Investing in Europe’s Top Talent: Behind the Scenes at EUR11 Demo Day
On 27th March 2019, we held our EUR11 Demo Day, bringing teams together from our eleventh London cohort, our second Berlin Cohort and our first Paris cohort.
At Entrepreneur First we believe it matters what the most ambitious people do with their lives and we exist to make founding a technology company the top career choice for the world’s most talented individuals.
We invest in exceptional individuals before they have an idea, before they have a team, allowing them to create companies that wouldn’t exist otherwise. We call this Talent Investing.
This sounded crazy when Entrepreneur First was founded in 2011, but eight years, 1,200+ alumni and 200+ startups later, it looks increasingly obvious.
We believe that talent is globally distributed, even if opportunity is not. That’s why in February we announced the $115m first close of our new global fund, which will help us to back over 2,000 individuals and help build hundreds of new companies over the next three years.
The founders on show at the EUR11 Demo Day are the first cohort backed by this new fund. With teams from London, Berlin and Paris on show, they are living proof that venture capital can scale.
Here’s a look behind the scenes at some of the best moments from the day.
(For full access to all the pitches click here)
Location, location, location
We’ve been running our Europe Demo Days out of Kings Place for the last few years and with Google around the corner and Facebook reportedly on the way, the emerging tech hub in Kings Cross is a fitting setting for our globally ambitious companies to reveal themselves to the world for the very first time.
Every Demo Day the cohort members arrive bright and early, along with the EF team who have been with them since the start of their journey, ready for a final practice pitch before the main event unfolds in the afternoon.
Can you feel it?
In the cool light and of the auditorium, it slowly starts to become real for the founders.
In just a few hours time they’ll be on that stage, pitching their newly founded businesses to some of the leading investors in Europe and the rest of world.
Time to press play on Demo Day
EF Co-Founders Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck open the show by whetting the investors appetite with a quick rundown of EF’s global mission and vision and the progress made in the last few months.
After wrapping up they hand over to EF CFO and General Partner Joe White, who gives a succinct overview of the mechanics of the new $115M Global Fund. Joe even took the time to tickle the audience with a joke on the only thing occupying more attention in the UK than EF’s Demo Day — Brexit.
(Top — EF Co-Founders Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck; Bottom — EF CFO & GP Joe White)
The fabric of an opening pitch
MC for the day was our Europe MD Allister Furey, who did a wonderful job of hyping the audience up for each pitch — and with an EF record 29 companies pitching, he did a pretty good job remembering them all too!
Opening the show takes guts…but Grant Aarons of FabricNano was faultless, weaving an engaging pitch that drew on the past and present of the age-old fermentation process which still powers the $5 Trillion chemical market.
With billions spent making incremental improvements to the microbes that make everything from bioplastics to emulsifiers for your soap and shampoo, FabricNano’s mission to design artificial cells that produce chemicals 100x faster seems like an attractive proposition to us…and judging by the traffic at Grant’s stall after the pitches, we’d say investors agree with us too.
Thrilling pitches from three cities
EUR11 showcased 29 companies from three different Entrepreneur First sites — London, Berlin and Paris — and despite English being a second language for many of the entrepreneurs, the standard of the pitching was higher than ever.
From detecting water leakages in space to diagnosing life threatening infections in minutes, and automating building construction to creating the world’s most realistic artificial voices, this set of companies was the epitome of deep technology, using scientific insight to innovate in the real world.
(Top — Hubert Baya Toda, Leakmited; Middle Left to Right — Oleksandr Yagensky, Fast Biotechnologies; Dora Sabino, Blazar; Bottom Left to Right — Lottie Liebling, Reallm; Yassir Al-Refaie, Seyo; Jonathan Anderson, Candu)
The poise, humour and timing of the founders pitching received plenty of attention offline during the break and online, where people tuned in for our livestream from all over the world.
(Top Left to Right — Dr. Mun Ching Lee, Nanovery; Louis Thibault, Presscast; Maria Silvia Scetta, Deltablock; Middle Left to Right — Mohammad Shana’a, Morta; Joanne Kanaan, Omini; Bottom — Dr. Rayna Patel, Vine Health)
The EF Teams from London, Paris and Berlin watched on in excitement on the front row as the talented people they met six months ago appeared on stage as the cool, calm and collected founders of deep tech companies.
The pitches went down so well, we even had one audience member comment that they’d never seen so few investors off their phones — still, there’s always a few…
Canapés and Capital
There’s no rest for our founders after their pitches — it’s straight to their stands to talk to prospective investors who are interested in finding out more about them and their company.
With fundraising up next, this is the first opportunity for investors to size up the latest batch of deep tech companies from EF and for our cohort members to meet some of the world’s top investors.
Conversations unfold, details are exchanged and meetings begin in earnest as early as the very next morning.
(Top Left to Right — Jonathan Anderson, Candu; Christian Schiller, Cirplus; Bottom Left to Right — Letizia Gionfrida & Suruchi Kothari, Arthronica; Dr. Jerzy Kozyra, Nanovery, Yanwen Chen & Yassir Al-Refaie, Seyo, Dr. Mun Ching Lee, Nanovery)
People power
Talent investing is all about finding the most exceptional people and giving them the opportunity to start a world-class company. But the model can’t work without the hard work of another set of exceptional individuals — the EF team, who source the amazing founders we bring on board and put the systems in place needed to make the programme run seamlessly.
At Demo Day, they were on hand as ever to make everything sure everything ran as smoothly as a machine learning algorithm — from on-site logistics, to managing the livestream and working the room to give investors any additional help and information they needed.
(Top — Demo Day Booklet, created by Georgie Mallett, Marketing Associate; Middle Left to Right — Coralie Chaufour, GM EF Paris; Esha Tiwary, GM EF Bangalore ; Bottom Left to Right — Caroline McGrath, Launch Associate; Luzana Costa, Talent Associate & Ana Lucia Buckman, Head of Investor Relations)
Here’s to EF EUR11!
29 remarkable companies, 59 remarkable founders, 3 remarkable cohorts — pitching in the same location for the first time in EF history.
We’ll always look back at EUR 11 Demo Day with fondness and are looking forward to seeing what these amazing companies from LD11, BE2 & PA2 produce in the future.
