In this edition, we are focusing on two exciting events that took place on the LBS campus that brought in some HODLing participants and speakers, as well as hackers and builders from across London, providing a quick snapshot of the rich and dynamic ecosystem at LBS supporting web3 entrepreneurs and hackers alike in case you missed attending these events! Now put your FUD aside and dig in.

LBS Blockchain Summit 23’ (Jan 19 - Jan 21)

The London Business School Blockchain Society’s mission is to make web3 accessible to all. The community is one of the most passionate and enthusiastic on campus, with each talk having a litany of IRL audience questions. This year’s event was sponsored by the BCB Group, NEAR Foundation and a16 Crypto. To give a quick summary:

This year’s blockchain summit peaked some astounding milestones:

• 330 Attendees

• 42 Speakers

• 6 Panel/Speaker events

• Bootcamp and Hackathon led by the NEAR Foundation

There were many interesting discussions covered, from regulation and CBDCs to the web3 startup and VC ecosystem. 

Some notable speakers that attended included Marieke Flament (CEO of the NEAR Foundation and LBS Alumna), Thomas Doyle (Coinbase, Head of Hedge Fund Sales EMEA). Daniël Rood (Google Cloud, Head of Web3), Tyrone Lobban (J.P. Morgan, Head of Blockchain Launch), Amit Chaudhary (Polygon, Head of DeFi Research), Dr. Bernhard Kronfellner (Boston Consulting Group, Partner & Associate Director).

In addition to these, the highlight of the event was the LBS Web 3 startups showcase where each company pitched their company/product to the crowd. Congratulations to all those who featured (including our very own Grace from the LBS EClub):

• Fyde Treasury, presented by Behrin Naidoo, Bo Zhang, and Carlos Noe Saavedra

• HashSafe, presented by Park Yeung

• Popp, presented by James Cochrane-Dyet and Sam Dhesi

• Kiln, presented by Thomas de Phuoc

• Unlonely, presented by Grace Guan

• Martian Wallet, presented by Abhinav Bhardwaj

• Meta Lordz, presented by Dan Bronstein

• WyzePay, presented by Anya Markitanova

• Unagi, presented by Remi Pellerin

Here’s a spotlight of three of the companies showcased:

1.Ultimate Champions by Unagi

Ultimate Champions is an entirely free-to-play fantasy football game with officially licensed digital cards hosted as NFTs on the blockchain. Charlie & Remi, the founders of Ultimate Champions have 7 years experience co-managing a game studio at Ubisoft. They grew their team from 35 to 120 employees, managed highly profitable F2P community-based web games and launched new F2P mobile games with multi-million dollar marketing budgets. Unagi has been gaining some impressive traction with over 140K NFT packs sold with a 5.3% conversion rate and over $1.3M revenues in the past 5 months.

2. Kiln

Kiln is a staking platform you can use to stake directly, or whitelabel your staking product. In case you are wondering what staking is - Staking is a way to secure a blockchain by proposing new blocks or attesting to other validator’s blocks to earn rewards in the form of coins or tokens. Founded by Laszlo Sabo, Ernest Oppetit and Thomas de Phuoc, the team at Kiln believes that staking is the closest thing we can get to a blockchain network’s “risk-free rate” and that as the crypto economy matures, more long term investors would be attracted to this native form of yield for their PoS (Proof of Stake) assets. Kiln supports a wide range of institutional customers such as custodians, wallets, exchanges, market makers, funds, banks and anyone dealing with cryptocurrencies. Their customers include the likes of Ledger, Flowdesk, Binance US and Lido.

3. Martian Wallet

Martian Wallet is a self custodial wallet to store and transfer your NFTs and Crypto in a safe and secure manner. The importance of self custody has become even more relevant with the new slogan of the cryptoverse: “Not your Keys, Not your Coins”. It is currently available on Chrome but soon to be launched on iOS and Android Play Store. Co-Founded by Utkarsh Sinha and Siddharth Jain, Martian Wallet is currently in the Aptos and Sui ecosystem - new layer 1 projects that seek to solve the scalability, safety and decentralization challenges. 

HackLBS 23’ (Jan27th - Jan 29)

Next up we have HackLBS, a flagship hackathon hosted by the LBS Entrepreneurship Club bringing together aspiring entrepreneurs, coders and designers and enabling them to put on their ideation hats to create exciting products. HackLBS was open to all with different themes and cash prizes totalling to £3000. 

There were 80 individuals creating 18 teams from across the UK. This year’s themes were:

• Improving Thyself: How can we use technology to make or break habits?

• Improving the Planet: How can we use technology to reduce food and product waste?

• Hacker’s Paradise: Open challenge - solve anything that bugs you.

This event was powered by the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital and our wonderful alum Nigel Morris and Lori Morris alongside BCG X. All the participants and teams came through with superb pitches with a final showcase where the finalists pitched their ideas in front of a stellar judge panel which included: Matthew Sinclair, Jeffrey Eneberi, Sid Singh, Nitish Malhotra, Rupal Patel, Jeff Skinner, Matthew Brooke-Hitching, Osman Haneef, Amanda Hultman, Elisabetta Zaccaria, and Max Comfort. 

A special shout out to LBS alum and founder of Days, for supplying our hackers with Days’ alcohol-free beer.

