Founders Factory

🏥 Founders Factory has launched a new cross-border healthcare accelerator with Chicago-based @NorthwesternMed, one of America’s leading healthcare systems. The partnership will bring Europe’s top AI and deeptech health startups into the world’s largest healthcare market 🇺🇸 AI is transforming healthcare, from earlier detection and chronic disease management to research acceleration and operational efficiency. Through this four-month programme, selected pre-Series A startups will gain direct access to: 🔹Northwestern Medicine’s 11 hospitals, 5,400+ physicians and 200+ outpatient sites 🔹A partner-track to accelerate customer discovery, deployment and commercialisation 🔹Use case development & pilot execution with Northwestern in Chicago and The London Clinic in the UK 🔹A Residency Week in Chicago for customer roundtables and commercial discussions with Northwestern Medicine, organisations in the US healthcare ecosystem and connections with US investors 🗓 Applications close March 31, 2026 👉 Apply here: foundersfactory.com/northwestern-m… #HealthTech #AI #MedTech #Accelerator

Today, Founders Factory joins HSBC, Third Derivative and the Venture Climate Alliance at the Philanthropy Asia Summit in Singapore - as part of the Future Industries Partnership. This particular session, Startup to Scale Up: Accelerating the Deployment of Climate Solutions in Asia, goes into the practical questions that determine whether capital reaches the solutions that need it. The panel consists of practitioners working across the full capital stack, from early-stage venture to institutional deployment: 🔹 Natalie Blyth, Global Head of Sustainable Finance and Transition, HSBC 🔹 George Northcott, Co-Founder & President, Founders Factory 🔹 Roy Torbert, Head of Programmes, Third Derivative 🔹 Sara Simonds, Executive Director, Venture Climate Alliance Southeast Asia represents one of the most significant and complex climate deployment environments in the world with enormous emissions exposure and rapidly growing economies. The session is designed to close the financing gap between the capital available and the projects ready to receive it. The Future Industries Partnership brings together Founders Factory, HSBC, Third Derivative and RMI to connect early-stage climate and deep tech ventures with major industrial operators across the region. 📸 Photo from yesterday’s opening event #PhilanthropyAsiaSummit #Ecosperity #ClimateTech #SustainableFinance #FutureIndustriesPartnership #Singapore

Tonight in Singapore, Founders Factory and HSBC are hosting the Industrial Innovator Programme Gala The evening brings together founders, investors and industrial operators with the time and context to have genuinely useful conversations. The evening opens with remarks from Gilbert Ck Ng, HSBC Singapore Head of Banking, followed by a keynote from Natalie Blyth, HSBC's Global Head of Sustainable Finance and Transition - on the role of catalytic capital in unlocking first-of-a-kind technology at industrial scale. This will be followed by a panel discussion on Beyond the Blueprint: Catalytic Capital and First-of-a-Kind Technology Finance - moderated by Founders Factory CEO Henry Lane Fox, with perspectives from: 🔹 Matt Hessey, HSBC Sustainable Finance 🔹 Pekka Santasalo, Head of Growth & Ventures, Rio Tinto 🔹 Pavina Adunratanaseea, Founding Partner, ArkTerra Partners 🔹 Peter Majeranowski, CEO, Circ The discussion focuses on what it takes to finance and deploy emerging industrial technologies beyond the pilot or proof of concept into the infrastructure decisions that determine whether a technology reaches the market or stalls in development. The evening closes with an Innovator Showcase, with three ventures presenting to the room: 🔹 Nanoweave - Javier Berrocal, CEO 🔹 VyCarb - Garrett Boudinot, CEO 🔹 Nandina REM - Karina Cady, CEO We are proud to be hosting this alongside HSBC as part of Ecosperity Week - one of Asia's most significant gatherings at the intersection of capital, sustainability and industrial innovation. Tomorrow we will be at the Philanthropy Asia Summit with the Future Industries Partnership. Get in touch if you are in Singapore this week and want to connect with the team. #IndustrialInnovator #SustainableFinance #ClimateTech #Singapore #Ecosperity

