Ten highlights from 2024

Chris Smith
Playfair Blog
Published in
6 min readDec 9, 2024

TL;DR tough years are the new normal in the world of venture backed startups. Despite this, it’s been a strong one, with our founders proving resilient and continuing to grow revenues and close funding rounds. We’ve also grown the team and managed to have some fun along the way.

#1 Closing follow-on rounds

In a challenging funding environment, our founders did an incredible job securing 6 follow-on rounds (5 announced) worth more than $176m.

This year we were delighted to participate in the following rounds:

Nory in their $16m Series A led by Accel with participation from Cavalry, Samaipata and Triple Point Ventures (Business Insider).

Orca AI in their $23m round led by OCV Partners and MizMaa Ventures (TechCrunch).

Passionfruit in their $9m Series A led by Seaya with participation from Firstminute Capital, Cornerstone and Portfolio Ventures (Sky News).

Qureight in their $8.5m Series A led by Hargreave Hale AIM VCT with participation from XTX Ventures, Guinness Ventures, Meltwind, Ascension Life Fund and Cambridge Angels (Sifted).

And celebrate a later stage round being closed:

Starship’s $90m round led by Plural and Iconical (TechCrunch).

#2 Closing new investments

We were active deploying capital into new investments across Europe this year and closed five rounds (same as last year):

NetFabric’s $2.2m round co-led with Founderful alongside angels (Why we invested | EU-Startups).

Recurse ML’s £2.5m round co-led with Seedcamp alongside angels (Why we invested | Seedcamp).

Unannounced round co-led with another European fund in the fusion space.

Unannounced round co-led with another European fund in the disinformation space.

Unannounced round co-led with angels in the AI assurance space.

Excitingly we were able to bring angels into all of these rounds — awesome to have you onboard. We’ve also seen our data driven sourcing strategy surface some very high quality companies ahead of the market.

#3 Promotions

Sheff was promoted to Principal after an outstanding three years at the firm.

And Clare was promoted to Associate and Head of Female Founder Office Hours.

She wrote an excellent piece on her learnings from 18 months in venture.

Yes, it’s a toilet brush…or is it?

#4 New joiners

In the summer, we welcomed Lucia and Felix to our analyst programme after an intensive hiring process. We’re delighted they chose to join us and they have already been making a meaningful impact across the firm.

Check out Lucia’s interview in Business Insider for her experience landing a job in venture.

In the autumn, Matt joined as our CFO to continue professionalising our back office and finance function, whilst supporting our founders on all things financial from models to metrics, recruiting to runway, and more.

During the year, João and Raxita both moved on. João jumped the fence to become Chief of Staff at Legal Fly and Raxita became CFO at growth stage, climate focused fund Blume Equity. Hugely thankful for everything they contributed to Playfair and excited to see them thrive in their new roles.

Side note: if you want to join one of our incredible portfolio companies, check out our Careers Page (94 live roles) or register with our Talent Network.

#5 And one more new joiner

Olivia Ip Smith (aka Jubs) arrived 11 May, almost 2 weeks later than expected 🥰🥰🥰

#6 Founders’ Dinners & more

Collaboration between our founders has gone up a level this year — joint (successful) pitches to client, helping secure manufacturing contracts overseas, sharing successful strategies for fundraising, and much more.

Our bi-annual Founder’s Dinners and summer party allow these fantastic relationships to build and deepen, and have been the best yet thanks for the awesome work of our events guru, Deanne 🙏

#7 FFOH Edition 11 & 12

Two more pan-European virtual events ✅

600+ founders

300+ investors

2,300+ one-on-one meetings

#8 FFOH @ Slush, LTST & WCV:E

To supplement our bi-annual online event, we were back at Slush for a third time and launched at LTST and WVC:E, all lead brilliantly by Clare.

The feedback from investors and founders was extremely positive so we’ll be continuing in person events in 2025.

#9 Founder feedback

This year we started asking founders a simple question to figure out if we are doing a good job on the pitch calls we take:

You recently took a pitch call with [Investor].

We’re always looking to improve the quality of service we offer to founders so please can you rank this interaction from 1 to 5, where 1 is ‘worst’ and 5 is ‘best’, by simply replying to this email.

The average feedback score of 4.7 is a testament to the hard work the team put in every day trying to make Playfair a helpful, supportive investor (even when we pass).

#10 Angel community & Warner Yard events

Our angel community has been a key focus this year — growing our operator/founder network to 90, our open to all community to 250+, and holding a number of events at Warner Yard and elsewhere.

Warner Yard has traditionally been a hub of activity and events, and this year we hit our stride again after a slower return to normal since the pandemic. We hosted the first ever Dads Building Companies, various drinks and breakfasts, portfolio company sessions and more.

Personally, it’s been a crazy year, particularly since May balancing paternity leave and work. I am incredibly fortunate to have such a brilliant team who have supported me at every stage and allowed me to spend so much precious time with my family. Thank you 🙏

You can follow the Playfair team on LinkedIn, Twitter, Forbes and here on Medium.

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Playfair Blog
Playfair Blog

Published in Playfair Blog

This publication features the articles written by the Playfair team and friends.

Chris Smith
Chris Smith

Written by Chris Smith

Managing Partner @PlayfairCapital | Class 25 @KauffmanFellows | Contributor @Forbes

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