Act One Ventures’ Post

🚀 Celebrating Episode 1 Ventures - LPs Success for raising the £76 Million third fund: A Dynamic Blend of Visionaries : Congrats Hector Mason 🎉 This is an incredible milestone for you and all the Episode 1 Ventures team, and I’m thrilled to witness your continued growth and impact. 💪 And let’s not forget the heart of it all—the founders! 🙌 Their dreams, resilience, and hard work are the driving force behind this success. Kudos to each one of them! 👏 Here’s to the next chapter! 🥂 May it be filled with groundbreaking investments, disruptive startups, and transformative impact. I’m thrilled to share that the LP base for this fund includes a remarkable group of successful founders and operators. 🌟 Twenty-one of them have previously raised from Episode 1 Ventures (WaaW this is amazing), bringing their invaluable insights and experience to the table. And that’s not all! They’re investing side by side with the steadfast LPs who have been with the Episode 1 Ventures team through thick and thin, supporting them fund after fund. 🙌 Believe me, with these practices, we’re shaping the future of innovation. Here’s to the power of collaboration! 🥂 The amazing team 🎯 Simon Murdoch Stephanie Orde Adrian L. Adam Shuaib, PhD Paul McNabb Dominic L. Matt Harrison Full story here: https://lnkd.in/dhPbi6Jc Looking to announce other VCs raising funds to support them, to tell their story and share their best practices here in my LinkedIn profile to inspire the next generation of emergent fund managers. Cheers to you all! 🙌 Source TechCrunch #VC #VCcongratsVCs #UKVCs #fundraising #makthevc #VCS

The decision-making process is venture's ultimate black box. Even as someone who lives and breathes fundraising processes, I had little idea how my peers at other consumer funds carried out due diligence (DD) and got to investment decisions. Having polled a host of leading consumer VCs, I've laid out how VCs run their investment processes, focusing on 'commercial DD' and the decision-making framework that goes with it. Link to the blog in the comments 👇 I hope this proves useful to founders and also VCs looking to optimise their ways of working. Thank you so much to the VCs for their transparency and for filling out what was quite a long survey! Yes, fundraising is a horrible process, but there are VCs who want to help make it better. Specifically, Manuel, Rachel, Lilac, Jimmy, Anna, Billy, Lucas, Sarah, Hugo, Bill, Christopher, Nico, Anurag, Jack, Fred, Louis, Otto and Geordie. #startup #fundraising #venturecapital #duediligence #consumer

A new dedicated fund and brand , Wellington Assets Ventures (WAV) has raised $150 million for its debut, with the backing of limited partners including state pension plans and banks. This is very exciting news for diverse fund managers who continue to grow asset portfolios with limited partners to invest in underfunded companies of founders of color. The venture capital is a very segregated market and most funds have not been allocated to support founders who have already invested their own money and can’t grow their businesses due to lack of funding . We appreciate that these fund managers of color can create a legitimate opportunity to draw a thesis that target those limited partners as investors to go along with supporting black founders with equity investments… #civiceducation , #civicengagement , #economicempowerment , #blackfounders , #underrepresented https://lnkd.in/eKrSfGCh

Do you know what the scariest stage for a VC to invest is right now? It's pre-seed. The earliest stage of investing is currently the scariest for VCs so the amount of safety they need to take a bet relative to valuations is way higher than any other stage. SO if you're pre-product or pre-traction you're definitely feeling the brunt of this right now when it comes to fundraising... If you're a founder running a company at that stage, here's my advice to you: Be REALLY focused on what it's going to take to your company to some real traction milestones. It's no longer easy to get investors excited about ideas or cool products without customers. They want to see more evidence....so how are you going to grind it out to get there?? You can't go down the lazy path that you saw ZIRP era founders follow. No one is getting an easy path to raise a couple million to figure things out... So sharpen your pencil around what a plan that relies on maximum effort from you and minimum capital would be to get over that traction hump...then go raise that round So what does that fundraise plan look like? Instead of the $2M pre-seed round that 2021-2022 founders were raising, it probably looks more like a few angels that put 50-100k in that get you to 500k. Maybe you get lucky and have a pre-seed fund throw in $250-500k. I would rather you keep a more modest goal of $300k-$1M and use that money to start executing towards actual traction and growth so when you do go out to actual funds, you have something to show. This is what I'm seeing the path forward for most pre-seed founders should be... let me know what you think or if you have any questions

Jason Yeh is absolutely right here on investor sentiment in the current market Pre product is a no go I imagine for most early stage investors unless there’s a very solid problem-founder fit or if it’s a second time founder. For Pre traction, we really need to see proof points that there is a real problem being solved, signal that there is some solid intent/interest from customers as well as a well thought out GTM strategy. #vc #venturecapital #startupfounders #angelinvestors #angelinvesting #startupjourney #tech #techinvesting #seedfunding #startups #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #founders #fundraising #innovation #technology #business #product