Last week, eight founding teams - selected from 800+ applications - took to the stage at R[3]sidency Demo Day, closing out 16 weeks of building to pitch to 100+ international investors. The programme, created by @fabric_vc, @coinbase , @base, @animocabrands and Founders Factory, confirmed the central motivation of the accelerator; that the machine economy is here, and these are the startups building it: 🔹 @autodotfun_ : a non-custodial AI-powered wallet turning plain language into executed positions across spot, perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenized equities and yield, all from one interface. 🔹 @kash_bot : the first prediction market protocol embedded natively in social media feeds, letting anyone predict on real-time headlines by simply quote-posting. 🔹 @robinmarketsxyz : institutional-grade financial services for prediction markets, enabling users to earn DeFi-native yield on long-dated positions without leverage or surrendering exposure. 🔹 @polldotfun : the betting layer for group chats. Create a bet, fund with Apple Pay, share with friends and automate settlement inside iMessage or Telegram. 🔹 Parabol Labs: building at the frontier of the Machine Economy. 🔹 @Unifiedmargin: collateral mobility infrastructure letting asset managers use crypto assets as collateral to access traditional financial markets in a cross-margin setup. 🔹 @betterasaweb : where founders and their communities build, fund and earn from shared projects. When anyone can build a product, Web is how you bootstrap distribution. 🔹 Lexifina: a platform built bottom-up for core law firm operations, giving partners full visibility of the AI drafting process - prompts, citations, tool calls - to assess model decision-making and track how juniors are using AI. 🔹 @rosetta_hl : the infrastructure layer for institutional on-chain yield, already routing $300M+ across HyperEVM and Base, generating 9.01% APY over a 72-day benchmark window on a $100M cohort without leverage. The programme received support from the Department for Business and Trade, reflecting the UK's growing position at the intersection of Web3 and AI and the depth of the ecosystem forming around it. Congratulations to the full cohort. #R3sidency #Web3 #AgenticEconomy #MachineEconomy #DemoDay

Will AI make insurance cheaper? Our fintech director Olly Betts put the question to two founders building at the intersection of AI and insurance. Tim Graham of Malcolm, part of our venture studio with Aviva, argues the operational costs of serving insurance should fall significantly as AI removes the distribution and administration overhead that currently sits between a policy and the person who needs it. Freddie Gjertsen of Prompted points out that your ability to find cheaper insurance will improve dramatically - and we already know from price comparison that when people can find cheaper, they buy cheaper. Watch the full video on how AI will change insurance by 2029 👉 youtube.com/watch?v=jH2WzH… #Insurtech #AI #Insurance #AIrails

The clinical consensus on stroke recovery holds that meaningful progress plateaus at six months. Kourosh Sam Kamali, neuroscientist and founder of Myonerv, believes that consensus is wrong and has spent the better part of a decade building the evidence to prove it. In our latest feature, Kourosh argues that the plateau is not a biological ceiling but a function of therapy withdrawal. That the brain remains plastic long after the system stops investing in it. And that the patients written off by conventional rehabilitation - severely paralysed, years post-stroke - represent not a lost cause but a massively underserved market that nobody has properly built for. Topical reading for founders building in regulated industries, for those navigating the gap between clinical research and commercial product, and for anyone thinking seriously about where durable opportunities in European health tech actually lie. 👉 foundersfactory.com/articles/myone… #HealthTech #MedTech #Neurorehabilitation #Founders #DeepTech

With increasingly volatile European energy markets and households locked into standard contracts, the case for community-owned energy infrastructure has become ever more appealing. When households collectively finance a share of a solar park, they lock in the price of the majority of their consumption for up to fifteen years - insulated from the spot market movements that continue to drive energy bills higher. RemoteSolar Co-Founder Michael Schmitz makes the argument from first principles, why the structural weaknesses of the current energy model are creating a durable opportunity for community energy, and what it takes to build the infrastructure to deliver it. Read the full piece 👉 foundersfactory.com/articles/europ… #ClimateTech #EnergyTransition #CommunityEnergy

