Participated · Equity · Jan 2019

Gousto provides customers with all ingredients in the right proportions to cook meals at home, using organic, fresh and seasonal produce and chef-developed recipes. Customers choose recipes online from a weekly-updated selection. The founders, Timo Boldt and James Carter, started the company in 2012 out of a shared passion for cooking. In 2021 Gousto achieved B-Corp certification. Financially, the company has been raising large funding packages in recent periods to navigate economic uncertainty. Most recently it closed a £50M share sale from existing investors that will provide additional cash during a volatile period. Gousto operates a meal-kit delivery service that aims to help consumers eat healthily and affordably. The company emphasizes sustainability, saying it plays a role in reducing food waste and carbon emissions in the food supply chain. Gousto is a profitable B Corp unicorn founded by Timo Boldt in 2012 and is based in London. Management has framed the business as disrupting the traditional grocery channel for evening meals and targeting further growth. CEO Timo Boldt has said the company is embarking on its next stage of growth to become the UK’s most loved way to eat dinner. Financially, Gousto recently completed a large financing transaction following a prior $100 million financing in January 2022 that valued the company at $1.7 billion. Gousto is a London-based meal-kit company providing consumers with a steady stream of over 60 recipe-box kits delivered fresh to their doorsteps. The company is a certified B Corporation and emphasises convenience, health and sustainability. Gousto plans to launch an automated, AI-driven fulfilment centre near Birmingham and has four additional hubs on its roadmap. The new fulfilment capability is expected to increase overall capacity by 40%. Financially, the company completed a $150 million financing that gives it a $1.7 billion valuation and brings cumulative funds raised to $361.5 million since late September 2013. Management says the funds will be used in part to scale fulfilment and capitalise on accelerated grocery-market trends. Gousto is an online meal-kit manufacturer that delivers pre-portioned ingredients and weekly updated recipes to customers' doorsteps. The company uses proprietary algorithms to maximise pick speed, daily volumes and pick accuracy while minimising cost and food waste. Founded in 2012 by James Carter and Timo Boldt and based in London, Gousto scaled rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Revenues increased sixfold between 2016 and 2019, and H1 2020 revenue surpassed the £83M reported for the whole of 2019. Monthly meal deliveries doubled from 2.5m in January to 5m in June 2020, and the company has been profitable since Q4 2019. With new funding, Gousto plans to open three customer fulfilment centres, triple capacity, and create over 1,000 new jobs, with a second fulfilment centre in Lincolnshire scheduled to go live before the end of 2020. Gousto operates a subscription meal-kit service offering more than 50 weekly recipes and automated packing that enables customers to tailor orders. The company currently delivers about 4 million meals to 380,000 UK households each month and aims to cross 400 million meals delivered by 2025. Average price per meal, per person is £2.98. Gousto is investing in its AI recommendation engine and backend logistics technology and plans to build more capacity and expand next-day delivery. It reported rapid growth pre-COVID (forecasting 70% year-on-year) and has temporarily paused new customer sign-ups to prioritize existing demand. The business has 550 employees (100 in tech) and plans to grow headcount to 700 by 2022.

Led · Series A · Apr 2018

Founded in 2015, UK-based Open Cosmos is the country’s only provider of fully integrated satellite mission services, covering design, build, launch and in-orbit operation. Its OpenOrbit offering delivers turnkey telecoms, Earth-observation, navigation and scientific missions, while OpenConstellation lets multiple organisations share a mutualised constellation to access space data at lower cost. The company also operates DataCosmos, an AI-driven platform that aggregates and analyses imagery from its own and third-party satellites to tackle use cases from agriculture monitoring to disaster response. Open Cosmos is now expanding its Harwell campus facilities with vibration tables and a TVAC chamber, more than doubling production capacity and enabling larger satellites. The company’s growth is underpinned by significant capital, including a $50 million Series B round in September 2023—the largest UK space-tech raise of the year—and a new £5 million government grant. These resources position Open Cosmos to extend its manufacturing, R&D and data-commercialisation capabilities and to strengthen ties with organisations such as Space Park Leicester.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2018