Winners of HackLBS 23’:

• Mongo [Improving Thyself]: An app that helps young people develop financial literacy through stimulating techniques
  (Yvette Yu, Alisha Chowdhury, Shantanu Pasari, Sofia Zubiria, Samuel Ajayi)

• Serve Circular [Improving the Planet]: A software that helps restaurants reduce food wastage and costs through optimisation of order quantity, promotion recommendations and menu engineering

  (Kushal Kundanmal, Ken Dobson, Rick van der Linden, Ignacio Pascale)

• SquadGoals [Hacker’s Paradise]: Helping communities participate in goals to change habits through a buy in while rewarding the winners with a pot of earnings
  (Jacquie Harvey, Nicola Gubb, Krishna Kanneganti)

Spotlight on Mongo - Winner of Hacker’s Paradise

Mongo is a product that plays on a rising trend - for young people to gain knowledge outside the typical search ecosystem or traditional means. Over 46% of Gen Z is on TikTok and a growing number of them have been using Tiktok for educational content. The Mongo team was able to tap into this effect and even launched a real Tik Tok page that had hundreds of interactions during a short span of 24 hours. In their pitch, Mongo demonstrated a prototype that gamified the learning experience through rewards or Mongos that you can earn through a customized, highly interactive experience and differentiated among the various elements of attention that capture and influence Gen Z behavior.

Congratulations to the winners, we hope that you bring these products to market soon! While this month has been busy we have a lot to look forward to with the LBS Launchpad 23’ Cohort being selected and gearing up for the program.

Follow the Launchpad page for more details, and watch out for our next edition! Until then, get some sun and enjoy the additional 83 mins of sunlight :)

Thanks for reading, see you next month! Do you have any comments or feedback? Get in Touch!

💡Synativ is the generative AI platform for computer vision teams to create data to train their models, co-founded by Andrew Kanapatski (MBA 2023)

💡Otto Finance is a B2B2C financial health platform for employees that democratizes access to wealth management services through an optimal mix of human expertise and technology, co-founded by Jan Erwin Thomas (MBA 2017)

Let’s jump right into it!

💡The Spotlight

🚀Synativ - Andrew Kanapatski, MBA 2023

Two co-founders walk into a bar… Almost. 

In reality, Andrew and Tom connect over a whitepaper on Telegram, they meet, engage, decide to work together for a month, and create a solution to use generative AI to generate missing images and fill the gaps in datasets - Synativ. 

So, let’s understand the problem they’re looking to solve…

The Problem & How Synativ Solves It

Engineers at companies around the world are constantly struggling with a lack of cohesive data with which to train their models.
Think about Tesla trying to build an algorithm for its Autopilot to spot kittens or foxes at night on the streets of London - they would need a wide variety of images of different animals under different lighting conditions. How can they get these images? Well, either they dispatch a team for a nightly hunt, or they use Synativ.
Synativ uses generative AI to quickly expand a dataset of images and adapt it to different lighting/ weather conditions, allowing companies to build comprehensive training sets and develop models that perform under all use cases. 

More on Andrew & Tom

With a background in enterprise sales, convincing decision makers to pull the trigger on digital transformation, Andrew Kanapatski has had no shortage of experience in the realm of AI and digitization. As Head of Growth at Kira Systems, an AI legal-tech start-up, he built their first strategy practice and commercialization strategy for new products, taking them from Series A funding all the way to acquisition. 

When Andrew met his co-founder, Tom Bruls, a PhD from Oxford in Computer Vision & AI, they connected on Tom’s whitepaper on using generative AI to solve dataset gaps and thus, Synativ was born. In Andrew’s words, they are both in the business of building a “category-defining company” and the world is very much their oyster. 

What’s next for Synativ?

After being selected for the inaugural cohort of Sequoia’s exclusive Arc program, the possibilities are infinite. With the support of investors and mentors as well as incredible market activity in generative AI (read about DALL-E-2 and Stable Diffusion if interested), Andrew believes the next 12 months will be dedicated to building out a world-class team, gaining customers across industries with a budding focus on computer vision, and developing a strong product, iteration after iteration. 

Learning from Seqouia’s focus on reflection and personal development, this team sees the next year as not only one to grow the business, but to grow the personal side of the founding team alongside it - for true founder + product market fit. In Andrew’s words - and a useful nugget for all aspiring founders out there - there is nothing more important than determining: “Are you the right team addressing the right problem to build a category defining solution?

🚀Otto Finance - Jan Erwin Thomas, MBA 2017

It's as if putting in the hours at a big tech job wasn't enough - once you build wealth, you need to figure out how to invest or save for the future - something that most employees struggle with, as Jan Erwin Thomas - Co-Founder of Otto Finance points out.

Sliding into the market as the equivalent of the Tesla Autopilot for your financial life, Otto Finance has already made heavy inroads with white-collar workers in the tech industry.

More on Jan's background

Jan was a consultant at Bain & Company before his MBA at LBS. Post-MBA, he had a stint at Morgan Stanley before joining Raisin, a Berlin-based Fintech in the savings and investments space. Not a stranger to taking a fintech business from zero to one, he established Raisin's UK and Ireland business during its rocketship growth journey to unicorn status and successful exit to Deposit Solutions in June 2021.

While most of us were watching cartoons, Jan started investing at 12 and was always the go-to person for any investment advice, even today. When he and his Co-Founder - Madi, an MBA from INSEAD and ex-BCG and Fidelity employee - started thinking about helping friends in their circle with investment advice, the lack of a hub for such decisions helped conceive the idea for Otto.

How does Otto Finance work?

