It’s been a big month at BACKED HQ - three frontier bets, all pushing AI where it matters most. 🤖 Invisible Technologies raised $100M to make AI actually work in the enterprise. 🚀 Flow Engineering closed a $23M Series A to accelerate how hardware gets built. 🎮 General Intuition launched with a $133M seed - the first frontier research lab for gaming. This is the future being built in real time. At BACKED we believe in backing bold bets. Exceptional founders. Frontier technology. Right from the beginning 🏴.
BACKED VC
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
London, England 14,293 followers
We’re the human-centric VC fund. • Seek the Truth • Plant the Flag • Put People First • Keep your Word •
About us
BACKED is the human-centric venture capital fund. We invest in exceptional founders, at Seed, in Europe. We provide founders with an extensive support system to catalyse their development as a company operators and leaders. Through our Founder Experience Platform and energetic portfolio community we help entrepreneurs across all areas of a startup: from talent management to business development, further fundraising and international expansion. Founded in 2015 by partners Andre de Haes and Alex Brunicki, we invest across sectors including BioTech, Financial Services, Blockchain, Advanced Manufacturing and more. Over 80+ investments to date include Hutch (acquired), Thought Machine, Amenitiz, LabGenius, THIS, Enterprise Alumni, and many more. • Seek the Truth • Plant the Flag • Put People First • Keep your Word •
- Website
-
http://backed.vc/
External link for BACKED VC
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Headquarters
- London, England
- Type
- Partnership
- Founded
- 2015
- Specialties
- Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Investment, Community, Technology, Seed Venture, Early Stage Investing, and Founder Support
Locations
-
Primary
Get directions
6 Cavendish Square
London, England W1G 0PD, GB
Employees at BACKED VC
Updates
-
💥 INVESTMENT ANNOUNCEMENT 💥 At 14 years old, Pim de Witte, built the biggest RuneScape server online. Later, he scaled Medal into the world’s largest game-clipping platform with 1bn videos uploaded every year. 🎮 Now Pim is levelling up again. Now introducing… General Intuition - the research lab pushing gaming AI into new territory. “Truly intelligent machines must move from words to worlds, and acquire the capacity to perceive, anticipate, and improvise. They need to obtain a general intuition of reality.” - $133.7M in seed funding backed by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and The Raine Group. - Designed by a world-class team for builders, dreamers and devs who see the world as one big open world. - Their mission: to build foundation models with deep spatial and temporal reasoning, capable of creating truly intelligent agentic systems. We’re proud to have backed Pim’s ambitions since the early days and look forward to supporting him and his team’s evolution. Medal now welcomes Ken Colton to the helm as CEO. The next generation of intelligence just spawned. Time to power up. #FounderFirst #InvestmentNews #IntelligentMachines Alex Brunicki Andre de Haes
-
-
Introducing… General Intuition - the research lab pushing gaming AI into new territory by multi-time BACKED Founder Pim de Witte. More to come in following post... Start by reading Pim's incredible story below. #FounderFirst
Introducing General Intuition and our $133.7M Seed from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Raine. We build foundation models and general agents for environments that require deep spatial and temporal reasoning. This next frontier in AI requires large scale interaction data, but is severely data constrained. Meanwhile, nearly 1 billion videos are posted to Medal each year. Each of them represents the conclusion of a series of actions and events that players find unique - across tens of thousands of environments. The only other platform of comparable upload scale is YouTube. We’re taking a focused, straight shot at embodied intelligence with a world-class team, supported by a strong core business and leading investors. These clips exist across different physics engines, action spaces, video lengths, and embodiments, with a massive amount of interaction, including adverse and unusual events. In countless environments, this diversity leads to uniquely capable agentic systems. Over the past year, we’ve been pushing the frontier across: Agents capable of deep spatial and temporal reasoning, World models that provide training environments for those agents, and Video understanding with a focus on transfer beyond games. We are founded by researchers and engineers who have a history of pushing the frontier of world modeling and policy learning. We have teams in New York & Geneva, and are also open to hiring in SF & London. Consider joining us on the journey. Starting today, Ken Colton is starting as CEO of Medal. I'm deeply grateful for a wonderful 9 years at the helm of the consumer business, and very excited to be all-in on building General Intuition with this generational team. Consider joining us on the journey. Vinod Khosla Hemant Taneja Quentin Clark Max Rimpel Nicole Fraenkel James Swingos Alex Brunicki Jonathan Tam Henry Gladwyn Kenny Lee Dara Leung
