Participated · Seed · Nov 2020

Purple Dot offers a pre-commerce pre-order and waitlist platform that enables brands and retailers to sell products before they arrive at the warehouse. The system integrates with existing e-commerce infrastructure to deliver experiences for merchants and customers. It is used by hundreds of brands, including Oh Polly, Lando Norris, Goorin Bros, Astrid and Miyu, and Sachin & Babi, and processes millions of dollars in transactions each month. Led by CEO Madeline Parra, the company positions its product as a solution to unsold inventory by allowing brands to sell early and with confidence. Purple Dot plans to use new capital to continue building its platform and expand its reach to more brands across industries. The team comprises 15 people spread across London and Charlotte, NC. Purple Dot offers a waitlist and pre-order platform that lets fashion brands sell products before inventory reaches the warehouse, enabling production to match exact order volumes and reducing wasted inventory. The startup positions its solution as a way for brands to maximize sales, build loyalty, and access demand data earlier in the lifecycle. Purple Dot’s waitlist tool enables selling and shipping to be asynchronous, which the company says is a key customer-experience requirement for a sell-earlier strategy. The approach aims to cut the environmental impact from excess production and unsold garments. Founded in 2019 by Madeline Parra and John Talbott, the company claims it is the only solution of its type in the market. Financially, Purple Dot recently raised a $4M early-stage funding round led by Unusual Ventures, with prior investors participating. Purple Dot provides a "worth-the-wait" payment method for fashion brands that lets customers pay upfront for an item, request a lower price, and then wait for the retailer to confirm the discounted sale. Customers receive a full refund if the retailer does not confirm the reduced price. The product sits alongside buy-now-pay-later options but is designed to avoid encouraging consumer debt by offering modest (typically 10–20%) reductions rather than deep end-of-season discounts. For retailers, the model enables limited pre-orders and lower-risk mid-season discounting, helping test new styles and reduce inventory waste and associated carbon emissions. The company has secured menswear retailer Spoke as a customer and says it is in talks with multiple major U.K. and U.S. high-street brands. Purple Dot was founded in August 2019 by Madeline Parra (CEO) and John Talbott (CTO), both former senior Skyscanner employees.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2019

Rahko develops quantum machine-learning (QML) software and a QML platform aimed at chemical simulation and "quantum discovery" to accelerate advances in batteries, chemicals, advanced materials and drugs. The team consolidated years of PhD research from University College London into a commercial platform and includes co-founders Leonard Wossnig, Edward Grant, Miriam Cha and Ian Horobin plus lead developers Shuxiang Cao and Hongxiang Chen. Rahko says it uses hybrid approaches that combine classical and quantum computing to make quantum capabilities more accessible and commercially usable before large-scale quantum hardware matures. The company partners with major quantum hardware manufacturers, academic teams and national laboratories, and reports partnerships with IBM and Microsoft. Rahko originated from UCL’s Computer Science programme and is supported by Conception X, a venture builder for deep tech startups. It has attracted interest from a tech giant but the founders chose to commercialize their work independently.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2018

Hopsworks builds an operational AI platform centered on a Python-centric enterprise feature store that centralizes and governs the data used in AI models to enable real-time AI. The company offers managed deployments on AWS, GCP, and Azure, a self-managed version for any data center, and a serverless feature store at app.hopsworks.ai. Hopsworks reports early enterprise customer traction with named customers including American-First Credit Union, PaddyPower‑Betfair, and the Swedish Public Employment Service. The platform targets data scientists and engineers to manage features and develop and deploy models in production. The company has offices in Stockholm, London, and Palo Alto and emphasizes a strong engineering team based in Stockholm. Proceeds from the recent funding will be used to expand commercial operations, strengthen the US presence, and further advance the company’s technology. Logical Clocks develops Hopsworks, described in the article as the world’s first Enterprise and open-source Feature Store combined with an end-to-end machine learning platform. The product offers managed deployments on AWS and Azure and a self-managed version for any data center. Hopsworks provides low-latency access to features, real-time calculated data, and data provenance and governance to help teams move models to production. The platform is available as an open-source tier for individuals or small organizations and an Enterprise tier with advanced security for production use at scale. Hopsworks is already running in production at customers including PaddyPower-Betfair, Getinge, and Swedbank. The company plans to use new funding to expand its commercial operations and footprint, particularly in the US. Logical Clocks co-develops the open-source Hops Hadoop platform alongside KTH Stockholm and RISE SICS AB and provides enterprise support for Hopsworks, the company's data and AI platform. Hopsworks is presented as a user-friendly platform for data science that builds end-to-end pipelines to refine raw data into production-ready models. The platform includes what the company calls the industry's first enterprise feature store, plus features for generating training data, experiment versioning for repeatable data science, and model management. Logical Clocks aims to help enterprises transform on-premises and cloud data into intelligence. The company has raised a €1.25 million funding round from Inventure, Frontline Ventures, and AI Seed. Timo Tirkkonen of Inventure will join the startup's board as chairman.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2018

Hazy builds AI-generated synthetic data that preserves the statistical quality of real data while containing no real personal information, eliminating privacy risk. Its synthetic data can be used as a drop-in replacement for AI/ML development, software testing, and data commercialization. The company serves financial services, telecommunications, government, and research customers and lists Nationwide Building Society, Vodafone Group, and Wells Fargo among its customers. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in London, Hazy won the $1 million Microsoft Innovate AI prize and has expanded rapidly since. In March 2023 Hazy raised $9.0M in a Series A to continue growth within the banking and telecom sectors across the UK, Europe, and the US. The funding will support further adoption of its synthetic data solutions across target industries. Hazy offers a cloud-based data anonymization platform and workflow tool that automatically anonymizes and adapts to changing datasets. Its AI engine seeks out and anonymizes personal data buried in datasets to help companies remain GDPR-compliant when sharing data. The company has launched an initial product that allows businesses to share data securely under GDPR-compliant legal agreements. Hazy was spun out of UCL less than 18 months ago by Harry Keen, James Arthur and Dr. Fintan Nagle and is based in London. The new funding will be used to develop an automated data-anonymisation tool that can optimize privacy for each use case. To date the company has raised multiple early rounds including pre-seed and seed financing. Anon AI develops software to automate data anonymization, allowing developers and data scientists to share data securely. The company raised a £340k pre-seed round to enhance its prototype model and build a developer tool in partnership with the UCL community. It will work with UCL to advance its machine learning techniques and collaborate with Dr Fintan Nagle to enhance the neuro-linguistic programming capabilities of its software. Leadership includes CEO Harry Keen and CTO James Arthur. The firm plans to engage with public policy as the General Data Protection Regulation goes live in May 2018.