HBSAAL Newsletter December 2019

INTRODUCTION Dear Friends and Members,

It is my pleasure to share with you the first HBS Alumni Angels of London (HBSAAL) newsletter.

With over 5,000 alumni in London we play an important role in helping foster an increasingly vibrant and economically important start-up ecosystem. Our local Alumni chapter was launched in 2011, and in that time our members have made investments totalling £7.2M (excluding secondary investments) in over 40 companies. We all know that angel investing requires patience and a portfolio mindset, so we are delighted with notable exits such as Stupeflix and DogBuddy along with significant up-rounds from recent investments such as FlatFair, Seldon, Urban and Pavegen. This past July five companies that received investment from our members were shortlisted for the UK British Angel Association (UKBAA) awards. HBS alum Romi Savova of PensionBee won Best High Growth Woman Founder. Our investors bring more than just cash they also bring a strong network and valuable business experience.

We are all committed to life-long learning and our educational events have covered topics ranging from thematic investing in artificial intelligence and fintech to practical tips on angel investing. We had a successful pitch event on Nov 19th, and on Nov 27th we hosted a panel discussion with some of the most successful angel investors in the UK. This was hosted at McKinsey & Co’s new UK headquarters.

We will also shortly be introducing you to the wider HBS Alumni Global organisation where you can gain access to syndicated deals from HBSAA Chapters, such as New York, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Paris and Brazil along with access to global educational webinars.

We are a volunteer organisation and we are indebted to them for their time and commitment to our community. We are always looking for new volunteers, especially in marketing, investor outreach and deal flow. We also encourage you, our members, to continue investing. And please spread the word by inviting your network of sophisticated investors to attend our events. And of course, we are very open to ideas on how we can better serve you.

We wish you all a happy festive season!

Sincerely,

Simon Greenman, MBA 1999

Co-Chair, Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of London Club

RECENT EDUCATIONAL EVENT: ‘AI AND MACHINE LEARNING LEADERSHIP’

Two years after we first dove into Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Leadership, we revisited the topic in front of a vibrant full house on May 14th, kindly hosted by Taylor Wessing.

Kenneth Cuckier, the Senior Editor at The Economist and our Moderator for the night, kicked off the debate by engaging the audience and challenging the panellists on key questions such as are only the US and China leading the AI race? Do small companies stand a chance? How disruptive will AI be within the next 5 years? Will AI just rip through the labour market and create a job apocalypse?

Sana Kharegnani (Head of the UK Government Office for Artificial Intelligence) gave us some critical insight about the UK government’s AI vision by placing it within its social context. Steve Crossan (Venture Partner at FirstMinute Capital) and Simon Greenman (a Founder and Partner in Best Practice AI) provided broad and balanced perspectives on AI while Dr Marc Weiner (CEO and co-founder of Faculty) explained how AI actually works from a technical standpoint.

RECENT PITCH EVENT: 19th November 2019

On November 19th, the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of London (HBSAAL) held the third and last pitch event of 2019. This pitch event was moderated by Rohan Pradhan, the COO of Deliveroo. During the event, four high profile startups presented their pitch: Lake Parime, Pepper, Sook, ZOA Robotics. Many thanks to Taylor Wessing for hosting us so graciously.

Rohan Pradhan, COO of Deliveroo Rohan is responsible for the company’s sales and account management across its 13 countries. He has been a member of Deliveroo's executive team since 2016. Prior to this, Rohan was a founding team member for Prime Now 3P, Amazon's 1-hour delivery service in the US and was the lead PM for Prime Now's European expansion. Many thanks to Taylor Wessing for hosting us so graciously in their event space.