Otto aims to address the underserved gap between exclusive wealth management services by traditional financial institutions and the day-to-day spending management tools offered by app-based solutions like Nutmeg or Monzo.
Otto is initially targeted at white collar tech workers, who tends to be early adopters of new tools to help generate wealth and increase personal productivity. Also, their employers are keen to ensure that financial worries don't create additional mental health burdens on their employees.

Otto Finance has used technology and behavioural science to influence its product decisions. It aims to create a go-to place for all its customers' financial holdings, enabling them to gear up for the critical financial decisions to retire, buy a home, plan for a family, or live within their means in uncertain times.

What lies ahead?

Graduating from the inaugural class of the 17 startups from the Sequoia Arc program announced earlier in June, the highly technical team at Otto has been relentlessly iterating on feedback from early users. Their goal: a best-in-class product to make financial wealth management the next ubiquitous employee benefit.

📈LBS Ventures Funding Recap

Between the funding winter in October and November, 20 startups co-founded by LBS students and alumni have announced a collective $500m in rounds ranging from Pre-Seed to Growth. These startups come from the US, EMEA, China, and MENA. Talk about LBS’ global footprint 🌍
Let’s review some of these rounds together:

• Safely, a provider of insurance services intended to serve the vacation rental industry raised a $12m Late Stage led by Greenlight Capital Re, Highgate Technology Ventures and Lago Innovation Fund. 👏 Andrew Bate

• Benivo, an employee relocation management and support platform, intended to offer relocation assistance on a budget by reducing costs raised $12 Mn in Late Stage led by Update Partners. 👏 Kailash Tomar

• Lokky, Developer of a digital platform intended to offer tailored insurance products raised $3m from Azimut Libera Impresa. 👏 Sauro Mostarda

🌟Our Team Expands!

For this year, the LBS Venture Spotlight can rely on two superstar new joiners.

Dhruv Tandon is an MBA 2024 at LBS, and an experienced product manager with 5+ years of experience under his belt, including jobs at Indian Fintech unicorn Razorpay and SF based Drip Capital (YC S15).

Ayesha Forbes is an exchange student and Dean Fellowship recipient from MIT Sloan. She has 5+ years of experience in IB across New York and London, after which she worked in VC as a principal at Hiro Capital, before pivoting into strategy at BCG London.

Thanks for reading, see you next month! Do you have any comments or feedback? Get in Touch!

What better way to start than to spotlight two great founders and innovations in the world of online communities and social networks, or as it’s known in VC land, the creator economy:

💡Superlinked, a B2B SaaS providing an ML-powered social recommendation engine to help brands deliver relevant and engaging social experiences, co-founded by Ben Gutkovich (MBA 2013)

💡Unlonely.app, a web3 live-streaming platform that revolutionizes creator monetization, audience engagement, and content moderation, founded by our very own eClub co-president Grace Guan (MBA 2023)

But first, let’s look at some of the LBS Ventures which raised funding during the last months!

📈LBS Ventures Funding Recap

Between June and September in the midst of macroeconomic turmoil and a tough fundraising landscape, ca. 40 startups co-founded by LBS students and alumni have raised a collective $500m in rounds ranging from Pre-Seed to Growth. These startups come from the US, EMEA, India, and MENA. Talk about LBS’ global footprint 🌍
Let’s review some of these rounds together:

• Centivo, a US provider of self-funded health plans for employers to provide affordable, high-quality healthcare to employees, raised a $81m Series B1 led by Maverick Ventures and B Capital Group, with followers including Alumni Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Eight Roads, and F-Prime. 👏 Alan Cohen

• GrowthSpace, an Israeli online coaching platform providing personalized learning and development to enterprise employees, raised a $25m Series B led by Zeev Ventures, and followed by M12 and Vertex Ventures. 👏 Dan Terner

• Jify, an Indian fintech platform designed to build financial resilience by providing employees access to their earnings in real-time raised a $10 million Series A from Accel and Nexus Venture Partners. 👏 Anisha Aibara

• Tamara, a Saudi BNPL platform for e-commerce, raised a $100 million Series B led by Checkout.com & Sanabil Investments, with followers including Endeavor Catalyst and Coatue Management. 👏 Abdulmohsen Albabtain

We cannot close the section without an honorable mention for 3 startups admitted to the most coveted accelerators in the world, Y Combinator and Sequoia Arc:

💡Founder Spotlights - Reshaping Online Communities

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past 10+ years, you would have witnessed the rise of social networks and the societal transformation they have created. And as social networking behemoths have become part of our daily routine, many have started to resent how these platforms feel less and less “authentic”, alienating and sometimes downright toxic (remember the Facebook papers, anyone?). Moreover, creators who made these communities their full-time job have started recognizing that they are not appropriately compensated or prioritized by these tech giants.

This shift towards social platforms offering more genuine, rewarding interactions and fairer monetization opportunities for creators is on the rise, and the two LBS entrepreneurs in this month’s spotlight are riding this wave of transformation.
Let’s dive in!

Superlinked - Ben Gutkovich, MBA 2013

Superlinked is a B2B SaaS providing an ML-powered social recommendation engine to help brands deliver relevant and engaging social experiences

Ben has always been passionate about driving technology innovation. After starting as a software engineer in the Israeli Defense Forces, he founded his first startup to automate stock trading for asset managers, where he managed to raise 2 investment rounds and helped clients outperform the benchmark by 50% over 3 years. Eventually, the technology proved too early for its time, and Ben joined Orange, becoming Head of Product Management in the Innovation and Strategy department, and - after his MBA at London Business School - moved to consulting at McKinsey and Strategy&. However, as Ben put it, the entrepreneurial bug bit again, and in 2020 he began looking for a new problem to solve.

