Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

What happens when companies deploy AI agents before fixing the data those agents rely on?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Toby Mather, Co-Founder of Rig, the AI-native data infrastructure company building the data layer that allows humans and AI agents to work from the same trusted context.

Rig started as a "data brain" sitting on top of platforms like Snowflake and BigQuery, making sense of fragmented company data so teams could use tools like Claude and Cursor to build applications, automations and analytics. It has since...

What happens when AI moves beyond the digital world and starts transforming the companies that manufacture the things around us?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Robin Van Aeken, Co-Founder & CEO of Magentic, the AI company building digital workers for some of the world's largest manufacturers.

Magentic's AI agents, or "mages", work alongside procurement and supply chain teams at companies including Siemens and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. They connect with existing systems, analyse huge volumes of procurement data and identify opportunities to make supply chains cheaper, faster and...

What happens to software engineering when almost every line of code is written by AI?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James sits down with Mirko Novakovic, Founder & CEO of Dash0, the AI-native observability company helping engineering teams understand, monitor and fix problems in increasingly complex software systems.

Dash0 has grown at remarkable speed, 4x-ing ARR in six months and recently raising a $110m Series B. For Mirko, now on his third company, that growth hasn't come from a single breakthrough. His philosophy is much simpler: build the fundamentals brick by...

How do you build a global AI company without burning hundreds of millions of dollars?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James sits down with Krish Ramineni, Co-Founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai, the AI meeting assistant used by millions of people around the world.

Fireflies started building with AI long before the current boom. After struggling to raise capital, Krish and his co-founder became obsessed with reaching "ramen profitability", keeping costs low and controlling their own destiny. They eventually raised venture funding, but haven't touched the capital from their Series A, reaching profitability...

How do you build a consumer product that people genuinely love, while still making the economics work?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James sits down with Gyve Safavi, Co-Founder & CEO of SURI, the award-winning electric toothbrush company combining design, performance and sustainability.

Before founding SURI, Gyve spent eight years at Procter & Gamble, ultimately leading brand management for the £500m Gillette Female Shave Care business across EMEA. He later worked at AKQA and WPP, including alongside Sir Martin Sorrell, before moving into startups.

The conversation explores how those experiences translated into b...

What happens when you hear your own hit song playing in public, but never receive the royalty?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James sits down with Ryan Edwards, Founder & CEO of Audoo, the music technology company rebuilding how public performance royalties are measured and distributed.

The idea for Audoo came from Ryan’s own experience as a musician. After hearing one of his songs playing in a London department store and discovering there was effectively no reliable way to track the royalty, he started investigating how the system actually worked.

Wh...

What does it take to build a frontier AI model lab in a world dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Yang Li, Co-Founder & CEO of Cosine, one of the UK's leading frontier AI companies building sovereign AI models for enterprise and government.

Cosine began by fine-tuning foundation models for software engineering before evolving into a full frontier AI lab, training its own models from scratch. Today, the company works with organisations across defence, financial services and critical national infrastructure, deploying AI...

What happens when computing reaches the limits of classical physics?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Ashley Montanaro, Co-Founder & CEO of Phasecraft, one of Europe's leading quantum computing companies.

Backed by Episode 1, Phasecraft is building the software and algorithms that will unlock the commercial potential of quantum computers. While much of the industry focuses on hardware, Ashley explains why the real breakthroughs will come from the software layer, and why better algorithms could be worth orders of magnitude more than incremental hardware improvements.

The conversation explores what...

How do you build AI for one of the world's largest, most valuable, and least digitised industries?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Dr. Kate Jarvis, CEO & Co-Founder of Fifth Dimension, the AI company transforming how institutional real estate investors make decisions.

With a PhD from Stanford in machine learning and linguistics, Kate has spent her career applying AI to complex industries. Today, Fifth Dimension is building what she describes as the Bloomberg Terminal for real assets, helping some of the world's largest property investors replace spreadsheets, PDFs and...

Laura Modiano leads Founder Experience at OpenAI, a newly created function designed to help startups build, grow, and scale on the world's leading AI platform.

Having previously worked with startups at AWS and now at OpenAI, Laura sits at the intersection of founders, technology, and the future of company building.

In this episode, Laura shares how AI is fundamentally changing the startup journey, why founders can now build companies faster than ever before, and what OpenAI is doing to support the next generation of builders from day one.