Pitch companies

The four companies that presented were:

(1) Lake Parime is involved in the design, manufacture, and operation of high-performance computing systems powered by clean energy. The company’s ‘Powerbox’ solution (a data-centre housed in a shipping container) enables wind and solar farms to generate an extra income by utilising power that cannot be economically stored or sold to the grid. Lake Parime offers a service that turns energy into money - the data centre and service to end-users is fully managed by Lake Parime. Contact Sath Ganesarajah - [email protected]

(2) Pepper is the UK’s market leading B2B SaaS platform transforming the customer experience in hospitality with mobile. Creating merchant branded apps for hospitality companies, Pepper modernises the customer journey, while gathering actionable date for direct mobile marketing. Working with over 100 companies in the UK, US, Canada and Australia in over 600 locations, Pepper has recently signed partnership deals with Square and Coca Cola to expand rapidly in the US. Contact Simon Kelton - [email protected]

(3) Sook offers a solution which maximises the utility of retail units allowing multiple different users to occupy them flexibly and affordably across a week. Sook does this by transforming empty shops into digitally enabled spaces that allows anyone to brand the space exactly how they want to at the touch of a button. This reduces the costs and waste of physical fit out and allows multiple tenants to make use of the space at different times of the day. Sook has been operational at its pilot site for six months and is launching its second site, supported by Legal and General, in January. Contact John Hoyle - [email protected]

(4) ZOA Robotics develops commercially-affordable high-performance robots that enables Inspection as a Service for industrial customers. ZOA’s Inspection Service removes humans from hazards, increases the frequency and reliability of data acquired, helps plant managers schedule maintenance and alerts asset owners to impending failures before they occur. By solving stairs ZOA acquires multi-sensor data on all assets in an industrial site and provides asset health information through an intuitive Dashboard to plant managers on a subscription basis. Contact Thiago Azevedo - [email protected]

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HBSAAL SUCCESS STORIES We would like to congratulate a number of previous HBSAAL startup laureates for their continued success and for their nominations at the 2019 UK British Angel Association (UKBAA) Awards under the following categories: • PensionBee - Best Investment in Fintech, and Best High Growth Woman Founder • Dogbuddy - Best Exit of the Year • Flatfair - Best Investment in Fintech • Urban - Best Scale Up Team of the Year • Seldon - Best Investment in Deep Tech

PensionBee CEO Romi Savova was named ‘Best High Growth Woman Founder’ at the 2019 UKBAA Angel Investment Awards PensionBee is an award-winning online pension provider founded in 2014 by our CEO Romi Savova and CTO Jonathan Lister Parsons. They have transformed complicated pension transfer processes that typically take months to complete into a simple five minute process via a smartphone, and helped thousands of people save for a better retirement. PensionBee raised seed funding with the help of HBSAAL in March 2015, before launching to the public later that same year. They now count over 60,000 active customers with over £650 million in assets under administration. https://www.pensionbee.com --- DogBuddy, the leading UK dog sitting marketplace, was acquired by Rover in October 2018 DogBuddy, founded in 2013 by Richard Setterwall, raised seed funding through HBSAAL in February 2014 and went on to appoint one of the HBSAAL investors as Chair. The company went through a number of further successful raises through 2014 - 17 and a merger to grow to become Europe’s leading marketplace. They have facilitated over 1m dog nights through 25,000 vetted dog sitters. In October 2018 DogBuddy was acquired by Rover.com, the US-based global leader who has raised over $300m funding to date. https://uk.dogbuddy.com --- Flatfair, the leader in deposit free renting, raised $11m eighteen months after HBSAAL pitch Flatfair lets landlords offer "deposit-free" renting to tenants. Franz Doerr co-founded Flatfair in 2016 with “a focus on making renting fairer and more transparent for landlords and tenants". HBSAAL helped Flatfair raise its initial funding in November 2017. In August 2019, the London- based fintech raised $11m in a funding round led by Index Ventures. With this capital, Flatfair is hiring data scientists, business development specialists and product engineers, and is building new features and expanding its platform.