Things took a turn when Ben met Daniel, an ex-Google engineer who had worked for 7-years on the Machine Learning models for optimizing the matching of ads to users on YouTube. Ben and Daniel shared the excitement about the move away from big, monolithic communities towards smaller, fit-for-purpose social platforms that offer fairer monetization opportunities for creators (e.g., Mighty Networks, Patreon). However, as they looked into the space, they realized that the communities built on these platforms offer limited personalization options for their members and - as they scale beyond the scope of manual interventions to 10,000+ members - they start experiencing low engagement and significant churn.

Enter Superlinked. Superlinked uses scalable Machine Learning models to understand real-time user behavior within a social product and suggest content and connections that are most relevant for each user, increasing engagement by 2-3x.

The platform quickly gained traction and collected its first success stories.
When CoFoundersLab, a global community of 500,000 entrepreneurs, piloted Superlinked in San Francisco to recommend relevant co-founders to community members, 27% of those who participated in the trial made valuable connections. The Stage, an initiative linking startups with 1,000 investors through a demo-day, used Superlinked to automatically connect members for highly relevant 1:1 introduction, The Stage achieved a 70% sign-up rate in the first month.

Like what you read? Get in touch with Ben on LinkedIn or via email.

Unlonely.app - Grace Guan, MBA 2023

Unlonely.app is a web3 live-streaming platform that revolutionizes creator monetization, audience engagement, and content moderation

If you feel that the very social platforms that were supposed to connect us have instead made us lonelier, I would completely agree with you. But while you and I were googling “How to stop mindless scrolling”, Grace Guan and her brother Brian were thinking about how to solve this problem, powered by the conviction that the novel paradigms of Web3 could be used to overcome the key issues plaguing today’s social networks: audience engagement, creator monetization, and content moderation.

Grace and Brian have deep experience in both social networks and Web3.
Grace spent 5 years at Google, the majority of which she was at YouTube building partnerships with creators, where she grew passionate about their ability to drive connection and aware of the impact centralized platforms have on creator’s livelihoods. After Google, she began to learn about web3 solutions, leading marketing & community at Common Protocol (decentralized governance platform) and completed her plunge into Web3 with an MBA internship at Fabric Ventures.

Brian is the developer in the team, and after graduating in Applied Math and Chemical Engineering from UCLA, he started working at a biotech startup where he rose in the ranks to CTO. He was then recruited as a Founding Engineer at Mem Protocol, a startup building Web3 tools for social networking aimed at restoring users’ control over their data that raised $3.1m from the biggest crypto investors in Silicon Valley - Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Six months ago, Grace and Brian decided to join forces to build Unlonely.app, a Web3 live-streaming platform for decentralized communities. Launched in closed beta in August, Unlonely.app is already seeing 150+ hours of content viewed each week from their early adopters and 400 chats sent on average per daily stream.

Now, the siblings are preparing for their next milestone: the launch of their native token, which will allow them to unlock the power of their decentralized community. The token will feature a 2.5% take-rate (i.e., the platform’s share of creator’s earnings) at a time when their Web2 counterpart, Twitch, has just increased its cut from 30% to 50%, and enable a purely community-based approach to content moderation decisions. Finally, the token will be used to reward the most active members of the community, allowing us to stop our mindless scrolling and become Unlonely. Reach out to Grace on LinkedIn and follow Unlonely’s journey (and their daily stream times) on Twitter!

🚀Big news for the LBS eClub!

The start of the new academic year brings big changes in the LBS eClub.
First, congratulations are in order for our new Co-Presidents Courtney, Grace, Noemi, and Ria!

Also, Ankush - who was co-editor of the newsletter last year - has started a new role as VP in the VC Relations team, and big plans are brewing to connect LBS founders to the VC ecosystem. Finally, Rishad is the new superstar host of the new season of the eClub podcast. He’s building an amazing pipeline of founders and investors to interview, and in the eClub we are as excited to hear this season as we are for the release of House of Dragons…

Thanks for reading, see you next month! Do you have any comments or feedback? Get in Touch!

On April 26, 10 stellar startups at MVP stage pitched in front of a jury of venture capitalists from Notion, Octopus, Molten, and Techstars. The bar was very high, and it took over 30 minutes for the jury to decide on the winner.

And the winner was… KripTonic, is a fintech startup aiming to protect LATAM savers from inflation and currency depreciation.

Sounds familiar? Before making it to the top of the Booster podium, KripTonic was featured in the March edition of the LBS Ventures Spotlight!

Maybe another gem is hiding in this edition…💎👀

Huge congratulation to CX - a process automation platform for sourcing commodity chemicals - and Mate - a next-gen dating app sparking romantic relationships with AI - for securing second and third place, and to Remigos - a platform to streamline the administrative burden of studying abroad - for winning the people’s choice award.

