Ventures

Greg Cooke, Co-Founder of Rafiki, builds a cross-border payment operating system for fractional workforces using stablecoin infrastructure to solve the currency volatility challenges of managing global talent teams. Originally from Cape Town with a performance marketing background, Greg moved to London where he evolved Rafiki from a freelance marketplace for African software engineers into a comprehensive SaaS platform addressing the fundamental shift from fixed salary workflows to variable payments based on hours, days, or weeks as companies increasingly adopt contingent labor strategies. He identifies the perfect storm driving fractional talent adoption: companies seeking agility and cost-effectiveness, younger generations demanding autonomy, rapid technological change creating demand for niche AI skills, and the 260% increase in large US companies hiring freelancers over the past two years, necessitating new payment infrastructure designed for this new way of work rather than traditional salary-based systems. Rafiki leverages USDC stablecoin infrastructure to enable five-second cross-border payments with minimal fees, building on global adoption signals from Stripe's bridge acquisition, Shopify's crypto integration, and PayPal's 100+ cryptocurrency support, while observing that stablecoins comprise 46% of all cryptocurrency transactions across Africa where mobile payment adoption creates natural blockchain integration pathways. The platform combines payment rails with curated talent access, embedding senior African freelancers and micro-agencies (70% South African-based) directly into the OS to create a "one-stop shop for talent requirements including invoicing, payments, and compliance," functioning like a curated Fiverr with integrated payment infrastructure rather than offline transaction handling. Greg raises a £500K pre-seed round at £2.5M valuation supported by Baobab Network (Africa-UK corridor expertise), JobTech Alliance (equity-free grant focused on job creation), and CV Labs (Web3 guidance), while building toward V2 invoicing logic and Slack/WhatsApp integrations that enable billing workflows through familiar chat interfaces, expanding from the UK-Africa corridor toward US-LATAM markets leveraging similar cross-border hiring arbitrage opportunities.

Alina Croitoru, Founder of Inner On, builds a social operating system that eliminates media and content to create genuine one-on-one connections addressing the global loneliness epidemic affecting two billion people worldwide. Describing herself as a "nine lives cat with Labrador instincts," she transitioned from being a unicorn operator across seven countries to founding Inner On after becoming obsessed with solving authentic human connection in an age of tech fatigue and social media burnout. Alina identifies the core problem as social media's ad revenue model that rewires attention spans through fake dopamine hits and parasocial relationships, while everything has become performative marketing platforms that erode trust and genuine friendships, leaving people unable to connect authentically despite constant digital exposure. Inner On functions as a matchmaking platform powered by social science rather than dating algorithms, using AI to facilitate better conversations around taboo topics while connecting users with perfect matches for their current life phase, whether seeking emotional support, habit formation, or friendship development through shared goals and practices. Moving strategically to London five months ago (partly inspired by childhood Harry Potter dreams), Alina targets the UK's 46% declared loneliness rate, recognizing this likely underrepresents actual isolation in a culture that avoids directness, while building toward practical wellbeing systems that move beyond online conversations to real-world habit formation and support networks. She observes the UK ecosystem favors traditional B2B models over consumer tech innovation compared to US markets, requiring patience as an outsider, though she's found meaningful connections through 100+ networking events using her three-genuine-connection strategy, particularly valuing one-on-one coffee meetings over large gatherings. Alina positions Inner On as building the future for Gen Z who increasingly reject social media by purchasing phones without app access, creating an anonymous, ad-free platform focused on uplifting people through systematic support networks that adapt as individuals evolve their definition of success across different life phases, from current business building to potential future farming or poetry performance.

