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 building the infrastructure layer for startup funding
🪞 How a simple mirror trick can guarantee everyone in your area knows about you
📝 An AI tool that does your to-do list for you

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to the 43North startup competition with 5 early-stage startups getting $1m for 5% equity.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

🌊 Wave Ventures have raised a new €10m fund to back Europe’s next wave of Founders at the earliest stage with cheques of up to €300k - connect with the team here!

💸 Y Combinator are accepting applications for their Fall 2026 batch with successful applicants receiving $500k in investment - apply here!

🏔 Park Rangers Capital are looking to write cheques of up to $250k into companies building community around their product - reach out 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, B12
🧙 Technical Chief of Staff, Apheris
👷 Product Engineer, Maker

📈 Series D funding rises 308% in first half of 2026. Sifted

🚀 SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60bn in stock, days after blockbuster IPO. TechCrunch

🔌 US Government pulls plug on Anthropic’s most powerful AI Models. TechCrunch
 
🚫 Social media to be banned for under 16s in the UK. UKTN

Meet NOAN: The Intelligent Operating System for Founders

Still wrangling scattered docs and glorified spreadsheet CRMs? NOAN is your escape hatch. NOAN replaces outdated sales, CRM, project management, and marketing tools - powering your business development with a living, intelligent system controlled by you and AI.

Automate the repetitive. Ditch the manual busywork. Instantly surface the insights and actions that actually drive growth. NOAN keeps your knowledge, strategy, and growth engine in sync - so you can focus on building, not babysitting your tools.

Ready to leave chaos behind? Discover what your business can do when it runs itself. 

We’ve partnered with NOAN to offer readers 20% off the first 3 months by using code #UNCENSORED20

Try it now, or book a demo here

Marketing can sometimes be so unbelievably simple, and MAGI have shown just how simple a solid marketing campaign can be.

MAGI is a cafe in Spain that prides itself on how good their products look (and taste). So, if people come to your cafe because your products look good, how do you get more people to see them? Ideally, whilst keeping costs low.

Simple, just install a branded mirror right outside the cafe so friends can take selfies with their products in the branded mirror and share them everywhere for you - FOR FREE!

Before you know it, everyone in the local area has their eyeballs on your product and you’ve barely lifted a finger.

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.

Bond is an AI Chief of Staff for executives. It connects to your tools, learns how your company works, and turns scattered tasks into a self-managing to-do list that always knows what you need to do next. You can ask Bond to prepare you for your next meeting, draft a follow-up, send an email, create action items, identify blockers, surface risks, or delegate tasks to team members.

🚀 ThatRound: Building the Booking.com for Startup Fundraising

Raising capital is one of the most painful parts of building a company. Founders spend months sending cold emails, chasing introductions, and trying to decipher which investors are actually relevant to their business. Brad experienced those frustrations firsthand and built ThatRound to change the process.

ThatRound is a fundraising marketplace designed for UK startups. Bringing together Founders, angel networks, syndicates, SEIS and EIS funds, and venture capital firms, the platform helps both sides find each other far more efficiently. Rather than relying on outdated database filters, ThatRound uses AI to understand the qualitative preferences that really drive investment decisions, matching Founders and investors based on factors that go far beyond sector and stage.

The ambition is simple: become the infrastructure layer for startup funding in the UK.

From First Employee to Co-Founder

Matt Thomas wasn't originally a Co-Founder. In fact, he joined as ThatRound's first employee after being identified through a headhunting process.

Matt brought deep experience working with startups and fundraising, and it quickly became clear that he shared Brad's obsession with fixing the broken early-stage investment ecosystem. Within six months, Brad realised he was working alongside one of the best operators he had ever met.

One evening, while both were attending a black-tie event, Brad asked Matt to officially join him as Co-Founder. He said yes, turning what had begun as an employer-employee relationship into a true partnership.

Winning Both Sides of the Marketplace

Because ThatRound is a two-sided marketplace, acquiring customers required two different approaches.

On the founder side, Brad relied on highly personal outreach. Having raised money himself, he understood the value of receiving genuinely useful messages during a fundraise. Whether through LinkedIn, email, or direct messages, the approach was simple: lead with value and solve a real problem.

On the investor side, years spent building startups and running investor syndicates meant many of the initial relationships already existed. Those warm introductions helped get the marketplace off the ground, but the bigger challenge lay in figuring out how to scale beyond the founders and investors already in their network.