LBS Ventures Funding Recap | April-May 2022

From drones to real estate and satellites, no sector is off-limits for LBS founders.
Surprised? Have a look at this list of selected startups who raised in the past 2 months:

• Exyn, a US developer of aerial drones for 3D mapping of dangerous or hard to reach areas, raised $9.15M of venture funding

• Aerologix, an Australian cloud-based marketplace for drone piloting services intended to optimize drone technology for specific engagements, raised $4.2M seed round led by Ellerston Capital

• Xona, a US developer of next-generation Global Navigation Satellite Systems to power autonomous/ smart machines, raised $10M seed round led by MaC Venture Capital and Seraphim Capital

• Immo, a UK technology-led residential real estate platform creating and managing a portfolio in Single Family Rentals on behalf of professional investors, raised a $75M Series B led by Oak HC/FT

The Spotlight

Our April/May edition spotlights two great ventures and founders:

▶️ Unify, an end-to-end solution to connect prospective students to universities, from discovery to program selection, founded by Mattia Pastore, MBA 2021

▶️ Arc Street Capital, a crypto treasury management platform founded by Bo Zhang, MBA 2023 and Carlos Noe Saavedra, and Behrin Naidoo, MIF 2022

Unify - Mattia Pastore, MBAs'21

Unify is an end-to-end solution to connect prospective students to universities, from discovery all the way to applying to multiple programs with a single application. 

Unify was born in 2021, but its foundations date back to 2013 when its founder Mattia Pastore launched UNI Student Advisors, an educational consulting business providing personalized advice to help students land their dream degree programs in foreign universities. Founded in the US, UNI Student Advisors is now a market leader in Italy and has grown its revenues 8x in the past 2 years alone.

Through this experience, Mattia discovered that the university admission process is broken: students spend 1 year on average choosing a university program, but over half have some regret over their choice; universities spend an average of €1.1m on marketing, but 40% of admission officers struggle to hit targets. 
Realizing that it would have been more difficult to achieve impact at scale with a professional service company, in 2021 Mattia began transitioning to an advisory role at UNI Student Advisors, pouring all his learning into its next challenge: a SaaS solution to guide students throughout the entire university admission process.

Enter Unify. Unify allows students to discover and compare programs, and streamline their applications through a “common application” feature, which allows students to easily send their applications to multiple schools. It also features two smart-matching algorithms to link students with universities based on their academic background and goals.

These services are completely free for students, as Unify generates revenues through an agent model in which universities pay a fee for each student enrolled through the platform. Moreover, Unify plans to implement advanced concierge services (e.g., sessions with third-party education consultants) and a data-driven lead-generation tool for universities and concierge partners, which will provide additional monetization opportunities.

Unify is initially focusing on prospective students at graduate programs for Business Schools in the UK, EU, US, and Canada to build network density. 
After testing the market with an initial MVP - during which it placed 2 students in Master’s programs - Unify is currently working towards its official launch in September. Leveraging its sector expertise, Mattia has already closed partnerships with 22 Business Schools, including several in the Top 30 of the FT ranking, but plans to reach 50 ahead of launch.

Unify entered the 2021 cohort of the LBS incubator and closed a pre-seed round from 1648 Factory (Venture Builder) and angel investors at a £2.5M valuation, and is now preparing for launch and its next fundraising round.

In preparation for the official launch, Unify is hiring three key positions – Head of Software Engineering, Head of Product Growth and Head of Strategy & Operations.

Don’t wait until September! Get in touch with Mattia at Unify via LinkedIn or email

Arc Street Capital – Bo Zhang, MBA'23

Arc Street Capital is creating an on-chain exchange pool that allows for diversified treasury management, founded by Bo Zhang, Carlos Saavedra, and Behrin Naidoo - all current students at LBS.

Crypto companies have raised tremendous amounts of capital with AUM of DAO Treasuries is expected to reach $100B by end of 2022 and 5% of all VC deployed capital going to Crypto in 2021. However, but, at the moment, have poor treasury management - a survey of the top 50 DAOs by size shows 70% have their treasury allocated in 1-3 tokens.

Arc Street Captial is solving the DAO treasury management issue by addressing what we call "the four pillars of DAO treasury management": Diversification, Liquidity, Cash Flow (Yield), and Governance. They combine old-school portfolio management strategies with blockchain technology to solve each of these pillars in one harmonious solution. The feedback that they have got from all the people they have spoken with (VCs, industry, developers, etc.) ranges from "there's nothing quite like it" to "what you're building is essential".

With 27 Years of Traditional Finance Combined with 20 Years of Crypto Experience, the team stands strong to deliver on its promise. Bo Zhang (Trad: 8 yrs | Crypto: 8 yrs), Carlos Saavedra, CFA (Trad: 8 yrs | Crypto: 8 yrs), Behrin Naidoo, CA (Trad: 11 yrs | Crypto: 6 yrs) and partnering with PhDs and astrophysicists with a background at NASA / Stanford.

Thus far, they have 8 medium-sized DAOs on the waitlist, partnerships with 4 DeFi protocols and platforms, and 2 DAO tooling platforms and are seeking a $2m seed round to cover 12-18 month runway.

Interested? Get in touch with the team by email.

Thank you Nina and best of luck!

We want to end this edition of the newsletter by thanking Nina, our co-author and co-president of the eClub, for coming up with the idea for a VC newsletter and for her work and continuous support in getting it off the ground.

As she graduate from the MBA, Nina is leaving the newsletter team to focus her efforts on her full-time job as a growth investor at Lightrock, backing exceptional ventures creating a positive impact on People, Planet and/or Productivity at Series B and beyond. If you know of a founder in the space, please connect with her!

Best of luck on your new role, Nina 🚀

Thanks for reading, see you next month! 👀 Do you have any comments or feedback? Get in Touch!

