EWOR

🚨 𝐃𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐭 (𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮)! ➡️ On March 20-21st in St. Gallen, we will be combining forces with START Global for our biggest ever LIVE Grand Pitch! 🚀 12 EWOR Fellows, each raising between €250k and €5M, will be taking centre stage to pitch to a crowd of top-tier investors. 🫂 Following the main event, we will be hosting an EWOR Community Meet Up with all of our Fellows, Investment Team and Partners. 🎟️ You can get a 20% discount using the code "GrandPitch2000": https://lnkd.in/eunrnzpJ -- 🔜 We can't wait to see you there - DM us if you're coming! #entrepreneur #startup #startsummit

🎙️ Daniel W. Dippold and Petter Made (Co-Founder of SumUp) recorded a podcast with Startup Insider about outlier founders. It’s a must listen conversation for any investors or founders out there who are too focused on products and commercials, rather than what really matters. Check it out, as linked in the comments! — ➡️ This podcast is Episode #1 of a new series which Petter Made will host called “Founder DNA”. 👀 Be sure to keep your eyes peeled as interviews with the likes of Fabrice Grinda (FJ Labs) and Markus Villig (Bolt) are on the way! #startup #founder #entrepreneur #tech

🗣️ Exciting news: Our new Fellow, Dr. Bjol R. Frenkenberger, has closed a €600k round for MIR Insight! 🔎 MIR Insight is an AI-based forecasting tool for manufacturing industries, with an initial focus on textiles, fibers, and plastics. ♻️ For context, the textile industry alone accounts for up to 8% of global CO₂ emissions, driven by 40% overproduction. Bjol’s mission is to tackle this waste at its root by making manufacturing smarter and more efficient. And we believe he will do just that. -- 🎹 Before entering the world of tech, Bjol was a child piano prodigy. At just 12, he won the Austrian National Piano Competition and achieved perfect grades in every subject at school. 📈 After earning a Master’s in Musicology from King's College London, an internship at Bloomberg took him to Japan, where he led business development at FiNC Technologies, a health tech data analysis platform.   🧑🏫 During that time he developed an interest in uncertainty and decision-making in business, which led to a PhD at University of Oxford where he secured over £35k in scholarships and ultimately graduated with Distinction. 💡 While at Oxford, he recognised how advancements in forecasting technology could revolutionise industries plagued by inefficiencies, particularly in manufacturing. That realisation became the foundation for MIR Insight. 🚀 In late 2023, he founded MIR Insight, using proprietary AI to forecast supply, demand, and pricing with up to 97% accuracy; and helping clients to avoid multimillion-euro costs while cutting CO₂ emissions. 📈 In 2024, the company secured €36k in ARR. In the last month alone, they’ve already secured €36k in revenue. With this momentum, MIR Insight is on track to hit £1m ARR in 2025. And with that prospect, the future of manufacturing looks a lot smarter than before. #entrepreneur #founder #tech

🗣️ Exciting update: Onur Demirci, who became an EWOR Fellow 2 years ago, has just hit £40 Million ARR in booked revenue with FINVISE! 🦄 (And with that revenue becoming effective, FINVISE will become a unicorn!) ➡️ FINVISE is the first and only RICS-regulated digital valuation company, specialising in regulated, AI-powered hybrid valuation reports for residential and commercial assets. 🏦 By combining industry expertise with advanced AI, FINVISE delivers fast, accurate, and unbiased valuations for leading financial institutions, including major lenders and banks. 👏 Traditional valuation methods are slow and outdated. FINVISE generates reports in a matter of seconds, a staggering 600,000x increase in efficiency.   🔐 Moreover, as a London Stock Exchange marketplace member and dual ISO-certified (27001 & 42001), FINVISE meets the highest standards of security and compliance.   👀 To meet growing demand, FINVISE is now preparing for a large Series A to scale its team and expand operations. Keep your eyes posted. -- Onur’s achievements are a strong testament to EWOR’s central hypothesis: Rebels, Nerds, and Visionaries create companies with global impact. Before founding FINVISE, Onur: 👨🏫 Became one of the UK’s youngest Senior Lecturers (Associate Professor), with a 5-year tenure. 💸 Spent a decade in the financial industry. ✈️ Spent many years as a cadet in the Royal Air Force (RAF). 📜 Alumnus of University of Cambridge with a focus on the mathematical principles shaping cognitive and pedagogical mechanisms underlying quantitative comprehension and abstract reasoning. 🏡 Alumnus of UCL, with a focus on valuations and the regulatory and strategic aspects of International Real Estate and Planning, accredited by both the RICS and RTPI. If you want to hear more about FINVISE, or Onur, send him a message - he’s always open to chat! #founder #outlier #startup #AI

