From venture debt to revenue-based financing and service for equity, there are more and more options for founders to grow their businesses than venture capital.

At Alpha Wolves in London, we were joined by Neville Taraporewalla, President at Brand Capital International, Flavia Richardson, Chief Commercial Officer at Velocity Juice and Johny Clark, Marketing, Sales and BD at Consilience Ventures to talk about alternative funding options for Series A+ startups.

We discussed the following:

Download your free copy of the latest State of Global Media for Growth Report www.mediaforgrowth.co/stateofmediaforgrowth2022

Join Chris Sheldrick, CEO & Co-founder at what3words on a fireside chat with Diana Florescu, mediaforgrowth at Wolves Summit on how to gain a growth edge through partnering with media broadcasters. what3words is backed by ITV AdVentures and Channel4Ventures in the UK, GMPVC in Germany and most recently they raised 10m USD from The Times Group India Brand Capital International to scale their brand in India.

If your startup is fundraising, this event is for you. Learn more about:

Enjoy!

ITV is the UK’s 2nd largest TV broadcaster reaching 34.2m viewers a week (that's nearly 56% of all TV viewers). During the pandemic, the group saw an opportunity in backing direct-to-consumer startups and launched ITV AdVentures, a £15m media for equity annual fund.  

Sheena Amin joined TV in 2022 as Director of ITV AdVentures bringing a wealth of experience across both investing and TV/media.  

She joined us live on Media Capital 🎙️ on Thursday, March 2nd and we talked about: 

📍 her journey and how she started in the world of media,

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DMG Ventures is not your typical consumer VC, nor a traditional “media for equity” fund. Backed by Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), dmg ventures invests typically 50% cash / 50% media-for-equity (with more flexibility for follow-ons). Basically making that cash investment work harder 💪🏻

Together with Manuel, the CEO of dmg ventures, we touched on:

With over fifteen years of experience across investing, operational management, and the wider Daily Mail group, Manuel launched dmg ventures in 2017. Since then, he has deployed over £200m and overseen exits worth in excess of £1.6bn. Before launching dmg ventures, Manuel was Strategy Director at DMGT, having also worked previously at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs.

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TV might be the most popular medium for equity deals, but outdoor and print media owners have also staked a claim. Joining me next on the Media Capital show are JCDecaux's Nurture team - Joe Hills and Connie (Constanze) Zehentmeier.   

Nurture is JCDecaux’s specialised investment programme bridging startups’ advertising and skills gap through match funding and expertise.   

We will touch on the following and much more:  

📍How did Nurture come about?  

📍How does the programme work?  

📍What do you look for in a startup?  

📍Joe’s and Connie’s views on the venture market and  

📍What’s next for Nurture and JCDecaux   

Enjoy!

There are two types of media for equity players, one being leading media companies that leverage their own media directly into targeted investments. 

The other model is independent media funds such as German Media Pool that aggregate media across a number of media groups and platforms to invest in growth companies.  

In this first episode with Niko Marcel Waesche  and Aljoscha Kaplan we covered:

Previous to co-founding German Media Pool, Niko was an executive in the media industry as well as an early pioneer in European venture capital. In media, he had global and European leadership roles including IBM. He was ITV's first media for the equity fund manager and strategy advisor for RTL.

Aljoscha worked in venture capital and as Senior Consultant for Ernst & Young in Washington D.C. and Stuttgart.

GMPVC German Media Pool was set up in 2011 pioneering the independent fund model in Germany. Since then they’ve invested in 38 startups, including category leaders such as ABOUT YOU, Momox, Grover, Sanity Group, and CLARK. The fund employs its own media planning manager, who works closely with the companies to define media strategies and plans across the different media types.  Of German Media Pool’s 38 investments, 17 used more than one media type. Three startups used all four types of media, and two further ones combined three types. The most popular combinations of two media types were television with radio (5 companies) and television with out-of-home (5 companies).