Venture funding rounds involving LBS founders contracted during March. Nonetheless, 5 promising ventures were able to close their fundraising this month:

• M-Kopa, an African connected asset financing platform for the underbanked (and protagonist of a case study in the Marketing class for LBS MBAs), raised a $75M round led by Broadscale Group and Generation Investment Management

• SteadyPay, a platform helping freelancers and gig workers stabilize their income, raised a $5 million Series A round led by Digital Horizon

• Breedr, a UK precision livestock management application for farmers, raised £12M between debt and equity funding in a deal led by Investbridge Capital

• Cascador Health, a Belgian platform collecting structured, anonymized data on patients and healthcare delivery, raised €3.4m from Qbic, Volta Ventures, Theodorus, and Hirslanden Private Hospital Group

• FabricNano, a UK biomanufacturing company using a DNA-based flow reactor that produces artificial cells to speed up chemical reactions, raised $10m from undisclosed investors

  

The Spotlight

Our March edition spotlights two great ventures, both of which are currently fundraising:

▶️ KripTonic, a fintech product aiming to protect LATAM savers from inflation and currency depreciation, founded by Juanes - Juan Jaramillo and Juan Beltran, both in the MBA 2022 class

▶️ ProComps, is a drafting analytics tool for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) teams, founded by Eyüp Can Özbek, MBA 2023

KripTonic - Juan Jaramillo & Juan Beltran, MBAs'22

KripTonic aims to improve financial inclusion and lead crypto transition and adoption in Latin America, bringing the best of this ecosystem to everyone through reliable, transparent and simple investment vaults.

Did you know that the Argentinian peso depreciated ~510% vs. USD during 2017-2021?So did the Colombian Peso (by ~30%) and the Brazilian Real (by ~60%), making purchasing power of LatAm’s savers decrease over time.

It is a reality that current investment alternatives in LatAm are unreliable and require high transaction costs and long complex procedures, and this is why Kriptonic created KT Vaults, a simple fintech product that maximizes savings by hedging against inflation.

With KripTonic, users deposit local currencies, which are exchanged for stablecoins and invested in DeFi protocols (mainly lending, staking and liquidity provision for exchanges), achieving a 10% fixed Annual Percentage Yield in USD to its customers. Kriptonic also protects its customer’s money through third-party insurance policies.

The team is at MVP stage and preparing to go live in the next few months. They are now raising a $3m seed round, which will close on the 2nd week of April.

The funds raised will be used to hire CTO (if you know anyone that could be a fit reach out below!) and an internal technical team, develop and launch the app, fuel growth, and test market fit on a significant scale. Education modules, themed portfolios (e.g. NFTs, gaming) and DeFi expansion and a transition to web 3 company are on KripTonic’s roadmap.

Like what you read? Get in touch with the KripTonic team by email.

ProComps – Eyüp Can Özbek, MBA'23

ProComps is a drafting analytics tool for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) teams, founded by Eyüp Can Özbek, currently an MBA’23 at LBS.

MOBA is a ~$40B industry and the largest segment of e-sports, in which teams compete in a 5v5 game with different characters. Popular MOBA games include League of Legends and Dota 2.

Currently, players face several issues when drafting champions - i.e., selecting the characters to play the game as - ranging from picking complexity and time constraints on decision making to frequent patch updates and drafting unawareness. Further, most analytics tools today focus on individual players to improve their game rather than teams – leaving an untapped market for ProComps.

As a drafting app designed for teams, ProComps gives players live drafting suggestions taking into account game style, synergies among champions, and recalculating in real-time based on enemy picks to present a AI-based shortlist for the team to decide on. In MOBA games, where players have 30 seconds to chose among 150+ characters, ProComps provides a great headstart to teams, that are also equipped with a pre-game summary guide once the drafting is completed.

ProComps has seen great signs of early traction with over 5K+ users, ~1.2K Monthly Active Users (MAUs), 100 Premium members, and growing quickly to $5K revenue to date. The company has a freemium model, and charges €10/month for Pro features, which significantly lower than the cost of a coach (typically at $50 per hour or $10K a month). ProComps is currently raising $250K SAFE round led by angel investors.

Interested? Get in touch with the team by email.

eClub Podcast - Crypto Deepdive

New episodes alert! In the last two episodes of the eClub Podcast, our guest host Grace Guan dives into the world of web3 and cryptos.

In episode 3, Grace talks to Altan Tutar, analyst at Antler, about Antler's approach in nurturing web3 startups including what to look out for if one wants to start a business in this space.

In episode 4, Arun Sugumaran, co-founder and CEO at ArtWallSt, talks about how to build a business in #web3 space, what his #inspiration was, how Antler helped him find the right #cofounders and what to look out for during #fundraising stage.

Follow us on Season 1 of the London Business School Entrepreneurship Club's podcast 'Those who launched 🚀: The pilots and the propellant' where our hosts talk with venture capitalists and founders from their portfolio companies to learn the tricks and challenges of building a business.

🎙 Listen now

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Thanks for reading, see you next month! 👀 Do you have any comments or feedback? Get in Touch!

That's a big statement. But so it's the news.

In 2021, LBS alumni received $4 billion of startup funding, more than the capital raised in Switzerland and Portugal combined. So far, 6 companies started by LBS alumni reached unicorn status:

• Livspace, one of Asia’s largest home interior and renovation platforms

• Wayflyer, a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce companies

• Razor Group, which aggregates and scales up Amazon FBA businesses

• Feedzai, AI-powered risk management for financial services to detect fraud

• Zepz, a digital cross-border payments platform with 11+ users in 150 countries

• HelloFresh, a company offering weekly home-delivered meal kits

Interested in finding the next LBS startup to join the unicorn club? Read on!