Why do people in tech mistrust each other? 🔎 Whether in the context of investor negotiations, co-founder agreements or client contracts, Game Theory provides a plausible answer: When two parties have their own short-term self-interests in mind, even if they both think they are acting rationally, they may both end up worse off. The solution? "𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠-𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠-𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞", as Naval Ravikant would put it. ⏩That is, abandon short-term thinking and select a group of business partners, peers, and friends whom you want to trust long-term. The minimum up-shot: you'll be efficient and save time. 👀At least, that is what Daniel W. Dippold thinks. Read his full-thoughts on how trust from the outset and long-term thinking create value in life: https://lnkd.in/eMvtUGAc #founder #gametheory #startup

🗣️ Excited to announce that Ricky Knox has closed a €4.5m round for Prosper! 🚀 Prosper is a wealth management platform for high-net-worth individuals, which uses AI to unlock private markets with transparent, low fees. 📈 First focusing on the €8tn pension savings market in the UK, Prosper already has over €200m AUM and is on track to reach over €1bn AUM by 2026. 🫂 We're immensely proud to call Ricky an EWOR fellow, and it is no surprise that he has hit the ground running with his latest venture. Why? He is the definition of a serial entrepreneur. --   📞 Ricky's first venture was GSM Systems, a telecom marketplace that now operates in over 70 countries and partners with over 170 mobile operators. Today, GSM Systems is run by Ricky's brother and manages 10% of Africa’s spare mobile parts market. 💰 After GMS Systems, Ricky founded Small World Financial Services, which grew to become the world’s fifth-largest remittance company with over €4 billion in ARR before its acquisition in 2018. 💸 In parallel, he built Azimo, a social digital payments platform that has facilitated remittances to 198 countries worldwide before being sold to Papaya Global in 2022. 🌱 With an 8 and a 9 figure exit under his belt, Ricky then launched Tandem Bank, a neo-bank for environmentally conscious consumers. 👏 Under his leadership, Tandem raised over €25 million, expanded to a team of more than 500 employees, and was recognised by The Sunday Times in 2024 as one of the UK’s top 100 fastest-growing tech companies. -- ➡️ Ricky stepped down as CEO of Tandem this year to focus on his two (!) latest ventures: Carbontricity, a marketplace for monetising green energy, and Prosper. (Define "Serial Entrepreneur".) When we asked Ricky why he keeps going, his answer was, simply: People. He wants to make a significant contribution to the value of individual lives. Now, with Prosper, Ricky is looking to democratise wealth management. And with his track-record, we are confident he will do just that. #startup #tech #founder

🗣️ 𝐇𝐔𝐆𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓! 🚀 We will be co-hosting a 𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡 at START Summit 2025 on March 20th in St. Gallen! Why get excited? 1️⃣ 12 EWOR Fellows, each raising between €250k and €5M, will be taking centre stage to pitch to a crowd of top-tier investors. If you are an investor, the message is simple: do not miss out! 2️⃣ Following the main event, we will be hosting an EWOR Community MeetUp where all of our Fellows, Investment Team and Partners will be present. 🫂 This will be a great chance to connect and go beyond the online community events we host throughout the year. ✨ And, of course, the Summit itself is packed with incredible speakers, such as Thomas Wolf (Co-Founder & CSO, Hugging Face) and Matt Cohler (Former VP Facebook & LinkedIn)! -- 🎟️ Lot's more exciting details are to come - but if you already keen, you can grab a ticket here: https://lnkd.in/eunrnzpJ ➡️ Let the countdown begin! #tech #STARTSummit #grandpitch

🗣️ Excited to announce that Dr Sebastian Fox has closed a $2M seed round for Composo! 🚀 Composo is a foundation model for evaluating LLM applications. But unlike other LLM-based alternatives to human testing, Composo offers a no-code option and an API. In short, it's built for non-technical users. With early customers like Accenture, Palantir Technologies, and McKinsey & Company, Composo is set to give enterprises the confidence to deploy GenAI at scale. 📈 We're proud to have supported Dr Sebastian Fox from the jump and can't wait to see Composo grow! ➡️ See TechCrunch's feature article for more information: https://lnkd.in/djRxZYMu

➡️ The next wave of dominant founders will master automation first, people second. At least, that is what Daniel W. Dippold thinks. In the past, people were the primary driver in scaling an organisation. Charismatic founders, like Richard Branson, attracted and retained great talent, and therefore created the most productive companies. Now, founders who are stellar at tech, abstraction, and judging talent (rather than merely attracting it), will dominate the next era of tech ventures. Why? There are two ways of scaling a tech company: People, or tech. Either hire more people, or get one person to do by automating their work with tech. With the rise of agentic AI, no-code tools and custom LLMs, founders who scale organisations primarily through tech will surpass founders who scale organisations primary through people. For Daniel's full analysis, check out this article: https://lnkd.in/eKt6N_qy

🗣️ Excited to announce that Gülce Horataci is joining the EWOR Team as Programme Manager! 🎯 With extensive experience managing early-stage investments across 10+ sectors at top VC funds, Gülce will help make EWOR fully modular (a flexible accelerator with no rigid programming) and optimise our selection process. 🚀 We can't wait to work with you, Gülce!