Tania Ladanova, CEO of TRMNL4, leads the global consumer tech acceleration platform that emerged as a spin-off, positioning TRMNL4 as "YC for consumer" by leveraging partnerships with Meta, Snapchat, and major consumer brands. Tania identifies 2024's dramatic shift where only 6% of venture capital went to consumer tech, but AI-native products are creating a renaissance because technology finally enables human-like conversations rather than forcing users to learn machine language through keywords and filters, resulting in B2C startups achieving $4M ARR compared to B2B's $2M in equivalent timeframes. She emphasizes the platform shift from content to context, where successful consumer products function as "motivational engines" like Duolingo, requiring companies to build community-first approaches that create emotional connections rather than just features, citing examples like Zook (AI bedtime stories mixing family rituals with Paramount/Netflix content) and Valerie (menopause supplements with strong women's community education). TRMNL4 discovers startups through word-of-mouth alumni networks, VC partnerships who refer profitable-but-not-yet-fundable companies, and ecosystem exchanges where they trade B2B referrals for B2C recommendations, while observing founders increasingly launch through viral TikTok campaigns and building public communities before product launch. Tania notes European talent density advantages in Berlin's fintech boom and predicts Eastern European consumer comebacks from regions that produced Grammarly and Vault, though founders need to overcome cultural shyness around personal branding compared to Western counterparts who embrace pitching and self-promotion. She sees modern B2C startups reaching profitability faster through organic growth rather than requiring massive marketing rounds, making investors compete on value-add beyond capital through expert networks, corporate partnerships, and growth blueprints, while TRMNL4's three-month virtual program connects 25% US participants with 100+ consumer experts across case studies, one-on-ones, and peer exchange sessions powered by a young, high-energy team that maintains "excited and exhausted" operational intensity.

Matthias Rossini, Co-founder of Avlana, builds AI-powered post-production tools that evolved from automated footage labeling and sorting for major brands to become "a remote editor in your messenger" where creators send raw footage and receive ready-to-post videos without touching editing software.

After spending July in San Francisco's Bay Area meeting founders and investors, Matthias experienced the energy deceleration returning to Europe, noting SF's unique serendipity where "I walk to a random Blue Bottle and will meet a VC and a founder" - something unavailable elsewhere globally. This culture shock prompted his team to seek European energy equivalents, leading them to Project Lovable in Stockholm after seeing Harry Stebbing's posts, where they pivoted from their planned video pre-production agent to tackle an "unreasonable" problem: building an agent that works while you sleep.

Their hackathon project aimed to create voice-controlled task automation for complex workflows like event management, where an agent could research venues, gather quotes, and handle follow-ups across time zones while founders sleep, using tools they built including Google Maps scrapers, web scrapers, and email automation.

Despite building four functional tools within 20 hours, Matthias admits they underestimated open-source limitations and lacked genuine excitement for event management compared to video - a key learning that passion for the problem space dramatically affects product development energy and demo quality.

The experience reinforced their focus on video post-production agents while teaching them to build within their expertise rather than exploring tangential areas, as they prepare to continue selective hackathon participation only when exploring new technical boundaries rather than treating them as regular team activities, recognising that connecting with builders matters more than expanding VC networks during their current non-fundraising phase.

Aaron Jones, Founder of Yepic AI, pioneers empathy-driven avatars that transform digital interfaces by enabling real-time human-like interactions through video and voice technology designed to create meaningful connections rather than just providing answers. Coming from a diverse background spanning social enterprise work in Cambodia, visual search company development (C-Fashion), and media production for MTV and the God Channel, Aaron positions empathy as the essential foundation for human communication, believing that knowledge without connection renders even quantum physics expertise powerless. His journey began at Founders Factory as Project Lucas, where his team built the world's first diffusion model (predating stable diffusion) and became the first company globally to create talking photos and real-time avatar conversations, though they learned painful lessons about the necessity of raising capital when competitors with venture backing and 100+ engineers repeatedly outmaneuvered their technical breakthroughs. Aaron explains Yepic's evolution from patent-focused IP protection to building killer products that integrate best-in-class third-party APIs from Traverse, Hedra, and others, recognizing that model-building has become a race to the bottom dominated by ByteDance and Google, while their competitive advantage lies in real-time optimization requiring sub-500 millisecond response times and specialized GPU infrastructure planning. After bringing the company back from near-bankruptcy with CTO Mark, they've grown from zero to £2.5 million ARR with just seven people, while working on major projects including Somalia's national elections and partnering with Good Omen team members Marco and Geo through hackathon collaborations that validate future product directions. Aaron envisions avatars that interact with their environments, pick up objects, and respond to both camera feeds and their artificial worlds, positioning Yepic to lead the convergence of gaming engines and generative AI through world simulation technology that will enable personalized film narratives and fully avatar-presented live events, while maintaining his Sunday research paper routine to stay ahead of developments like Stable Avatar for temporal consistency and keyframe editing innovations that eliminate the soul-destroying creative flow interruptions plaguing current video generation platforms.

