Houghton Street Ventures | Community Newsletter
January 2024
Hello,
Welcome back to the Houghton Street Ventures Community newsletter, our monthly update on everything that’s happening within the LSE startup and venture ecosystem. We have a great workshop coming up next week, on all things hiring for your startup, with the team at Deel:
Events:
Houghton Street x Deel - From 5 to 50: how to hire at your early-stage startup: 29th February at 3pm GMT - book your free ticket here
If you’re interested in learning more about Houghton Street Ventures, we’d love to hear from you. Or if you have ideas about future content or collaborations, just hit reply!
Hiring
1. Stealth Startup Seeking Commercial Co-founder - NYC
Orac is a platform for machine learning in real-time data environments. Siobhan, the CEO is a former data scientist with first-hand experience of the challenges of machine learning on real-time data. Through interviews with data scientists in similar roles across a range of companies, she developed the conviction that this is a common problem for which a general solution can be designed. She developed Orac as the answer to the myriad of issues her team and other data scientists were facing. The MVP is almost complete and design partner contracts are in place.
Orac is now seeking a new team member to lead operations and go-to-market. Ideally, someone joining the team will have prior experience fundraising and bringing SaaS solutions to market, irrespective of vertical. This is a role for someone to hit the ground running and take initiative in building a business around a great technical solution.
Orac Introductory Blog: https://oraclabs.github.io/orac-blog/posts/orac/
Let us know if you’d like an introduction to Siobhan.
2. GTM Associate at TalkShopClub - NYC
An exciting opportunity to join Houghton Street Ventures’ portfolio company TalkShopClub, a US-based consumer startup founded by Sam Pasupalak and Sumit Pasupalak. It recently raised a $7M pre-seed round from top VCs in the US and Canada. Sam was the co-founder and CEO of Maluuba, one of the world's premier AI research startups, which was acquired by Microsoft for $160M. Sumit founded Ubiq (YC backed), a B2B meeting collaboration startup and most recently he was the founder of a social e-commerce startup.
As a GTM Associate, you'll be responsible for developing successful GTM strategies and executing them to help identify the product's early adopters. This role provides an opportunity to understand the workings of a startup, take genuine accountability for your work (our team is small, so you'll be given real, impactful work!), and work directly with experienced founders. Perfect for recent graduates.
Check out the job description here
Opportunities
1. Sequoia Arc
George Robson, LSE alum, is looking for the next cohort for Arc, Sequoia’s accelerator programme to partner with the next generation of outlier founders and help them increase their odds of success, finding product-market fit faster.
It’s a 7-week company building program for select founders with a mixture of in-person and remote learning.
To be invited into Arc, you have to be a Sequoia portfolio company, having either partnered with them recently or met through the Arc application process. So if you’re a pre-seed or seed-stage founder in Europe who is interested in partnering with Sequoia, we encourage you to apply. They’re keen to hear from founders developing an idea or product with the ambition of building a category-defining company.
Check out the application here
2. Y Combinator Request for Startups
This week YC released their annual request for startups, a list of themes they are focusing in on for the next batch of the accelerator programme. Some of the categories they’re focusing on this year include:
Robotics + Machine Learning
Digital Twins
Defence
Manufacturing
Climate
Open Source DevTools
Explainable AI
AI Agents
Many more…
For the full list, check out the blog here. If you’re interested in speaking with another LSE founder who has been through Y Combinator to learn more about the application and programme, please do let us know!
Ecosystem Offerings
Capchase, founded by LSE alum, Przemek Gotfryd, is a growth partner that empowers SaaS startups through non-dilutive capital and a buy-now-pay-later solution that accelerates your revenue growth. They’ve worked with 1000s of companies to date and made available more than $2.5bn in funding to SaaS companies.
They have an exclusive 10% off your financing rate for the LSE community. If you want to learn more, please reach out to ferran@capchase.com and mention that Houghton Street sent you.
Community News & Updates
Houghton Street Ventures
Comet featured in Notion Capital’s Cloud Challengers 100, a list of the top 100 software startups in Europe. Other alumni companies include: Surfboard, Performativ, Autone, Bastion, Ambr, and Arbonics
Big Deals
Pier - raised a $2.4m Seed led by ACME Capital
Simplyblock - raised a $2.75m Seed led by 42CAP
Pluto Markets - raised a $2.6m Seed led by Magnetic Capital
Packmactic - raised a €15m Series A led by EQT Ventures
TrusTrace - raised a €22m Series B led by Circularity Capital
Rasa - raised a $30m Series C led by PayPal Ventures, Accel and a16z
In the News
Aster were in the news after they raised $2.4m for their neonatal care platform
Pluto Markets shared their pitch deck in Business Insider which they used for their recent $2.6m seed round
Rasa featured in TechCrunch with their enterprise platform for conversational Gen AI agents
Simplyblock, were in EU Startups to talk about their solutions to improve the carbon footprint of data centres
Meet the Team
If our paths cross or if you’re swinging by London, come visit us in the LSE library - we’d love to catch up, let us know!
Paris - 29-30th February - Hannah hosting an event for French funds on ESG, let us know if you’d like to come along on the 29th at SciencesPo
New York - 18-22nd March - Hannah delivering ESG training, meeting LPs and founders
Best,
Hannah, Adam, and David
Great stuff guys - keep it up!