LBS Funding Recap | Jan-Feb 2022

Ventures founded by LBS alumni continued to gather investors' interests in the first two months of 2022, closing funding rounds across different stages.

How many? We are listing 3 below, but if you send us an email with your guess, we will let you know the right number and send over the complete list!   

• Ridge, an Isreali managed web services provider allowing developers to deploy cloud-native applications anywhere users are located, raised a $22M round led by NFX 

• Workwize, a Dutch digital procurement platform empowering employees to work from home efficiently, raised a €1.5M round led by Peak Capital

• Databook, a US customer intelligence platform to boost enterprise sales performance, raised a $50M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners 

The Spotlight

For this edition of the Spotlight, we have talked with two amazing founders: Cong Le, MBA'22, co-founder and COO at Blockchain Monster Hunt, a multi-chain Pokémon-style game; and Etienne Louvet-de Verchère, MiM’21 co-founder and CEO at IONA, an autonomous drone company enabling deliveries in low-density rural areas.  

Hunting Blockchain monsters - Cong Le, MBA'22

With NFTs finding their way into gaming, we have started to see a little bit into what the future of gaming could be like. The invention of NFT allows users to have full ownership and control of their in-game assets, which is a remarkable development and has the potential to revolutionize the gaming space in the coming years. However, the NFT game market today mostly consists of games that are not yet completely decentralized and on-chain, essential factors that compose a true blockchain game.

Guess what? A serial gaming entrepreneur and 2 ex-Google and Facebook software engineers are here to change that! They hope to utilize their multi-chain infrastructure and provide a plug-in solution to integrate different chains for other games that want to go multi-chain. They also aspire to be the pioneers in the multi-chain movement as they believe multi-chain will be the next breakthrough in the crypto market, connecting the vastly fragmented blockchain communities together and reducing dependency on any single blockchain.

How? Through Blockchain Monster Hunt - a multi-chain NFT game where players can hunt, collect, battle, and train rare NFTs born from the blockchain within the multiverse (multi-chain metaverse). Their game aims to provide users with an innovative experience that allows them to interact with different blockchains, such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Moonbeam, and many more to be integrated.

Further, the team looks to build cross-chain capabilities that bring high added value to the crypto space. For example, the team is currently developing an in-house cross-chain infrastructure such as bridges where users can transfer NFT and token between any two chains. What’s more, they’re creating the coveted play-to-earn possibility for players.

In September 2021, they raised $3.8M USD raised in a private funding round led by Animoca Brands and other investors including some notable infrastructure partners such as Polygon. By October 2021, they listed the project's governance token and integrated it into their ecosystem of 6 blockchains including ETH, BSC, Polygon, Moonbeam, KCC, and Avalanche (received grant from Moonbeam). By November 2021, they had sold 15,000 Genesis NFTs in collaboration with 10 launchpads for $3M USD. And, by December 2021, they had conducted 4 versions of the Open Beta Test and successfully launched on Jan 25, 2022.

Drone deliveries in rural areas - Etienne Louvet, MiM'21

Over the last decade, we have witnessed a revolution in home deliveries, with fulfillment times shrinking from several days to less than 24 hours, or rather 30 minutes for the most popular SKUs. Yet, while the quick commerce economy is exploding in urban areas, the situation looks very different in low-density rural areas. There, deliveries are not only slower but also much more polluting and expensive, with customers incurring delivery surcharges between 30% and 50% compared to urban areas.

To address these problems, Etienne Louvet-de Verchère (MiM'21) and Paulo Geraldes (EMBA'16) have founded IONA, which designs and operates decentralized networks of autonomous drones running on green electricity for day-to-day deliveries. IONA promises to provide a green alternative that reduces costs by 20% to 70%, while also unlocking a wide range of delivery options for residents of rural areas like local food and same-day parcel deliveries.

IONA insources R&D to create modular and fit-for-purpose drones while outsourcing manufacturing to build scale. According to Etienne, competitors either rely on non-scalable cost structures – using third-party technologies that impact maintenance costs at scale – or use drones that have been designed for different purposes (e.g., filmmaking, medical equipment) and are therefore poorly suited for day-to-day deliveries

To achieve this vision, IONA can count on a strong technical team. The CTO, Paulo Geraldes, Ph.D., has 20 years of experience in aviation and drones including as Head of Project Management Office for DE&S (UK Ministry of Defence). IONA's Lead Engineer and Aerodynamicist, Saïf-Deen Akanni, Ph.D., has founded an award-winning drone engines company and has 30 years of relevant experience, including roles at Airbus and as a Senior Aerodynamicist for Ferrari-Hass F1 Team.

Drones will generate £42B in net benefits to the UK economy by 2030 (PwC), and IONA estimates its Serviceable Obtainable Market to worth £650 in the UK (£10B in Europe). The company plans to operate as both a 3PL provider and a marketplace on which consumers and local businesses can trade in a decentralized and autonomous way.

IONA is currently raising a £150k SEIS to complete the production phase and aims to start the first drone flights this Summer. It will initially target Scotland, where households pay £45M each year in delivery surcharges but plans to expand in 2023 to the rest of the UK – where the government has unlocked £65M through Innovate UK for the Future Flight Challenge Phase 3 – and in Europe.