Building a company humbles you as a founder because it’s super hard. But we keep doing it because we believe in something bigger. I had to stop driving from AUH to DXB to read Amir Farha’s recent post. COTU Champions Fund I - with more than a decade of VC experience! - 18 months fundraising mode - 500 emails outreach - 300 pitches - 14% conversion rate (70 LPs) That is discipline! Definitely give it a read! There's a lot of takeaways and learnings, not just for aspiring fund managers, but it's also super relevant for startup founders who are in the fundraising process. What a morning treat

NEWS: Today we are thrilled to announce the oversubscribed final close of Ada Ventures Fund II at £63m/$80m. The £63m/$80m fund is dedicated to breakthrough ideas across the fund’s three themes: climate equity, healthy ageing and economic empowerment. We will continue to make pre-seed and seed investments between £250k and £1.5m And we’re already on our way. Our investment team has already partnered with 11 new companies across the UK including, BlakBear, Materials Nexus, OPENFORMAT, Juno Bio, PlannerPal, Multiomic Health, Glowb, Boldr, Greenworkx and Radiant Matter.   Our co-founding Partner, Francesca (Check) Warner, said: "We’re thrilled to announce the final close of our second fund. We’ve worked incredibly hard over the last five years to develop the systems and processes to turn our ambition to build a truly diverse and inclusive fund into reality. Strong returns are strongly correlated with inclusive investment. We want other funds to copy this blueprint. The excuse that diverse talent isn’t ‘out there’ is a cop out. We have proven that you can build a thriving, inspiring portfolio of diverse founders building breakthrough products and hugely valuable businesses." A big thank you to the LPs who joined Ada Ventures Fund II including British Business Bank, The University of Edinburgh, Big Society Capital, Legal & General Capital, Atomico, Export and Investment Fund of Denmark and Molten Ventures. They have been joined by a number of founder investors, including Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, and Illusian Family Office, co-founded by Ilkka Paananen, co-founder and CEO of Supercell. Swipe right to learn more about Fund II's portfolio and follow the story in the comments below 👇 

I am absolutely thrilled to shared that Consensus has raised $11.5M in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures! Alongside USV is an amazing group of investors joining the round like Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross (NFDG), Kevin Carter (Night Capital), lead seed investor Draper Associates and more. Scientific research is the most valuable source of knowledge humans have ever created. Yet - there is no easy way to search and consume it. We have built Consensus to change this and have been humbled by the over 2 million users who have used Consensus since launching our product. We want to create a world where expert knowledge is within reach of everyone. A world where scientists can get back to doing real science, not searching, and one where a generation of citizen scientists can be created via easier access to real research. This is one of the many reasons we are so excited to partner with USV. In the current USV fund thesis is a call to invest in opportunities that broaden access to knowledge. On top of that, they have been writing about and investing in the "splintering of search" long before anybody knew what an LLM was. It would truly be hard to find a better partner for us at Consensus than USV. We are also happy to share that Jared Hecht will be joining our Board of Directors. I want to give the BIGGEST possible shoutout to the entire Consensus team. Without you, we would be nowhere and it is a pleasure to work with such an incredibly talented, passionate and kind group of people. I cannot wait to keep building together: Megan Van Welie, Brett Nebeker, Chris Varano, Jimmy Longley, Ali Farid, Namrata Kundu, Sarah R. Wakeman and Pablo Garcés. I'll save my full sappy co-founder post for another day or another medium - but, working every day with my best friend Christian Salem has been the greatest professional experience of my life. Lastly, a shoutout to the previous seed investors who have doubled down on us not mentioned above like Alumni Ventures, Billy Draper (Path Ventures), Marc McCabe (Nomad Capital), and Nathaniel Manning. Consensus is just getting started 🏗 Onward.

We've raised $1.3B Balderton Capital in new funds across early and growth to continue supporting UK & European technology founders. This is the 8th(!) fundraise I've been part of and have shared some thoughts on why venture matters, how fundraising in Europe has changed and how we differentiate ourselves through conviction here: https://lnkd.in/e2XRcagq

When SeedLegals launched SeedFASTs back in 2018, founders would usually create a couple of SeedFASTs to raise smaller amounts ahead of their next funding round. But that’s all changed. We now see founders creating dozens of SeedFASTs, sometimes 100 or more. So we released an all-new SeedFAST workflow designed to make it even easier to raise from lots of investors with SeedFASTs. https://lnkd.in/e23Ras5x