We discuss:

<...

What does it take to build an AI company a decade before the world realises AI is the future?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Barney Hussey-Yeo, Founder & CEO of Cleo, the AI financial assistant helping millions of consumers make smarter money decisions.

Barney started building Cleo years before ChatGPT brought AI into the mainstream. Today, Cleo has grown into one of the UK's leading fintech success stories, reaching $400M ARR and becoming a category-defining consumer AI company.

The conversation explores the realities of scaling from zero...

What happens when software adapts to humans, rather than humans adapting to software?

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Jonathan Sanders, Founder & CEO of Light, the AI-native finance platform redefining how businesses manage money.

Jonathan's journey spans investment banking, consulting, Pleo, founding Juni, and now building Light. Along the way, he has developed a unique perspective on technology, AI, and what the next generation of business software will look like.

The conversation explores Jonathan's concept of "organic software" where AI agents learn, adapt, and operate alongside teams...

Steve Domin, Founder & CEO of Duffel, the company rebuilding the infrastructure layer of the global travel industry.

Duffel is taking on one of the most complex and outdated sectors, creating modern, developer-first APIs for flights, hotels, and more. Backed by investors including Index Ventures and Benchmark, the company has raised over $50M to transform how travel is bought and sold.

Steve shares the journey of building Duffel from scratch, including:

 Why the travel industry is fundamentally broken  The insight that led to Duffel’s API-first approach  Building deep supply-side integrations with airlines and incumbents  Navigatin...

Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO of Ori, is now part of Radiant following its partnership with Brookfield.

Mahdi is building at the centre of one of the most important shifts in technology: the global race to scale AI infrastructure.

We cover:

 From telecoms to data centres: lessons from building infrastructure businesses from age 20  Why Ori chose the harder path of building for a future that did not yet exist  What “AI infrastructure” actually means, from GPU clusters to orchestration software  The Radiant model: combining capital, power, compute and software into a single platform  Why AI is becomin...

This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Charlotte Palmer, Vice President of Venture Capital at Integra Global Advisors.

Charlotte sits on the other side of the table as an LP, backing emerging venture funds globally. In this episode, she lifts the lid on how LPs actually evaluate VCs, what really matters beyond headline performance, and why many GPs still get fundraising wrong.

We cover:

• How LPs really underwrite venture funds and why early DPI is often misunderstood
• What matters more than performance in the early years of a fund
• Why acce...

This week on Riding Unicorns, we welcome back Alan Chang, Founder and CEO of Fuse Energy.

Since his last appearance, Fuse has scaled rapidly, reaching a $5B valuation and setting its sights on £1B ARR. In this episode, Alan breaks down what it really takes to build a full-stack energy company from scratch, and why solving energy is one of the hardest and most important challenges of our time.

We cover:

• Why lowering the cost of energy is a trillion-pound opportunity
 • The reality of building in a deeply complex, regulated indust...

What does a genuinely great VC fund look like today, from an LP’s perspective?

In this episode, James and Hector are joined by Dave Neumann, Investment Manager at Schroders Capital, one of the most experienced institutional investors in venture. With a career spanning decades and exposure to top-tier global funds, Dave shares how leading LPs actually evaluate venture firms, and where many GPs get it wrong.

The conversation covers what separates top quartile funds from the rest, why venture is increasingly about building a firm rather than just making investments, and how the best ma...

Tony Jamous first joined Riding Unicorns in January 2023, just after Oyster became a unicorn. Since then, the company has raised its Series D, Tony has moved into the Executive Chairman role, and Hadi Moussa has stepped in as CEO.

In this episode, James sits down with both Tony and Hadi to unpack what really happens when a founder hands over the CEO role in a high-growth company. They discuss why Tony knew Oyster needed a different kind of leader for its next stage, how the search process unfolded, and what Hadi has focused on in his first...

Nikola Mrkšić is the Co-Founder and CEO of PolyAI, one of the world’s leading voice AI companies, helping enterprises automate customer service through conversational AI at massive scale.

Before PolyAI, Nikola was a machine learning researcher and part of the team behind Siri. In this episode, he joins James to unpack what the world is only now starting to understand about voice AI, why most automation still misses the point, and how PolyAI has built a full stack enterprise product that goes far beyond simply reducing call queues.

