Founders and Funding

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with Michael Bambrick, Partner at Wallace Corporate Counsel and Founder of Fundraising Skool. As a VC lawyer who has worked both sides of the table across pre-seed through Series B, Michael explains why fundraising should be run as a structured business project with clear targets and a fixed deadline, rather than a series of hopeful introductions.

He walks through his proof, find, pitch framework, why most founders start at the pitching stage when two phases should come first, and why mass LinkedIn outreach has become close to worthless. Michael also covers the term sheet mistakes founders make most often, why the highest valuation can work against you, and what actually changes in the evidence investors expect as you move from pre-seed to seed to Series A.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip speaks with Anush Mnatsakanyan, Co-Founder and CEO of Burnwe, a video marketing agency built specifically for tech companies.

Anush shares how she founded the business in Armenia in 2018, landed her first client in Florida, and has grown it to around 450 clients across 46 countries, producing explainer videos, product launches, demos, and advertising for SaaS and AI companies. She explains why Burnwe has been bootstrapped from day one, with revenue from the first month, and how that shaped a slower but more autonomous path to growth.

Anush also talks about why she'd avoid pre-seed funding and wait until a product has real users and feedback, how founder visibility has become one of the most powerful tools for attracting both customers and investors, and why she advises treating an investor like a customer who needs to go a level deeper.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip speaks with Ali Winger, Founder and CEO of Key2Biotics. Key2Biotics helps supplement and food and beverage brands develop probiotic and gut health products, taking them from concept through to shelf, and operates a purpose-built innovation centre in Cork with three labs and a team of scientists.

Ali shares how she left senior leadership in some of the largest global probiotic and supplement companies at the start of 2025 to build the business, and why she structured the funding around a mix of Local Enterprise Office and Enterprise Ireland support, debt, and revenue from day one.

She talks about building three labs from a concrete floor and no ceiling, why getting to a minimal viable lab quickly mattered more than building slowly and perfectly, and what she's learning about storytelling as Key2Biotics moves into its first seed round. They also discuss why perfectionism is a liability in early-stage building, and how the Irish ecosystem has supported the company from week one.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip speaks with Alexandra Butmalai, Co-founder and CEO of amazive. Amazive is an AI software for engineer-to-order manufacturers, currently focused on windows and doors, extracting specifications from architectural plans, sketches, and tender documents and turning them into structured, editable data that feeds straight into production planning. Alexandra explains how a process that can take up to two weeks by hand is cut down to minutes.

She shares why she deliberately bootstrapped amazive after previous companies that raised significant capital, why taking investor money to learn rather than to accelerate leads to poor decisions, and how growing up around her parents' construction and furniture businesses eventually led her back to the industry.

They also discuss choosing complementary skills and shared values in a founding team, why low ego matters more than founders think, and how to put yourself in an investor's shoes before you ever pitch.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with Ayse Guvencer, Founder of ELVT Advisory and Founding Operator at Celestine Materials & Innovation. Ayse works with deep tech and technical founders on go-to-market, positioning, and commercial operations, and shares why the startups she sees most often have excellent technology and the wrong message attached to it.

She explains why Celestine, which turns agricultural waste into usable building materials, is funded through grants rather than VC, and how the funding route available to you often depends more on your sector than your traction. Ayse also walks through her Stack Trace operating system, a layered framework she built to help technical founders diagnose whether their problem is really a GTM issue or something two layers further down. They also discuss the most expensive hiring mistakes technical founders make, and why she advises tailoring your investor deck to the customer rather than the VC.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with Aida Lutaj, Founder and CEO of Legitify, a digital notarisation platform for cross-border transactions.

Aida shares how she and her co-founder built the company after running into the problem themselves during the pandemic, when closed borders and shifting regulation opened the door to remote online notarisation for the first time. She talks about bootstrapping through an accelerator before raising a seed round on the back of real traction and major partnerships, why customer revenue is the most honest form of capital, and the five skills she thinks matter most for founders now.

They also discuss why founders should stop asking how to attract investors and start asking how to become investable, and why you shouldn't raise unless you can articulate exactly what the money will be for.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with James Robson, Founder and CEO of Fund Onion, a UK commercial finance brokerage evolving into an investment bank for small and medium-sized businesses.

James shares the full arc of the business, from a failed comparison platform built on a WordPress site with almost no capital, through a pivot into brokerage, to becoming one of the largest players in unsecured lending for its niche.

He talks about why Fund Onion has never taken debt or equity, how they've reinvested free cash flow at every stage, and why he actively advises certain founders against raising equity at all.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with Mark McCarthy, Founder of How You Doing, a new app built to help people with their mental health and get the help they need. Drawing on seven years of frontline experience with An Garda Síochána, Mark explains why he wanted to bridge the gap between people struggling in silence and the friends and family who would want to help.

He talks about the app's features, including a positive news feed, daily mood journaling, trusted contacts, and links to local therapists and support services. Mark also shares how he self-funded the prototype before partnering with Perfutil Technologies, secured a Local Enterprise Office Feasibility Grant, and took the app from an idea to a live launch on the App Store and Google Play.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with Eoin, Co-founder and CEO of Trace. Eoin shares how a problem he watched his college friends struggle with, burning through AI subscription credits within hours because of inefficient prompting, turned into a company tackling the same issue at enterprise scale.

He talks about bootstrapping Trace alongside a part-time job and a degree at UCC, recruiting his co-founder by physically tracking him down in a Cork shop, and why proving the product first is the right sequence before approaching grants or investors.

They also discuss what he learned from the NDRC pre-accelerator, the value of easygoing conversation over hard selling in the Irish startup scene, and why procrastination is the biggest obstacle most aspiring founders face.

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with Stas Levitan, Founder and CEO of Lightsight AI, a full-stack AI search platform that covers both the technical and analytics sides of winning visibility in AI search. Stas shares the story of bootstrapping Lightsight AI to over 150 clients within its first year, growing almost entirely through referrals and community trust with near-zero marketing spend.

He talks about why he recommends founders avoid chasing funding too early, what he learned watching well-funded startups run fast in the wrong direction, and how getting to know customers deeply was the foundation everything else was built on. They also discuss the skills that matter most for founders today, why go-to-market and brand building have become harder than building the software itself, and why the best way to attract investors is to stop thinking about attracting investors.