrow range of profiles, Untapped seeks to address this by identifying more dealflow from companies led a broader range of founders. Channel 4 Ventures is committing that a significant proportion of deals taken to its investment committee each year will be in businesses led by such founders. We expect this expansion of our existing investment strategy to drive both commercial returns for Channel 4, as well as increase the quality and resilience of the early-stage consumer ecosystem. We benchmarked the profiles of hundreds of consumer founders that secured investment valuing their companies at £100 million or more since 2013. Our research reveals that: ◾ 94% of founders were men, despite men representing only 41% of all UK graduates ◾ Founders are fifty-one times more likely to have graduated from an Oxbridge university or its US equivalents, than a graduate of a university outside the top 100 institutions globally ◾ Consumer companies in London, Oxford, or Cambridge are 11 times more likely to have raised a valuation of £100m+ than a company located anywhere else in the UK  ◾ White university graduates are ten times more likely to have founded a consumer company at a valuation of £100m+ than a black graduate, and nearly twice as likely as an Asian graduate ◾ 67% of founders were either previous founders or came from within the traditional start-up ecosystem (i.e. a narrow set of roles in prestigious firms) Anyone interested in submitting their business plan and associated information should contact untapped@channel4.co.uk by 5pm on April 17. After receiving proposals, Channel 4 Ventures will analyse founders’ self-submitted data to identify entrepreneurs’ profiles. Channel 4 Ventures will run a series of annual Untapped roadshows across the UK. Find out more - https://lnkd.in/e-8DeSWe Vinay Solanki Dan Tolhurst Verica Djurdjevic

Our partnership with Airtasker has officially launched on Channel 4! Introducing 'Airtasker. Yeahtasker!' - a campaign that captures the ultimate “YEAH” feeling of when you get the jobs you want to do, done. 💪 We are thrilled to be a part of this growth journey to re-create the similar successes that Airtasker have seen from Australia to the UK.