They discuss how PolyAI is used...

This week on Riding Unicorns, Matt Wilson returns to the podcast. Matt previously joined us in September 2022 to talk about Omnipresent, which has since been acquired by Deel. He is now back building Jack and Jill, one of the most talked-about venture-backed companies in Europe right now.

Jack and Jill is bringing conversational AI to job hunting and hiring, with two agents built for two audiences:

Jack, an AI agent for individuals that learns who you are, what you want, and monitors the job market for you, while also helping with career coaching, CVs...

Nicolò Frisiani is Co-Founder & CEO of Lupa, the world’s first enterprise-ready AI operating system for veterinary clinics.

Lupa has raised over $25m from investors including Singular and Firstminute Capital, and is on a mission to modernise a sector still running on 1980s technology.

In this episode, Nicolò shares:

Why Lupa started as a consumer app and quickly pivoted to a full-stack operating systemHow note-taking became the wedge product into a much bigger platform visionWhat he learned from sending his co-founder to work as a vet receptionist for a monthThe complexity of selling into PE-b...

George Davis, Founder and CEO of Lorum.

George has been deep in payments for years: Head of Product at TrueLayer, then co-founder of BVNK, and now building Lorum to tackle the hardest layer of the stack: global clearing.

We get into:

Why payments becomes an obsession if you look closely enoughWhat “rebuilding clearing from the ground up” actually means, in plain EnglishVirtual accounts, ledgering, Swift, and why settlement speed still mattersThe real opportunity: fixing dollar clearing and cross border flowsHow Lorum makes money, and why being “payments only” changes the incentivesThe fundraising sprint, choosing Northzon...

James sits down with Dr. David von Rosen, the serial founder behind Lottoland and 25 Degrees, and the Principal of the VONROSEN family office, through which he invests globally and pan-sector in fast-growth pre-IPO startups.

David does not pretend to have one neat playbook. He prefers volatility, backs ideas that feel genuinely new, and invests like an operator, often taking a significant stake so he can get involved properly.

We talk about:

Why David prefers fewer bets with bigger ownershipHow he thinks about hiring generalists and spotting motivation over credentialsWhat most people misunderstand about risk...

Harrison Rose co-founded Paddle, one of the UK’s standout B2B billing and payments companies. Now he is building GoodFit, a go to market platform helping teams prioritise the right accounts, at the right time, with the right data.

In this episode, Harrison breaks down a simple idea most teams still get wrong: before you buy another shiny GTM tool, make sure you are actually selling to qualified customers. He shares how Paddle approached go to market from first principles, why the “execution layer” has exploded (16,000 tools and counting), and why fundamentals like market mapping and qualif...

Ben Freeman is the Co-founder and CEO of Omnea, an AI native procurement and supplier management platform used by companies from the mid-market through to enterprise, including Synthesia, Typeform, Spotify, Monzo, Albertsons, and The Adecco Group.

Ben’s path to procurement was not obvious. From running a bootstrapped events business in Manchester (and dropping out of uni), to a stint in investment banking at Lazard, to scaling cybersecurity company Tessian in New York, he accidentally discovered just how broken procurement can be inside otherwise world class organisations.

In this conversation, Ben breaks down how he fo...

James and Hector sit down with James Cadwallader, CEO and Co Founder of Profound, to unpack how AI is reshaping the internet and what that means for every brand on the planet.

James explains why large language models are not just a new interface, but a fundamental platform shift in how people retrieve information. Instead of humans clicking blue links, user agents now visit the web on our behalf, read content, and answer questions directly. Profound sits in the middle of this change, helping some of the worlds biggest brands understand if and...

Ariel Harmoko is the Co Founder and CEO of Artifact AI. Ariel joined James and Hector for a conversation that moves from race tracks to reconciliation engines.

Ariel grew up in Jakarta, was thrown into Go Karts at eight, and went on to race professionally all the way to Formula 3 alongside the likes of Lando Norris and George Russell. That early immersion in high performance teams, engineering and discipline shaped how he now operates as a founder.

He shares how a love of maths and science took him to boarding school...

Andrew D’Souza is the Founder of Boardy, the Creandum backed AI super connector reshaping how founders and investors meet and build trust.