Flatfair recently won Tech Startup Business of the year at the GoTech Awards and was named “exceptional” in the Best EA (Estate Agents) Supplier Guide 2020. www.flatfair.co.uk --- Urban, the European leading online wellness and massage marketplace, raised $10m in May 2019 Urban, the number one wellness app in Europe, operates in four cities and lets you book wellness services on demand, including massage, osteopathy, facial and nail services. Founded in 2014 by Jack Tang and Giles Williams, Urban benefits practitioners and customers alike. On Urban, practitioners take home 72% of bookings and customers are able to choose between trusted, pre-vetted practitioners.

Urban raised its initial funding through HBSAAL in March 2015. In May 2019, Urban raised a $10m Series B with the ambition to add new services, expand to more cities, and become a “one-stop-shop for on-demand wellness services”. The round was led by Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV) and included an earlier equity crowdfund, and two of Urban’s previous backers. https://urban.co/en-gb/ --- Seldon, the machine learning deployment specialist, raised $3.4m ten months after HBSAAL pitch Alex Housley founded Seldon Technologies Ltd in 2014 with a simple yet ambitious aim: accelerate the adoption of machine learning to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems. Since then, Seldon has achieved 38% month-over-month growth and 170,000 installs. Seldon Core is at work on Google, RedHat, and IBM ML platforms. Its fast-growing global network is founded on a community of Artificial Intelligence specialists across 90 countries.

The business has seen exciting growth and has built the team to 19, including a new Sales Director (ex Oracle) and a ML Engineering Director (ex Eigen). Seldon Core, the open-source model serving platform, is seeing strong organic traction including multiple new enterprise customers. In May 2019 Alibi was released, a standalone library for XAI that brings together a variety of leading algorithms with a consistent API and high-quality reference implementations.

Further to the funding raised at the March 2018 HBSAAL pitch event, Seldon closed a $3.4m seed round in December 2018, led by Amadeus Capital alongside Global Brain, Techstars Ventures and other existing investors. Seldon is now raising a Series A for US expansion and to grow a new GTM team focusing on sales, solutions engineering, and customer support. https://www.seldon.io

UPCOMING HBSAAL EVENTS Save the dates!

March 3, 2020 - Pitch Event

Our next pitch event will take place March 3rd, the location, moderators and pitching companies will be revealed closer to the event date.

March 17, 2020 - Educational Event

Our next educational event will take place on March 17th and be hosted by Taylor Wessing. The agenda will be communicated in the new year.

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UPCOMING HBS ALUMNI EVENTS

January 29, 2020 British Friends of Harvard Business School Annual Dinner to be held at the Carlton Club. Guest speaker: Sir Harpal Kumar - speaking on medical innovations and cancer research.

February 6, 2020 Visual Presentation of Quantitative Data by Alex Selby-Boothroyd, Head of Data Journalism at the Economist

HBS New Venture Competition - Europe Startup Teams

The HBS Club of France invites you to participate in this year’s HBS New Venture Competition.

The competition is open to HBS alumni with early-stage ventures. It starts at the regional level in Europe, after which the winner will advance to the global semifinals and finals in Boston with a chance to win over $100,000 in cash prizes!

Use the link below to apply by noon January 27, 2020.

APPLY NOW

Disclaimer

The Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of London (HBSAAL) is not a venture fund, investment bank, broker/dealer, investment clearinghouse, investment portal, or any other form of investment advisor, and is not registered with the Financial Conduct Authority. Any information distributed by HBSAAL, its officers and its members is for information purposes only and is not intended to be, and is not, an endorsement, approval or other recommendation with respect to any securities and/or investments. Dissemination of information does not constitute an endorsement of the accuracy or adequacy of the information.

Potential or actual investors are responsible for obtaining all necessary information for evaluating the relative merits and risks of an investment, as well as engaging their own investment advisor if deemed to be appropriate. HBSAAL is not responsible for, and shall have no liability for, any investment decisions. The entering into of any investment transaction will be with the respective company without involvement of, or participation by, HBSAAL. Potential or actual investors understand that any investment they may make entails substantial risks and need to be able to bear the complete loss of any such investment.