Our exceptional and diverse portfolio of mission-driven founders and companies, delivering next generation platforms, products and B2B technology solutions.
About
Arāya invests in pre-seed and seed startups globally. Our debut £20 million Super Angel Fund has a primary investment focus in the U.K. with a 20% global allocation.
We invest in visionary founders building the next generation platforms, products and solutions across Health, FinTech, Commerce & Future of Work.
It’s our privilege to be a small part of founders’ journeys and in addition to capital, we provide unparalleled access to expertise, network, support and future funding from the get go. Arāya’s network of fund investors includes exited entrepreneurs who’ve “been there, done that,” family offices looking to follow-on in the companies we back and a deep network to support your growth across funding, customers and talent.
We also run Arāya Ventures Academy for Angels (AVA Angels), the fastest growing angel investment academy for new angel investors.
60
of our portfolio have been in gender diverse teams
60
of our portfolio are first-time founders
45
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.
Research Grid raises $6.48M to automate clinical trial admin
Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn’t mind the work, but there was one thing she consistently hated: administrative tasks.
“I think most people do, especially in research,” she told TechCrunch. She would rather be analyzing data or building relationships with patients, she said. “But I was spending so much time doing manual tasks that didn’t require any medical expertise. It’s a process that’s completely broken, and I knew it could be fixed.”
Bloom Money: the app breaking down barriers to financial inclusion
Bloom Money has blossomed into a vital platform for UK diaspora communities, helping users save, build credit, and manage their finances with confidence.
Meet the 17 startups founded by former Monzo employees
Europe’s later-stage fintechs continue to be a crucial training ground for the next generation of entrepreneurs and typically dominate lists of “founder factories”. According to a recent report by VC firm Accel and data platform Dealroom, Europe’s seventy fintech unicorns have produced 423 startups including Sync Savings founded by former employees.
Lapse Snaps Up $30 Million Round As An Anti-Social Media Photo App
Lapse, a three-year-old photo-sharing app, announced it raised $30 million in Series A funding from a group of prominent venture-capital firms and angel investors led by Greylock and DST Global Partners. Greylock general partner Jacob Andreou, a former Snap executive, joined Lapse’s board.
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.
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
Rupa Popat is Founder & Managing Partner at Arāya Ventures and Araya Ventures Academy for Angels (AVA Angels).
Prior to Arāya, she founded and built several startups to exit, is an experienced operator and has over 30 angel and VC fund investments in her portfolio. She has also worked with some of the world’s largest companies to design and build their start-up programmes like Johnson & Johnson and an entrepreneur-in-residence at Morgan Stanley Ventures.
She was recognised as Top 15 UK Investors by Forbes in 2022 and a finalist for the UKBAA Angel Investor of the Year award in 2023 and 2024.
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.