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 turning cartoons into reading time
⚽️ How not sponsoring the main event can get you the most attention
📧 A tool that becomes your email native assistant

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to Seedcamp’s new $220m first cheque fund, looking to back Pre-Seed and Seed stage companies.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

🔂 Tapestry VC have raised a new $80m fund to back repeat Founders, with a focus on doing more European deals - connect with the team here!

🤖 Ruya Ventures have just raised a $50m fund to invest in startups across deeptech at the earliest stage - connect with the GP here!

💰 Guinness Ventures are writing £1m - £5m cheques into EIS eligible businesses across Consumer, Tech and Health - pitch 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

🧑‍🎨 Product Designer, AIOS
🧑‍💻 Product Designer, Maze
👷 Founding Engineer, CultureTest

🧑‍⚖️ Klarna wins $1.97bn antitrust lawsuit against Google. Sifted

⛔️ Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models. TechCrunch

🐕 Corgi, the buzzy Y-Combinator backed insurance tech startup, says it didn’t steal an open source product. TechCrunch
 
🚀 UK Government to invest £580m in new defence technology. UKTN

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Continuing last week’s theme of whacky World Cup sponsorships, we’ve got Rexona’s referee armpit campaign!

The football World Cup draws in billions of viewers every time, which means the headline spots for sponsorship cost MEGA bucks. So, A number of brands are starting to get creative. Rexona, the deodorant brand, have sponsored the armpits of the officials. Every time one of the officials holds up the board to let everyone know how many minutes have been added on, everyone sees the Rexona sponsorship right in the deodorant sweet spot underneath the armpit.

If you’re looking to sponsor a big event, how can you sponsor something super relevant very creatively?

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.

Supafax is an email-native assistant that learns how you work and prioritises your inbox, drafts replies, and schedules meetings end-to-end.

🚀 Caterpillar Captions: Turning Cartoons Into Reading Time

Most parents want their children to read more. Most children just want to watch their favourite cartoons. Caterpillar Captions bridges that gap by transforming screen time into reading practice.

The company has developed an AI-powered captioning system that overlays children's TV with Literacy-Grade Captions and Reading Nutrition Labels, helping children improve their reading while watching the shows they already love. Rather than asking families to choose between entertainment and education, Caterpillar Captions quietly combines the two.

For parents, it's an effortless way to support literacy. For broadcasters and streaming platforms, it improves engagement, retention and trust while adding genuine educational value.

From Lockdown Frustration to a Global Literacy Movement

The idea was born during Covid, when Founder Henry Warren and his Co-Founder found themselves trying to homeschool their children while juggling work and everything else that came with lockdown.

With backgrounds in education, they became increasingly concerned about declining literacy levels. Instead of trying to convince children to spend more time reading, they focused on a behaviour that already existed: watching TV with subtitles.

After Henry shared research about subtitles and literacy on Twitter, the response was extraordinary. The post went viral, attracting support from well-known names including Stephen Fry, Jack Black and Sandi Toksvig, eventually reaching around 150 million people worldwide.

As broadcasters began asking what subtitles designed specifically for reading development should look like, the team realised there wasn't an existing answer. That question ultimately led to the creation of Caterpillar Captions.

Proving the Concept on the World's Biggest Children's Platforms

Some of Caterpillar Captions' first major customers included Akili TV in Kenya and Moonbug, the company behind CoComelon and Blippi.

Working with Akili TV, the team launched a dedicated "Read-Along Hour" after school each weekday. Within just two weeks, children's viewership for that slot increased by almost 15%, while parent co-viewing rose by 39%.

The results reinforced a simple insight: parents care deeply about literacy, especially when it doesn't require extra time, effort or constant encouragement.

The partnership with Moonbug took a different direction, helping create a literacy-focused YouTube channel that has since grown to more than 12 million subscribers and billions of views.

Perhaps the most powerful part of the model is its simplicity. Children aren't being asked to change their behaviour - they're simply learning while doing something they already enjoy every day.

Scaling by Solving One Problem at a Time

As the business has grown, Henry discovered that selling into large organisations wasn't about convincing people the idea was valuable - it was about making ownership obvious.

Almost every department within a broadcaster saw benefits, from product and marketing to accessibility and CSR. The challenge was deciding who should actually buy it.

That led to an important shift in positioning. Rather than presenting Caterpillar Captions as a solution that solved dozens of problems, the team focused on it as a product feature that improves the viewing experience, builds parental trust and increases engagement.

The lesson was simple: big companies don't buy Swiss Army knives, they buy scalpels.

Finding Investors Who Believed in the Mission

Caterpillar Captions has raised just under £500,000 from angel investors and expects to reach profitability this year.

Rather than trying to appeal to everyone, Henry deliberately focused on attracting investors who believed in both the commercial opportunity and the wider literacy mission.

The very first line of the company's investment deck reflected that philosophy:

"This investment is not for everyone. This is only for people interested in balancing both profit and purpose."

That approach resulted in a group of investors who are closely aligned with the company's long-term vision, rather than simply chasing financial returns.

The Biggest Lesson: Speak to the Parent, Not the Child

One of the team's biggest early mistakes was assuming children would actively seek out literacy-focused content.

The reality was very different.

No seven-year-old wakes up excited about improving their reading skills. Building collections of educational content simply wasn't enough to change behaviour.

Instead, the messaging shifted entirely towards parents.

The proposition became much simpler: Would you like your child to become a better reader without even realising they're practising?

That single shift transformed how the product was positioned and dramatically simplified the customer conversation.

A Billion Readers by 2027

Caterpillar Captions has set itself an ambitious target: helping one billion children improve their reading by the end of 2027.

The company is already reaching an estimated 550 million children through existing partnerships and is currently in discussions with major broadcasters and streaming platforms around the world.

For Henry, the vision has remained remarkably consistent from the very beginning - not replacing books or changing children's habits, but making something they already love a little more valuable every single day.

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…