• Paddle

  Participated · Series A · Sep 2016

  Paddle acts as a Merchant of Record (MoR) for digital product companies, handling payments, sales tax, refunds, fraud prevention, and compliance. The company serves over 6,000 SaaS, AI, and app businesses and employs 300+ people across offices in London, Lisbon, Toronto, New York City, and Austin. Paddle reported strong momentum in 2025, driven by a 40% annual growth rate and demand from new AI products and web monetisation following Apple policy changes. The product roadmap and recent partnerships with Vercel and integration with RevenueCat aim to make web monetisation and cross‑platform subscription management easier for app developers. Leadership additions to the executive team (CRO International, CTO, and CMO) are intended to support enterprise sales, product scaling, and global marketing as the company expands. The new capital is earmarked to accelerate product development, support enterprise customers, and fuel further international expansion. Paddle is a London-based payments and billing platform that serves software companies as a merchant of record, offering checkout, payment processing, subscription management, invoicing, international taxes and compliance. It works with more than 3,000 software customers across 200 markets and is sold as a SaaS product with basic pricing of 5% plus $0.50 per transaction. Paddle says revenue growth has doubled over the last 18 months but does not disclose absolute revenue figures. The company is pursuing expansion into in-app payments and has built an alternative to Apple’s in-app purchase system, planning a December launch with 2,000 developers signed up representing $2 billion in app store volume. Paddle plans to price its IAP offering at 10% for transactions under $10 and 5% for transactions over $10, positioning itself against Apple’s 30% fee. Its product integrates multiple payment providers and partners to localize transactions and simplify the complex payments stack for scaling SaaS businesses. Paddle offers a unified Revenue Delivery Platform for B2B SaaS companies, integrating checkout, payments, subscription management, and financial compliance. The platform enables rapid entry into new markets, one-click product launches, friction-free renewals, and optimisation of Net Dollar Retention (NDR). Paddle was founded in 2012 by Christian Owens and Harrison Rose and is headquartered in London. The company has grown to 140 employees and serves over 2,000 software sellers across 245 countries and territories. Paddle reports average annual revenue growth of over 175% over the past four years and says it doubled revenue in the last year. The company plans to use new funding to expand in the US and globally and to invest further in product, engineering, sales, and marketing teams. Paddle provides a checkout, eCommerce, marketing and analytics platform that helps software companies and developers sell products globally and manage licensing. Customers use its checkout and licensing solution to sell worldwide and its analytics and marketing tools to understand and grow their businesses. The company is led by Founder and CEO Christian Owens and currently employs a team of over 100 people. Paddle serves customers in over 200 countries. The company raised an additional $8M in new funding, bringing total funding to date to $25M. It intends to use the funds to expand its data, product and engineering teams. Paddle is a platform for aggregating and managing the various stages of software sales, such as trials and licenses, payments and taxes, and usage and crash analysis. The company positions itself as a unified commerce platform intended to replace a fragmented software sales stack, according to CEO Christian Owens. It raised $12.5 million in the current funding round to support growth. The new funding will be invested in growing the team and accelerating product development with a focus on insight. Paddle currently employs 40 people at its London office and aims to grow to 100 by the end of the year. The company merged with MacPaw’s DevMate development platform earlier this year and has added Notion partner Chrys Chrysanthou and MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan to its board.

• FiveAI

  Participated · Equity · Jul 2016

  FiveAI is developing an AI-based autonomous driving platform and plans to operate a fleet of self-driving taxis using that platform. The company is a partner in the U.K. StreetWise project and is working with Transport for London, the Transport Research Laboratory, Oxford University, insurer Direct Line and others on a London pilot. FiveAI has not yet launched any commercial products and is currently in a multi‑phase plan: Phase One focuses on building and demonstrating the driving platform and pilots, Phase Two on dispatch, UX and a first commercial launch, and Phase Three on large-scale fleet deployment. The company recently completed a Series A and received a government grant to fund development and pilots, and CEO Stan Boland — a founder with several prior exits — says he has invested personal funds as well. FiveAI expects StreetWise test runs at the end of 2019 and anticipates regulatory improvements by 2021; large-scale expansion would require raising hundreds of millions or billions. FiveAI develops AI-driven software that uses computer vision and machine learning, paired with onboard sensors and cameras, to reduce reliance on detailed prior 3D mapping for autonomous vehicles. The company aims to enable self-driving cars to understand and navigate their immediate environment with simpler maps. FiveAI raised $2.7 million to continue building its software stack and to grow its team of AI/machine learning and other software engineers. Management says the funds are intended to carry the company to simulator and supervised road testing before seeking a larger round. After those milestones, FiveAI plans to begin working with vehicle OEMs to develop production-ready software. CEO Stan Boland, who previously co-founded Element 14 and Icera, emphasizes the U.K.’s AI talent and potential regulatory advantages for developing self-driving technology.