Before Boardy, Andrew co-founded Clearco, one of the first revenue based financing companies. Clearco deployed over $5bn to thousands of businesses, scaled to six hundred employees, and passed one hundred million dollars in revenue. Andrew is one of the few founders who has built a nine figure company before starting again.

Clearco’s early AI work and Andrew’s interest in generative AI since 2020 sparked the idea for Boardy.

Boardy is a v...

Erin Platts is the CEO of Octopus Ventures and former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank UK & Europe — one of the most pivotal figures in the UK tech ecosystem.

In this conversation, Erin opens up in remarkable detail about her personal journey from two decades inside SVB to leading one of Europe’s most active venture firms. She shares the inside story of the SVB collapse — the all-nighters, the adrenaline, the leadership decisions made under extreme pressure, and what it was really like to shoulder responsibility for thousands of founders, operators and employees during a once-in-a-generation crisis.

We t...

Lee Veitch is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of SuperAwesome, the world’s leading kid-tech and youth marketing platform.

SuperAwesome powers billions of kid-safe digital transactions every month — helping brands like LEGO, Disney, and Nickelodeon connect with young audiences responsibly and safely.

Lee takes us behind the scenes of a remarkable 13-year journey — from the early days of fear, frustration, and opportunity, to scaling globally, being acquired by Epic Games, and then buying the business back to continue its mission independently.

In this episode we dive into:
 👶 Why the internet needed a s...

The AI rollup transforming property management

This week on Riding Unicorns, we sit down with Dan Lifshits, Co-Founder & COO of Dwelly — the AI-first lettings and property management platform reinventing how landlords, tenants, and agents interact.

Dwelly is on a mission to modernise the UK rental market by acquiring traditional letting agencies and rebuilding them with technology at their core. The business is growing fast, backed by General Catalyst and other leading investors, combining the operational rigour of real estate with the scalability of AI.

Before fo...

Hector is joined by Gauthier van Malderen, Founder and CEO of Perlego, the “Spotify for textbooks” and one of Europe’s leading edtech scale-ups.

Gauthier shares the remarkable journey of building Perlego from a personal frustration with expensive university textbooks into a global subscription platform transforming access to educational content. He reflects on early failures, the turning points that led to success, and how COVID accelerated the company’s growth.

The discussion dives deep into topics including:

Solving the chicken-and-egg problem of marketplace growthThe power of B2B partnerships in edtechBu...

This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Paul Becker, Co-Founder & CEO of re:cap, a fintech platform helping digital businesses unlock capital and understand their financial position through intelligent forecasting, real-time data insights, and flexible financing.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Paul walks us through re:cap’s journey from an idea for automated due diligence software to becoming one of Europe’s fastest-growing capital platforms, recently securing over €125M in debt financing to power its next phase.

We explore the intricacies of fintech business models, investor expectations, the realities of growing a company during A...

Ali first joined us in January 2022, when Babylon was still one of the most ambitious healthtech companies in the world. Today, he returns with a new mission, building Quadrivia and its clinical AI assistant, “Qu”, designed to automate millions of repetitive healthcare workflows and rebalance the global shortage of clinical labour.

In this episode, Ali reflects candidly on the rise and fall of Babylon, the structural challenges behind its collapse, and the lessons he’s applying to his new venture. He also explains why he believes AI finally offers the chance to create abunda...

Sam Jacobs is the Co-Founder of Go Places, the operating system for social commerce.

In just 18 months, Go Places has become a trusted partner to some of the world’s biggest brands including Samsung, Mars, The Body Shop, and Trip. Backed by deep experience from Amazon and Coca-Cola, Sam and his co-founder Jack are building the infrastructure layer for TikTok Shop, combining performance, content, live shopping, affiliate management and analytics into a single high-performance engine.

Go Places runs 9 in-house live shopping studios (growing to 25 next year), manages 60+ trained presenters, and has developed AI-powered tools like On...

Akash Bajwa, Principal at Earlybird VC, one of Europe’s longest-standing early-stage funds.

Akash shares his journey into venture and how he helped launch Earlybird’s London office, now a core hub for the firm. We dive into the state of AI investing, how to distinguish enduring companies from short-term hype, and what traits define the next wave of outlier founders.

With experience backing companies like Briefcase (AI for accountants) and Spatial (3D generative AI), Akash offers a deep and practical perspective on both infrastructure and application-layer AI—and how to evalua...