LBS Ventures Spotlight
Update #1, December 2021
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!