• Kalo

  Participated · Series A · Jun 2016

  Lystable builds a freelancer collaboration and workflow management platform aimed at teams that work with many freelancers, with a freemium product now used by about 2,200 customers. The company has shifted its business model toward a payments-focused premium add-on to handle freelancer remittances, compliance and admin. It launched an early payments test at the end of last year, plans a public payments beta in December and a full launch in Q1 2018, and will make the workflow product freely available for anyone to sign up. Lystable sees early adopters in media and tech, with potential to expand into sectors like banking and healthcare as freelancer management needs mature. The startup is San Francisco-headquartered, recently raised additional funding to support the payments product and plans to grow headcount from 42 to roughly 75 by year-end. Lystable builds a SaaS tool focused on helping businesses manage freelancers, contractors and vendors. The company serves about 60 enterprise customers that collectively manage more than 20,000 lysted freelancers and vendors, roughly double its count since December. Its largest verticals are media and ecommerce, and named customers include MTV, Nickelodeon, ASOS, Google, The Economist, Airbnb and CNBC. Lystable was London-founded and has reincorporated as a US company as it prepares to relocate its headquarters to San Francisco. The new funding will be used to expand the San Francisco office (targeting ~30 people), grow the London team, and scale sales, marketing and senior product and engineering hires. Financially, Lystable previously raised $3.5M in seed funding (May 2015) and has now closed an $11M Series A. Lystable provides a supplier-management platform that helps companies organize, rank and communicate with freelancers, agencies and vendors, replacing spreadsheets and ill-suited CRMs. The product includes tools for browsing samples, rating skills, messaging with templates and a counterpart experience for suppliers to list services, accept jobs and request payment. The company launched a new website and is opening up access to more customers, moving toward a self-serve option for small and medium businesses while continuing enterprise deployments. Lystable offers a freemium pricing model and is still experimenting with pricing; it currently integrates with payment systems but plans to handle payments directly in the future. The startup was TechStars‑incubated and counts enterprise users such as Google and The Economist; it says implementations can scale from one team to hundreds of users and that sales cycles can be as short as three months. Lystable has opened a San Francisco office while expecting its core technical team to remain in London. Lystable provides an enterprise platform that centralizes the data companies need to find, manage and evaluate freelancers, agencies and service partners. The product emphasizes user experience and design, led by ex-Google designer and founder Peter Johnston. The company graduated from Techstars London, officially launched in February 2015, and counts ex-Google, Salesforce, Huddle and Onefinestay staff on its product team. Lystable has eight employees based in Clerkenwell, London. The startup has secured seed-stage funding (a total of $2M to date, including a $1.5M round led by Valar Ventures) to accelerate its growth plans and expand the product team. Management says the financing will enable rapid activation of ambitious growth and further depth in engineering and design.

• Tapdaq

  Participated · Series A · Jan 2016

  Tapdaq is a London-based in-app ad platform that helps indie and mid-sized app developers solve app discovery by enabling selective cross-promotion. Its core product is a cross-promotional mobile ad-exchange that uses a virtual currency called ‘daq’ so developers trade ad installs rather than pay cash. The platform is integrated via a free SDK and lets developers choose which apps to promote and customize ads to fit their apps. Tapdaq does not disclose user counts or install metrics but reports well over 100 million unique sessions per month. The company says it aims to become the default inventory management platform for developers and then begin monetizing that inventory. Tapdaq also says new funding will be used to continue building out the platform, and its developer community actively contributes code to evolve the product. Tapdaq operates a community-driven, peer-to-peer mobile ad network that lets users trade a digital currency called 'Daq' instead of money. The platform is designed to lower the costs of acquiring a user by facilitating ad exchanges between developers. When developers sign up the platform awards them 1,000 Daqs to try the service. Tapdaq is led by Ted Nash and is based in London, United Kingdom. The company raised $1.4M and intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and recruit people.

No current team members are available.