Founded in 2015 and based in London, Streetbees operates a human intelligence platform that lets people record by video, photo and text the reasoning behind their purchasing decisions. It maintains a community of 3.5 million consumers who capture emotion and context in the moment. The company applies deep neural networks to analyse that unstructured data and deliver rich insights for clients. Eight of the world’s ten largest consumer goods companies, including PepsiCo, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble, rely on Streetbees’ intelligence. Financially, Streetbees announced a €34 million Series B in October led by Lakestar and has now secured an additional €5.5 million investment. The firm is planning a significant recruitment drive and continued international expansion. Streetbees operates a phone app that asks over-the-spot surveys and lets users chat, send photos and share stories, effectively enabling consumers to sell behavioural data (the site says it pays up to £5 per entry). The company applies deep neural networks to index and analyse a proprietary dataset of millions of offline moments, claiming to make the offline world visible and searchable. Streetbees reports over 3.5 million consumers worldwide using its app and says it serves eight of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, including PepsiCo, Unilever and Procter & Gamble. With the fresh funding, the company plans to pursue data acquisition across new verticals such as media, entertainment and finance. Streetbees is headquartered in London, has an office in Lisbon and has opened a new office in the US. The company intends to grow headcount from about 100 to 230 over the next year. It closed a $40 million Series B to accelerate growth of its platform. Streetbees operates a chat-style app where over 1 million users across 150 countries share videos, photos and text about daily life; the company applies advanced natural language processing and machine learning to surface not just what users do but why and what they may do next. Its core product transforms real-time community data into actionable insights for brands and includes a new 'Always On' platform that gives customers ongoing access to real-life stories rather than one-off surveys. Customers include Unilever, PepsiCo, BBC World Service, Vodafone and L’Oreal, and nine of the world’s ten largest FMCG companies. Led by CEO Tugce Bulut, Streetbees plans to use the new funding to further advance its ML technology, expand its data science team and develop its community networks worldwide. The company is growing in the US, having opened an office there in January 2018, and currently employs 75 people across London and Lisbon. Streetbees recruits “bees” — ordinary people around the world — who capture moments from their lives via smartphone, sharing habits, shopping preferences and opinions for corporate clients. The platform verifies contributors via phone-number verification and background checks, and asks for photos and videos to ensure participation. It combines artificial intelligence, mobile geolocation technology and social media to gather and analyze data. Every user is paid in cash within 24 hours for sharing insights. The company already works with clients including Unilever, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Dyson, The Times Education Supplement, Vodafone and Amnesty International, and currently has over one million users in 87 countries. Streetbees plans to use the new funding to expand operations and double its 40-strong team over the next year, and expects to reach 10 million users over the course of the year.

Led · Series A · Mar 2018

TickX operates a search and discovery platform that aggregates ticket listings from over 50 providers, covering more than 125,000 events and attractions. Users can search by price, geography and entertainment/attraction type, and the site lists partners including Ticketmaster, Headout and Skiddle. The service is free to users; TickX earns commission on sales generated via its platform. The company says over 1 million people used TickX last year. Founded in mid-2015 and based in Manchester, TickX plans to use new funding to expand further into Europe, add cinema tickets to its database and continue investing in its technology. Its stated mission is to become a one-stop global destination for entertainment discovery and ticket comparison.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2018

Plum Guide is a London-based vacation home platform that curates high-quality homestays. It finds and awards the best homes in each market through a combination of data, technology and expert “home critics.” The platform is led by Founder and CEO Doron Meyassed and now features properties in over 500 destinations across 29 countries. The company raised $9M in a funding round led by Beringea, bringing total funding since launch to $57M. Existing investors Talis Capital, Hearst Ventures and Latitude participated, and Plum Guide offered its community a chance to join the round via a Crowdcube crowdfunding campaign. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its growth. The Plum Guide operates a curated booking platform that markets hand-picked holiday homes to affluent travellers who might otherwise choose hotels for consistent quality. The company employs hospitality experts who vet properties against a 150-point checklist covering factors from proximity to cafes and transport to Wi‑Fi speed. It currently operates in London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Paris and Rome. The startup says it will use new capital to expand geographically. In April it launched in Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Madrid and Tel Aviv, and plans to add six more U.S. cities later this year. The article does not disclose revenue or other operating metrics. The Plum Guide is a London-based startup that tests and curates holiday homes, short-term lets and vacation rentals. It handpicks properties from over 25 sites using a mix of algorithms and physical visits by hospitality experts. Shortlisted homes are visited and evaluated against 150 criteria, covering items from shower pressure and bedding quality to hosts' local recommendations. Roughly only 1 in every 100 spaces reviewed is accepted into the Plum collection. The company was founded in December 2015 by Doron Meyassed, Imran Arshed, Alex Lee and Arif Meherali. It raised funding to expand its business reach.