Our exceptional and diverse portfolio of mission-driven founders and companies.
Empowering Founders to Flourish
The way we experience healthcare, live consciously, work productively, shop experientially and grow our wealth is transforming at rapid pace. We invest in world-positive entrepreneurs re-imagining this future.
We believe in backing founders from all walks of life. And we mean it.
We know there is value beyond capital. And we deliver it.
We feel inspired by the innovations transforming how we live and work. And we are committed to empowering that change.
We invest at the earliest of stages (pre-seed and seed) and build empowering relationships with the founders we fund, providing unparalleled access to expertise, network, support, and capital.
We apply a diversification lens on every investment opportunity, backing daring founders who are closing gaps and addressing underserved needs in bold, unconventional, and creative ways. And we’ve proven the outsized impact this strategy delivers.
65
of our portfolio have at least one female co-founder
65
of our portfolio are first-time founders
50
of our portfolio have at least one ethnic minority co-founder
Hear from our founders
Latest Portfolio News
Keeping up with the latest News about our portfolio companies.
UKTN: Metaverse fashion storefront Emperia raises £8m Series A
Emperia, a London-base metaverse startup that develops virtual stores for fashion brands, has raised $10m (£8m) in a Series A funding round. Founded in 2019, Emperia creates virtual storefronts to simulate physical shopping experiences when purchasing art and fashion products. It has worked with brands including Lacoste, Dior Beauty and Sunglass Hut.
Evening Standard: Teaching that bridges tech’s gender gap
Anna Brailsford wants Code First Girls to become the world’s first edtech unicorn dedicated to women. She was inspired by the fact that the UK’s tech job market is projected to grow to six times its current value to be worth £30 billion by 2025. And the second was that only one in five people in the current tech workforce are women.
TechCrunch: Twig takes $35M to turn stuff you own into a way to pay
Twig, a London-based fintech targeting Gen Z and younger millennial consumers with an e-money account that gives them instant cash-outs on fashion and electronics they want to sell, has closed a $35 million Series A round of funding.
Sifted: Screenloop raises $7m to stop companies making bad hires
London-based hiring intelligence platform Screenloop — which offers candidate sourcing, interview analysis and reference automation — has raised $7m in seed funding led by Stride VC.
Rupa Ganatra-Popat
Founding & Managing Partner of Arāya Ventures.
Following an eight-year career in investment banking, Rupa founded several businesses in the last decade across the real estate, media, and technology industries. Following an exit, she began angel investing in early-stage businesses, investing in over 30 companies and venture capital funds, and has worked with some of the world’s largest companies to design and build their start-up accelerator programmes including Johnson & Johnson.
She invests in exceptional people transforming how we live and work. She was recognised as Top 15 UK Female Investors by Forbes in 2022 and a finalist for the UKBAA Angel Investor of the Year 2023 award. She runs ĀVA, an Angel Investment Course and community for women and is on a mission to get thousands more women in the UK to start their angel investment journey.
She is also a member at the Young President’s Organisation (YPO), an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Morgan Stanley, board advisor at several early-stage venture capital funds, a founding member of the Guild of Entrepreneurs and a mentor on the Mayor of London’s Business Growth programme.
Founder Resources
Resources to support and educate founders on their entrepreneurial journey.
Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
How to come up fresh, transformative and better ideas for your start-up.
How Venture Returns work and how much a founder should be giving away per round
The Founder-VC tussle over valuations is probably one of the more opaque aspects of the startup world. It’s often a classic case of one party not understanding where the other is coming from
Balancing the Art of Valuation with the Science of Dilution
Understanding the factors that help founders to maximise the valuation of their business and increase the propensity of new investors to come in at the highest possible valuation.
We’d love to hear from you.
If you’re a founder building a mission-driven company at pre-seed or seed, we’d love to hear from you.