Morning Innovators ⚡ In less than 5 minutes, we’ll cover…

🥳 The best funding opportunities, events and jobs in the Start-Up world this week
📰 This week’s biggest news stories in the Start-Up world
🎁 How this Start-Up is making instant gifting easy
🏷 How doing the opposite of what is expected wins you new customers
🕵️ A tool that connects agents to your data stack, safely

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to Baobab Ventures’ new $15m fund to back global Pre-Seed + Seed technical Startups.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

🔋 Future Energy Ventures have just raised a €235m fund to invest in energy tech startups across the globe - pitch the team here!

🌊 Indigo Capital Partners have just raised a €125m fund to back Seed - Series B businesses in enterprise SaaS, AI, Deep Tech, SpaceTech and OceanTech - get in touch here!

🥅 GoalVest Advisory have just raised a $10m fund with a focus on early-stage companies across AI, SaaS, FinTech, Defence, Climate and Consumer - connect with the team here!

We now have a community of thousands of Start-Ups and Founders, here are the hottest Start-Up job opportunities from the Innovators Uncensored community on our very own Start-Ups Job Board!

💼 Start-Up Jobs

👷 Full Stack Engineer, Tano
🎬 Creative Strategist, Stocked
🎨 Lead Product Designer, DevAlly

❤️ Lovable plans app store with its own ‘Apple Tax’, leaked pitch deck shows. Sifted

🤔 Company backed by Donald Trump Jr.’s firm nabs $620m government contract. TechCrunch

💾 Andy Jassy says Amazon’s Nvidia competitor chip is already a multi-billion dollar business. TechCrunch
 
📱 Nothing to open £3.8m ‘community investment round’. UKTN

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Every year we get to experience the craze of Black Friday, and often, retailers feel like they HAVE to give Black Friday discounts.

So, the team over at BatchLDN decided to take a stand by looking Black Friday right in the eye and doubling their prices! Not only did they do the opposite of what has become expected of retailers on Black Friday, they rented a truck with a screen on the back that read F*ck Black Friday.

Plenty of members in the retail community have rallied to show their support of this stunt, and it’s gained the Batch team plenty of new eyes on the brand.

How can you do the complete opposite of what’s expected in order to get eyes on your brand?

Each week we highlight our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our Start-Up community have recommended.

Pylar connects agents to your data stack, safely. Connect to any datasource, define exactly what an agent can see, turn those views into custom MCP tools, and publish them to any agent builder - with full observability across every AI deployment.

PRSNT — Rebuilding the Future of Gifting, One Instant Surprise at a Time

Making Instant Gifting Easy

Prsnt is a gifting marketplace built to make sending a gift as easy, and instant, as sending a text.

On the C2C side, it’s a beautifully designed app that lets people send real gifts to friends in seconds. Behind that simple experience is a massive marketplace of hundreds of retail brands and a near-limitless stream of gift inventory.

On the B2B side, Prsnt becomes a full enterprise engine: a turn-key platform that allows companies to send anything from a single thank-you gift to one million rewards at scale. Prsnt manages everything - ideation, planning, brand permissions, inventory, legals, fulfilment, reporting, and support.

It’s gifting infrastructure, delivered like a product, not a process.

Meeting the Co-Founder - A Business Built on Long-Standing Trust

David and Omid weren’t matched through a founder marketplace or thrown together by circumstance. They’ve been friends since their teens.

In fact, David jokes that he was Omid’s brother’s first ever accountancy client. The partnership didn’t form in a boardroom - it formed through years of shared interests, creative thinking, and a mutual obsession with design. That early trust later became the backbone of Prsnt’s culture.

Going Viral From Day Zero - How They Got Their First Users

Both founders come from design backgrounds, brand and product, and they approached Prsnt with a simple philosophy:
Make the product itself viral. Not the marketing. The product.

Every time someone sent a gift, a new user was created.
Every new user could send another gift.
Every gift required someone else to open the app.

A built-in loop.

David and Omid doubled down on this idea until Prsnt became a naturally viral engine with multiple network effects stitched throughout the system. They’re also unapologetically obsessed with growth hacking - real, mechanical, behavioural growth hacking.

The result?
Their first users didn’t “arrive.”
They flooded in.
Thousands every month. And that trend is still moving in one direction.

And if a founder can’t growth hack?
David’s advice is simple:
Use the Bullseye Marketing method. It works.

Scaling: From a Viral App to an Enterprise Partner

Once the consumer traction was clear, Prsnt looked upmarket.
The breakthrough wasn’t complicated:

“Make ourselves useful to companies with millions of customers.”

They did just that - offering enterprises a way to send gifts at unbelievable scale with zero operational friction. The viral consumer UX became a corporate tool, and the corporate side became a major revenue engine powering the business forward.

What They Learned Along the Way

Prsnt was built on experimentation, speed, and a willingness to get things wrong - fast.

A few of David’s core truths:

• Nothing works exactly how you expect - so move with the chaos.

• Mistakes are gold if you learn instantly and don’t repeat them.

• Scope down relentlessly.
  Make the minimum viable commercial objective your North Star.

• Start less. Finish more.

And if he could go back?
He’d be even tighter on financial discipline and burn rate. Brutally tight.

Funding the Business - From Bootstrapping to a £500k Raise

Prsnt began as a self-funded project. The founders built until they had metrics that were real, repeatable, and scalable.

They then raised around £500k, and the company is now cash-positive.

The early money came from proving value to companies significantly larger than themselves. When they finally approached investment, they went with SEIS focused VC SFC Capital, who match-funded an angel round. They initially aimed for £250k but ultimately closed nearly £400k through that structure.

A later follow-on round came quickly from existing angel - another sign of a company that delivers on its promises.

The Hardest Part of the Journey

David doesn’t sugar-coat it:

Getting people to try a new product is a slog.

There were brutal days - the kind where “the floor opened up and ate us whole,” as he puts it.
The UK fundraising market was another grind.
And then there were the inevitable mistakes that come with building something from scratch.

But resilience became part of the culture.
Laugh at the chaos.
Dust yourself off.
Grin.
Try again.

The Biggest Lessons

A few standout principles that define Prsnt’s DNA:

• Reach out to the biggest people in the world.
  Especially the ones you think are too busy or too important. Some will reply - and those replies can hand you the elevator straight to the C-suite.

• Forgive yourself.
  Forgive others.
  Move on quickly.

• Don’t live in the future.
  It’ll arrive soon enough.

And what would David change if he started Prsnt all over again?

“Cheesy… but nothing. Not a single thing.”

Because every misstep, every risk, every chaotic day played a part in building a business that now delivers joy, for consumers and enterprises alike, instantly.

Next week I’ll be highlighting another awesome Start-Up, as well as sharing all the usuals including funding opportunities, Start-Up news, plus plenty of awesome tips, tricks and tools.

P.S. Connect with me on LinkedIn…