Dec McLaughlin, Founding Partner of Foras Ventures, builds the UK's first community-to-fund venture platform by leveraging three years of international founder programs across SF, New York, Austin, and Europe to create genuine global-first mindset adoption for ambitious UK startups. Starting as a "joke on a Slack channel" during his Startup Grind Scotland leadership days, Foras emerged when Scottish Government's ecosystem fund offered £50K maximum grants, leading Dec and co-founder Carol to take 20 founders to Silicon Valley's Startup Grind Global instead of running traditional pizza-and-beer events. The name "Foras" derives from Gaelic, meaning "to travel together as a group on a voyage," symbolising their focus on collective international expansion and overcoming the dangerous "local maximum" trap where Scottish founders (5.5 million population) get caught building only for their home market rather than thinking globally from day one.

Dec positions Estonia as the European gold standard, citing their 10-11 unicorns from just 1.1 million people, driven by the Skype mafia's successful wealth recycling loop where founder exits created family offices that reinvest locally, plus a shared cultural mission of digital-first governance and ecosystem accountability that prevents bad investor behavior through reputation consequences.

Foras addresses systemic UK problems where founders receive unfavorable early-stage terms that create continuous fundraising loops rather than milestone achievement, while building toward a £20 million fund through three phases: immediate membership launch with 15,000+ network beta testing, SPV bridge deals for reputation building, and eventual fund leadership focused on founder-friendly terms, employee option pools, and supporting companies across health tech, climate tech, and deep tech verticals through university partnerships with Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Heriot-Watt, and Strathclyde.

HERE WE GO: TODAY ON VENTURES 🚀: 9 Guests, 5 hours, 1 don't miss streamThe docket is locked, loaded and it's a fun one!We're moving to a new day, so Europe can experience the best of the Renaissance across the week.5 hours of streaming, bringing you the latest on what is happening in the landscape of technology & Business.From Building a Fund 1 to a £950,000 Pre-seed raiseEUROPE IS ON FIRE 🔥Where else are you going to find this 🤷‍♂️00:00:00 - Introduction and episode overview00:16:00 - Dec McLaughlin on Forest Ventures and European ecosystem00:48:00 - Aaron Jones on YEPIC AI and empathetic avatars01:26:00 - Matthias Rossini on Project Lovable hackathon experience01:57:00 - Tania Ladanova on TRMNL4and consumer tech resurgence02:31:00 - Alina on inner on: alive and social connection02:56:00 - Greg Cooke on Rafiki and fractional talent03:34:00 - Josh Tulloch on Plugged and community building04:00:00 - Linda Hong Cheng on ethical AI infrastructure04:21:00 - Mark Costello on Meshed and insurance innovation04:45:00 - Closing thoughts and wrap-upJump in the chatFeed us your thoughts & questions before & during - It's LIVE.Send in pics of where you're watching VENTURES 🚀 - most outrageous gets a prize.Follow us on YouTube & LinkedIn to watchDM - if you want to appear on the show or sponsor/partnerToday @ 11:30LFG 🚀 🔥 🚀