-
BACKED VC reposted this
We’re excited to announce our $23M Series A led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Patrick Collison and John Collison [Stripe] and David Helgason [Unity]. We’re also thrilled to welcome Sequoia’s Managing Partner Roelof Botha to our board. At Flow, our mission is to reinvent the way humanity develops its most important machines. We are building a requirements tool for next generation hardware teams to bring their designs to life faster, safer and simpler than ever before. #systemsengineering #space #defense
-
-
BACKED VC reposted this
It’s time to reveal the final lineup for our side-event at the Engaged Investments Conference on 22 October 🌟 The Female Founders & Investors Aperitivo is kicking off with a panel on “Scaling Funds & Startups – Lessons Learnt and Future Outlook”, featuring: 🔹Camilla Sievers, Partner & Tech Investor at i5growth and member of the Global Board at the Columbia Venture Community. 🔹Paulina Mazurek, Co-founder and CEO of BEIT and Founding Partner at Bitspiration VC. 🔹Sandra Golbreich, General Partner at BSV Ventures and Co-founder of Baltic Sandbox Accelerator. 🔹Lucia Cerchlan, Co-founder of LUMUS Investment Collective and Head of Founder Experience at BACKED VC, acting as moderator. This open conversation between gender-conscious investors and female founders will set the stage for an informal networking cocktail and aperitivo. Together with Rockaway Ventures, and LUMUS Investment Collective, we’re creating a space to pause, connect, and reflect, exploring new collaborations and diving deeper into meaningful discussions about gender-conscious investment. 🎫As a bonus, confirmed participants may qualify for a discounted ticket for the main Engaged Investments Conference. Learn more and sign up 👉 https://lnkd.in/dvdP3DJt
-
-
From designing rocket engines to reimagining how complex hardware is built — Pari Singh is rewriting the operating system for manufacturing with Flow Engineering. 🚀🚀 Alex Brunicki's conviction in Pari has stayed strong over the years and believes “Flow is supporting a revolution in how complex engineering systems are designed… Pari’s vision for the business has remained unchanged since we led Flow’s pre-seed round...and in many ways his ideas were ahead of their time (and head of much of the industry)." Alex goes on to say that although the path to get here was not straightforward and required immense resilience and mission-led zeal which Pari and the team has shown throughout. "Huge credit to Pari for consistently keeping the larger mission in mind." Today, Flow announced their $23M Series A funding. We're delighted to see Sequoia Capital leading the charge, with Roelof Botha coming on board to supercharge Flow's next phase of growth. Read more about how Flow Engineering is enabling humanity to design products faster, simpler, and safer than ever before in Fortune by Allie Garfinkle: https://lnkd.in/ejx_v9QN #hiring - This is your chance to join the incredible team: https://lnkd.in/dvxZPjbw #FounderFirst #SeedtoSeriesA #FundraisingAnnouncement #rocketscience
-
-
Congratulations on the fantastic $23M Series A raise! We first backed Pari Singh and the Flow Engineering team when the idea was little more than a sketch. Now they’ve become the collaboration layer powering some of the world’s most advanced manufacturing teams — from cars to satellites to rockets. Read all about their story below:
We’re thrilled to announce Flow Engineering’s $23M Series A led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Patrick Collison & John Collison [Stripe]. We are also welcoming Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s Managing Partner, to our board. Reusable rockets. Humanoid robots. Self-driving cars. We’ve entered a new era of manufacturing. Humanity is reinventing how it develops hardware. Flow is a next-generation Requirements Platform that helps hardware teams design, build, test, and iterate faster - bringing real-time collaboration, continuous integration and automated testing to hardware development. Companies like Rivian [Auto], Joby [Aero], Astranis [Space] and Radiant [Nuclear] are now building on Flow. In two years, Flow has become the default platform for next-gen hardware companies. That’s just the start. Flow’s mission is to reinvent the way humanity develops its most important machines. This funding will allow us to build out our new HQ in San Francisco, expand our team in London and take the next step in Flow's AI Systems Engineer. We are calling on builders in San Francisco and London. If you want to help reinvent how hardware engineers build the world’s most critical machines, now’s the time. We are hiring across the board in software engineering, forward deployed engineering, sales engineering, talent and open to general applications. (See more in comments.) To Flow’s incredible team - thank you. Your work is reshaping how engineers build. To our earliest believers, Charlie Songhurst, Matt Clifford, Reshma Sohoni, Alex Brunicki, Alastair Mitchell, David Helgason Kyle Parrish - thank you. #systemsengineering #space #defense 🚀
