Simon Blakey

👀 Hopefully, you've heard by now that we run free fundraising accelerators for seed founders... 👉 What makes this next programme particularly unique is that we teamed up with 4 other organisations - GC Angels, Stronger Stories, Foundervine and Firstport to deliver a brand new initiative called Venture Forward. It combines our decade of experience of running programmes with partners from across the UK to deliver a new initiative, fully funded by Innovate UK, to support a whopping 160 companies in the next 15 months. 🇬🇧 We will deliver these workshops to companies all over the UK, including London, Birminghman, Manchester, & Edinburgh. 🚀 We will also be focusing on under-represented founders (more details in the application form). The programme will consist of fundraising workshops, 1-on-1 mentoring, regional meet-ups, national investor days, centralised resources and an active alumni community. ✅ Applications are now open via ventureforward.co.uk

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When the same people hold the capital, the same kinds of businesses keep getting funded. That’s why today’s 🇬🇧 announcement is such an important shift. The 🇬🇧 UK Government and British Business Bank are committing £500 million to support diverse and emerging fund managers — including £50 million specifically for female-led VC funds through the Invest in Women Taskforce initiative. chaired by Hannah Bernard OBE and Debbie Wosskow, OBE. Diverse investors open the door to diverse founders. Without them, talent and innovation get left behind. The British initiative is more than words — it’s designed to break barriers: helping first-time managers build track records, funding smaller funds, and backing those without inherited wealth or insider access. It’s a concrete, meaningful step. Of course, systemic change takes time — but this is momentum we can build on. At European Women in VC, we’ve been advocating for this and similar action across all of 🌍 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 🇳🇴 Europe, working with our LP and VC network and presenting recommendations to the European Commission and the European Investment Fund (EIF) and thanks to the efforts of champions like Laura González-Estéfani or Shiva Dustdar, supporter by Carlos Moedas and Mariya Gabriel and the hard work of DG GROW there are the first initiatives at VC level in place under InvestEU. We need to also create the private fund of funds layer - so missing in Europe, where pensions are not active VC backers and university endowments are tiny and rarely back VC. The Bootstrap 4F is one such ground-breaking initiative. Kudos to everyone who pushed te BBB game changing project forward - Louis Taylor CBE, Christine Hockley, Caroline English and many others. A more inclusive funding landscape is key to making the UK the best place to launch and grow a business 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 cc Amy Lewin at Sifted - article link in comments

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Sharing a few thoughts on why Thema invested as an LP in Upside VC Fund I, a new consumer fund with built-in distribution, led by Jamie Elliott and Sam Uwins and backed by high profile creator LPs including Sidemen Entertainment We backed the fund as we believe: 1) Scalable and cost-effective distribution within the consumer sector is essential. Upside’s model offers a differentiated route to reduce customer acquisition cost at scale, giving the fund a clear edge. 2) The fund has been built with deep alignment to ensure creator LPs are meaningfully incentivised to contribute to portfolio success. 3) The unique value-add proposition has already translated into several up-rounds, with a longer-term ambition by the team to build a next-generation consumer VC platform. You can read more here: https://lnkd.in/eH4YD8tG

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Search funds as the next new big private asset class after venture capital. Interesting parallels between search funds and venture raised by Rick Buhrman in the podcast he and Paul Buser did w Will Thorndike (author of 'The Outsiders', and search fund pioneer).

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SCOOP: Graphcore CEO to launch deeptech VC fund --- Graphcore founder and CEO Nigel Toon is set to launch a new growth-stage deeptech fund, following a bruising year for the sector in Europe that saw a number of darlings fall by the wayside. Toon, who is still chief at the AI chip maker following its acquisition by SoftBank last year, is launching the vehicle with Ekaterina Almasque, who was previously general partner at Finnish VC OpenOcean, according to Companies House filings. The new fund is called BlankPage Capital, will launch in 2025 and invest at growth stages in the UK and Europe, according to a company website seen by Sifted. A pop-up on the site invites LP investors and deeptech companies to get in touch. While Europe boasts world-leading research institutions, commercialising science-based technology has proved difficult in the region. In 2024, a number of once hyped unicorns, including EV maker Arrival, electric plane startup Lillium and battery company Northvolt all filed for bankruptcy. Full story: https://lnkd.in/e2R86TWv

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🚀 Big news from FirstPartyCapital Today we are proud to announce the launch of FirstPartyFinance, our new solution to help founders access the flexible, non-dilutive capital they need to scale. For too long, innovation in our sector has been held back by slow payment terms and a lack of understanding by traditional financial institutions. FirstPartyFinance aims to change that by connecting ad tech and digital media companies with debt solutions that increase cash flow, fuel growth, and allow founders to maintain more control and ownership of their companies. This marks the third pillar of our support model for adtech businesses: • FirstPartyCapital: direct investment in high-growth companies • FirstPartyStudio: strategic incubation and operational support • FirstPartyFinance: debt financing Delighted to be working with my former FastPay colleague, James Ryall, to launch this new business unit! FirstPartyFinance will serve companies both inside and outside the FPC equity portfolio, and seeks to provide global coverage including the US, UK, Europe, APAC, and Brazil. The goal is simple: Adtech vendors and publishers the liquidity they need to compete and innovate at a time of huge change in the industry. 👉 If you are building in adtech or digital media and want to explore how this can support your growth, we’d love to talk. #AdTech #VC #Innovation #FirstPartyFinance #FirstPartyCapital #FirstPartyStudio #lending #debtfinance

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