Building Network Effects From the Ground Up

The breakthrough came from growing both sides of the marketplace simultaneously.

ThatRound intentionally focused first on the most fragmented part of the market: early-stage investing. Angel networks and syndicates provided the initial proof of concept, before expanding into SEIS funds, EIS funds, VCTs and venture capital firms.

Every new investor joining the platform increased its value for Founders. Every new founder made the platform more attractive to investors. Those network effects became the engine behind growth.

Alongside marketplace expansion, the team layered on SEO, PR, outbound campaigns and content. Being active participants in the UK startup ecosystem has also helped drive awareness, with the team regularly attending founder and investor events across the country.

Interestingly, paid acquisition has not been a major focus. Brad believes the economics are difficult for an early-stage marketplace, and would rather invest resources into improving the product itself. As a result, word-of-mouth referrals have become an increasingly powerful growth channel.

Their goal is clear: become the infrastructure that startup fundraising has been missing.

Why Timing Matters More Than Ideas

One of Brad's biggest insights is that ThatRound simply couldn't have existed a few years ago.

The challenge with fundraising isn't filtering investors by stage or sector. It's understanding all the softer variables that influence investment decisions: Founder profiles, routes to market, theses, and even where investors sit within the lifecycle of their funds.

Traditional databases were never capable of handling those nuances. The emergence of large language models changed that.

Looking back, Brad's main regret is not hiring an AI specialist sooner. With the matching engine sitting at the heart of the product, he believes bringing in dedicated AI expertise earlier would have accelerated development significantly.

Betting Personal Capital Before Raising External Money

Before bringing in outside investors, Brad funded ThatRound himself using capital generated from the exit of his previous company.

The early team accepted reduced salaries and deferred compensation in exchange for equity, ensuring everyone involved genuinely believed in the long-term opportunity.

Earlier this year, the company closed its pre-seed round in just two weeks. The EIS-qualified round was backed by twenty angel investors from Aligned Syndicate, with Brad leading the process personally.

For him, the raise represented more than capital. It was proof that others shared his conviction about the opportunity.

Raising From a Network Built Over Years

When it came to external funding, Brad didn't need to start from scratch.

As Co-Founder of Aligned Syndicate alongside Harrison Faull, he already had relationships with more than 100 active angel investors. Naturally, those existing connections became the foundation for ThatRound's first institutional backing.

Ironically, ThatRound itself wasn't used for the pre-seed raise. The network already existed.

However, Brad fully intends to use the platform for future rounds, believing founders should experience the same infrastructure that he hopes every startup will eventually rely upon.

His advice to founders raising capital is straightforward: focus on active and aligned investor groups rather than spraying cold emails across the market. That's how fundraising actually works, and it's exactly the process ThatRound was built to simplify.

A Painful Lesson That Sparked the Mission

One of the most difficult experiences in Brad's entrepreneurial journey happened long before ThatRound.

While raising money for CROSSIP, the non-alcoholic spirits company he Co-Founded, Brad was introduced to a fundraising intermediary who promised access to wealthy family offices in the Middle East. After paying a significant upfront fee, the introductions never materialised.

When Brad eventually approached the investors directly, none of them had even heard of the intermediary.

The experience was frustrating, expensive, and ultimately revealed something much bigger. Almost every Founder he knew had a similar story. The fundraising ecosystem had developed a predatory layer sitting on top of the legitimate one, and early-stage Founders often lacked the experience to tell the difference.

That experience became one of the driving forces behind ThatRound. Every investor and fundraising service on the platform is vetted, and Founders are able to leave reviews based on their experiences. Brad believes this level of transparency should have existed years ago.

Building Faster, But Never Blindly

Looking back, Brad's biggest lesson is that fundraising deserves to be treated like any other critical business function.

Too many Founders underestimate the cost of doing it poorly. Saving money on fundraising support often results in far greater costs through lost time, distraction, and missed opportunities.

Another lesson came from an early board meeting, when an investor challenged Brad with a simple question about his own business that he couldn't answer. The message that followed stayed with him: as a Founder, it is your job to know.

That principle has only become more important in the age of AI. Tools can accelerate execution, but they should never replace understanding.

If starting ThatRound again, Brad wouldn't change the core thesis. He would simply move faster, hire AI expertise earlier, and begin sharing the company's story publicly from day one.

Because after experiencing firsthand how broken fundraising can be, he believes Founders deserve something better, and ThatRound exists to build it.

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…