Sasha Cayward, MSc., transforms venture capital by addressing the systemic psychological neglect of founders who receive massive funding without emotional support infrastructure. Coming from a background in competitive tennis, psychology, neuroscience, and religion at LSE, she transitioned through founding her own company via Techstars before recognizing that founders lack adequate psychological support despite carrying enormous pressure and responsibility. Sasha identifies the "tech bro culture" as a manifestation of toxic masculinity inherited from Wall Street models (Wolf of Wall Street, Gordon Gekko) that rewards aggressive, emotionally unintelligent behavior while prioritizing technical skills over people skills, creating a chicken-and-egg scenario where the VC system breeds founders who fit this destructive mold to achieve 10x returns. She argues it's unethical to give founders substantial funding (£800K-£5M) without psychological support, comparing it to lottery winners where 85-90% go broke within five years due to identity displacement, relationship changes, and overwhelming responsibility they've never experienced. Using the Big Five personality framework (neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion), Sasha advocates for psychometric testing during due diligence to assess founder psychology alongside company metrics, recognizing that founders need controlled "craziness" with high neuroticism balanced by other healthy traits. She positions entrepreneurship as the ultimate spiritual journey that surfaces all psychological shadows, traumas, and fears (rejection, visibility, inadequacy), requiring founders to develop self-worth and nervous system regulation while building support systems through coaches, therapists, and peer communities. Sasha draws parallels to professional athletes like Carlos Alcaraz who transformed from emotional volatility to psychological stability through coaching, emphasizing that founder psychology represents a transition from individual sport (pre-revenue) to team sport (scaling) that requires both founder and VC psychological development to create genuinely symbiotic relationships based on mutual accountability rather than traditional power dynamics.

Luke, Head of Brain Rot at Bigged, talks to us about startup marketing by spending hours "doomscrolling" across multiple phones to decode algorithm patterns, transforming viral format discovery into a systematic process that generates inbound leads with just two touchpoints. Starting as a summer intern recruited via LinkedIn DM while on holiday in the Lake District, he builds fresh algorithms using new accounts and emails, then scrolls for two hours with dimmed screens while watching films to train platforms before cataloguing 100+ successful formats in Excel spreadsheets. Luke explains his unconventional title stems from understanding platform culture rather than traditional marketing theory, positioning himself as someone who studies what audiences actually see versus what marketers think they should create. His breakthrough insight involves "packaging over content" demonstrating how an AI doctor account went viral in seven days by perfecting format rather than originality, emphasising that three-second hooks determine whether high-effort content succeeds or fails with just 20 likes. Luke's 30-day LinkedIn chicken wing series (featuring lab coats and goggles while eating increasingly spicy wings) exemplifies his philosophy of taking proven formats from other industries and applying them with 3% originality, creating "motion over indifference" that generates conversations with major DTC brands and elite companies. He advocates for speed and scale over perfection, wanting to hire five content creators producing three pieces daily to discover viral formats, while building integrated organic-paid flywheels where Facebook ad performance informs content strategy. Luke positions algorithms as the new marketing education system, requiring teams to have dedicated scrollers spending minimum 30 minutes daily studying culture shifts, since insights become irrelevant within days on platforms like TikTok, ultimately believing that successful marketing combines scrappy execution with systematic format analysis rather than traditional brand aesthetics until companies reach scale.

Jakub Nowacki, CTO and Co-founder of Nusmark, builds an agentic AI assistant that transforms personal productivity by combining multiple specialised components into a seamless 24/7 digital secretary accessible in whatsapp. Starting his coding journey at nine years old creating video games and building AI opponents when friends chose basketball over programming, Jakub mentored over 100 students at university, won the AI Summit London twice (first person to achieve this), and left corporate aerospace after discovering the bureaucratic inefficiencies of requiring forms to send emails. He explains agents as infrastructure around LLM "brains" that provide tools and execute actions in loops, using Gemini for its massive context window and Google TPU speed advantages while building modular systems that can swap models instantly based on performance benchmarks. Jakub reveals Nusmark's sophisticated architecture featuring custom thinking layers, parallel/sequential processing for reduced latency, and RAG-based tool selection to handle future MCP server ecosystems, while implementing both short-term memory (stored in context) and long-term memory (extracted patterns from months of conversations). Their breakthrough phone calling feature uses speech-to-text, LLM processing, and text-to-speech components to book NHS appointments and restaurant reservations, with users questioning whether real humans are involved, while building toward agent-to-agent token-based communication that bypasses human language inefficiencies. Jakub positions Nusmark as the "super connector" that integrates across competing platforms (Meta, Google, Apple) where individual companies cannot due to competitive barriers, offering proactive capabilities like following up on delayed callbacks and scheduling meetings between users' agents that negotiate optimal times based on preferences like avoiding dinner conflicts and maintaining buffer zones around internal meetings, ultimately creating a mobile-first calendar experience designed specifically for touch interfaces rather than desktop-to-mobile ports.