-
#Hiring Mondays: We’re still buzzing from last week’s Founder Exchange - all about AI workflows, human leverage, and how founders are automating the boring bits. Now it’s time to turn that energy into action ⚙️ If you’re building, optimising, or scaling with AI, these roles might just be your next move: ☁️CloudNC — VP, Operations & AI Enablement. Join the team reinventing precision manufacturing with code. [Apply: https://lnkd.in/ev6NeNYc] 🧠 Invisible Technologies — Director of Quality. Powering the future of human + AI collaboration. [Apply: https://lnkd.in/ezaZ--59] 🏦 Thought Machine — Engineering Programme Manager. Help modern banks finally ditch legacy tech. [Apply: https://lnkd.in/e2PAvH-7] Looking for something else? Explore 100+ live roles on our jobs board: https://lnkd.in/d3k36xc. #FrontierTech #AI #FutureofWork #HiringMondays #BackedbyBACKED Getro 🤝
-
PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST 🏴☠️ Meet Sasha Dickinson - newest member of the BACKED Clan! This week, we welcomed Sasha as our new Marketing Associate — and she’s already proving what it means to put people first. Sasha started her career in biology, working in bacterial diagnostics. But somewhere between lab benches and working part-time during her Master’s at Oxford, she realised what truly energised her wasn’t data — it was people. Creating connection. Crafting content. Building community. That intuition brought her to BACKED — drawn to our unparalleled events, capacity for storytelling and founder-facing work that sit at the heart of our brand. And in her first four days she’s already sharing her “get it done” energy by helping to host our Founder AI Exchange with Anthropic and ElevenLabs. She has also repped the fund at a VC Pilates class with Atempo Growth and VC Comms breakfast by Merantix Capital and Cosmyc Partners. Her super power is her positivity with a solution-oriented mindset. At BACKED we aim to live out our values to plant the flag, seek the truth, keep your word and put people first. Sasha’s doing all four already. Like many of the team, her ambitious and competitive spirit is shown outside work too, playing netball to a high level, running, cycling and skiing. “Is it too soon to suggest hitting the slopes for a future Founder Retreat?!” Welcome to the clan, Sasha. 🏴☠️ Andre de Haes, Alex Brunicki, Adena Zecha Wallingford, Clare Hunter, David Linsey, Dominic Barnard, Olivia Moss, Lucia Cerchlan, Tom Hopkins,Yasmin Siraj, Vinay Chaudhri
-
-
What do Nano Banana, Granola, and Sam have in common? They all made an appearance at BACKED’s very first Founder Exchange this week - a hands-on afternoon at our London office diving into the real-world impact of AI on operations, automation, and workflow design. Head of Founder Experience, Lucia Cerchlan - who has been leading the charge at BACKED - brought together an inspiring mix of founders, operators, and AI enthusiasts for: → A live group discussion sharing use cases → Anthropic led a hacking session on automation tools → Fireside chat with ElevenLabs on scaling ops with AI. We heard from Victoria W., who heads up operations and has been key in shaping how the company scaled during a period of hyper-growth, from a team of 10 to 300. From how they evolved from being reactive to proactive, to the shift from "cruise ships" to nimble "speedboats", here are some takeaways from great conversations: 🔧 Let your team ask for AI, not the other way around - Introducing tools when teams feel the need reduces resistance and drives real adoption. 🛥️Small, cross-functional teams win - “Speedboats” with clear accountability beat bloated central “cruiseship” functions every time. 🤖 AI is not a sidecar - It’s already transforming compliance, recruiting, and support, freeing up humans to focus on higher-impact work. A huge thank you to Anthropic and Victoria for sharing their experience so openly, and to all our founders for your energy, honesty, and curiosity throughout the day. Led by Lucia, supported by Alex Brunicki, Adena Zecha Wallingford, Clare Hunter and Sasha Dickinson. 🧠 Keep an eye out for a longer piece – we’re just getting started. P.S. For the eagle eyes amongst you… yes AI still has a way to go with text generation 🤪
-