Like what you read? Get in touch with IONA on LinkedIn or by email, and access their pitch deck here.

Announcements and upcoming events

eClub Podcast Launch

New #podcast alert! In the second episode, James Chappell, Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Digital Shadows, talks to us about the early days of Digital Shadows and his decision to become an #entrepreneur in the #cybersecurity space, the collaboration with his co-founder, their fundraising journey, and their partnership with Storm Ventures.

Follow Season 1 of the LBS Entrepreneurship Club's podcast 'Those who launched: The pilots and the propellant' where our host, Eleanna Sfyra Ragkousi MiFPT2022, talks with #venturecapitalists and #founders from their portfolio companies to learn the tricks and challenges of building a business.

🎙 Listen now

🎧 Follow on Instagram

Eclub flagship events: Launchpad & Booster

The final pitching nights of our two flagship initiatives will be on April 26th (Booster) and May, 11th (Launchpad). As a reminder, these are mentorship programs to help LBS students launch (Launchpad) and scale (Booster) their ventures.

If you would like to participate as a judge or be involved as a mentor, please drop an email to eclub@london.edu or leave a comment below! We would love to have you 😊

Do you have any comments or feedback? Get in Touch!

LBS’s Entrepreneurship Club provides a forum for students to network and share ideas, promotes an environment that will foster innovation and entrepreneurship, and helps students cultivate and develop their own ideas. We organize over 50 events throughout the year for our vibrant community of ~2,500 members and have helped 100+ start-ups founded by LBS alumni secure funding.  Read about our activities that help LBS entrepreneurs Ideate, Explore, Build and Scale at eclublbs.com

We are launching the first edition of the LBS Venture Spotlight newsletter. Each month we will share funding rounds closed by LBS founders, and we will also deep dive in one/two ventures.

Founding Rounds - H2 2021 Update 

The last 6 months showed strong market demand for ventures co-founded by LBS students/alumni.

Find out more about funding rounds and acquisitions involving LBS startups: 

Pre-seed Rounds

• Junee, a borrow-and-return system of reusable lunch bowls, raised £250k (Dec '21). In May, Junee won the runner-up prize in e-club's Launchpad pre-accelerator.

• Hadrian, an autonomous offensive cyber security solution, raised €2.5M (Nov '21). Learn more about Hadrian's CEO in our Founder Spotlight! 

• Tanso, a sustainability reporting solution for industrial manufacturers, raised $1.9M (Sep '21)

Seed Rounds

• Gravitiq, a health-related e-commerce aggregator, raised $55M (Nov '21). 

• Krew, a fitness platform for live and on-demand workouts, raised $1.6M (Oct '21). Krew was part of the 2021 LBS incubator cohort.

Series A-B, and a new unicorn!

• Razor Group, a leading e-commerce aggregator, raised $125M in Series B funding at $1B+ valuation (Nov '21).

• XYZ Reality, which developed an integrated AR solution for construction projects, raised $20M in Series A funding (Jun '21).

Successful acquisitions

• Honest Health, the vertical health platform behind the D2C hair-loss solution Freshworks, was acquired by Hims and Hers Health (Jun '21).

• Yagro, an agriculture data-analytics startup, was acquired by Frontier Agriculture (Oct '21).

LBS Founder Spotlight

Rogier Fisher, MBA'22 - Co-Founder and CEO at Hadrian

For this first episode of the eClub’s “Founder Spotlight” series, we interviewed Rogier Fischer, MBA 2022. Rogier is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hadrian, an offensive cybersecurity platform focusing on continuous, event-driven vulnerability scanning.

Prior to Hadrian, Rogier had co-founded the crypto-trading platform LiteBit, which he scaled to over $750M in trading volume. He and his Co-Founder Oliver Beg are ethical hackers, and both have been featured on the Hall of Fame of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo for reporting security issues with their products.  

The co-founding team is completed by CFO Maurice Clin (LBS MBA 2022), who brings finance and sales expertise to the group, and CTO Tijl van Vliet, who has experience in building and scaling technology companies.

Just after one month of starting the business, the founders received its first Term Sheet. "We had to say no more than yes”, Rogier admits. In November, Hadrian announced their €2.5M pre-seed round from Slimmer AI and Village Global, a Silicon Valley fund backed by the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Chris Vogelzang, former CEO of Danske Bank, and Alex Weiss, Managing Director of the cybersecurity fund at Clear Sky, also participated in the round as angel investors. 

According to Roger, Hadrian's uniqueness lies in its technology. The software maps digital assets within a client infrastructure and continuously runs thousands of tests to detect vulnerabilities, using ML to interpret results and flag issues. Moreover, Hadrian automatically re-tailors its tests any time it detects changes in the infrastructure.   

Hadrian is targeted at enterprises with ~$100M in revenue, although it has also onboarded a few customers on the ~$1B revenue line.

Sounds interesting? Learn more in our full article!

Announcements and upcoming events

eClub Podcast Launch

Our podcast is for inspiration, affirmation, and acceleration to your entrepreneurial rocket oil. Our first season, “The pilots and propellant”, of eClub podcast is due to launch in January 2022. Behind the successful rockets launch are the pilots or company founder(s) who ensure the rocket is going in the right direction and is in control and the propellant or the venture capital firm that creates the motive force of the rocket to launch. In the meantime, follow our Instagram page for updates!

Do you have any comments or feedback? Get in Touch!

The next LBS unicorn 🦄 may be hiding in these pages…

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