A full and productive quarter across the Founders Factory ecosystem. Here's a look back at what happened in Q1 2026: foundersfactory.com/northwestern-m… Updates from FF HQ 🏢 🔹 Launched a new cross-border healthcare accelerator with Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine - find out more about the accelerator: 🔹 Ranked #3 in Sifted's 2026 UK & Ireland Investor Ranking, recognising investors backing the region's fastest-growing companies. 🔹 Announced the Hospital to Community Accelerator cohort, delivered in partnership with Innovate UK, supporting ten startups shifting care closer to home, culminating with a demo day in London 🔹 Hosted an AI and critical mineral discovery session at Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) 2026 in Toronto in partnership with TD Bank Group and alongside Unearthed Solutions and the CleanAI Initiative 🔹 Launched the HSBC Industrial Innovator Programme, connecting early-stage climate tech companies with major industrial operators across South East Asia 🔹 Announced Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator Cohort 4 – six new startups selected from 500+ applications, with the global portfolio now having raised $120M in follow-on funding 🔹 Announced the winners of the LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge with Hitachi Construction Machinery, with ten startups selected to pitch in Brisbane in April 🔹 Hosted an Aviva x Founders Factory Pitch Day, bringing together standout startups building across insurance, health and wealth 🔹 Launched Malcolm, a new studio venture building compliant AI agent infrastructure for the insurance industry Highlights from global portfolio 🌍 🌍 Hades Mining raised €15M Seed to build the world's first tech-enabled laser drilling extraction company 🌍 Tembo raised £16M to scale its digital savings and mortgage platform 🌍 WealthAi raised $1M pre-seed to build an AI-native operating system for wealth managers and family offices 🌍 Origin raised a Series B to scale musculoskeletal care for women across the US 🌍 Alomana raised €4M to accelerate its AI operating layer for enterprise execution 🌍 Acre was acquired by ClearScore Group – a major milestone for the mortgage adviser platform built in the Founders Factory studio 🌍 Armada Technologies signed an agreement with TUI Cruises to install its Passive Air Lubrication System, reducing hull drag and fuel consumption at sea 🌍 Nebuly joined the Fastweb Investment Programme, building the analytics layer for enterprise AI interactions 🌍 Venga secured investment to build the operating system for community gatherings and real-world experiences #Q1Highlights #VentureBuilding

🧬 AI-enabled technologies are already evolving healthcare from earlier detection and chronic disease management to faster research and system-wide efficiency. Nowhere is that shift more visible than cancer care, which is moving rapidly from hospital-led treatment to technology-enabled care pathways. As part of our Healthcare Accelerator partnership with Northwestern Medicine, we're exploring the market trends across key healthcare specialties, starting this week with oncology. Four themes we’re watching closely: 🔹 Computational pathology AI is extracting new diagnostic signal from digital slides, improving tumour classification, grading, and biomarker prediction while helping labs manage rising volumes. 🔹 Biomarker-first oncology Treatment decisions are becoming increasingly guided by molecular signatures, with genomic profiling and companion diagnostics shaping care from day one. 🔹 Early detection screening AI From mammography and lung CT to other population screening workflows, AI is boosting sensitivity, supporting triage, and reducing missed findings, especially where radiology backlogs are growing. 🔹 AI workflow + decision support AI tools that can triage scans, support pathology interpretation and help clinicians prioritise cases, reducing backlogs and freeing teams to focus on patients. If you’re building in oncology across diagnostics, care delivery infrastructure, AI decision support or advanced therapies, apply to the Northwestern Medicine x Founders Factory Healthcare Accelerator before the deadline. 👉 Apply here: foundersfactory.com/northwestern-m… #Oncology #HealthTech #AIinHealthcare #DigitalHealth #MedTech #PrecisionMedicine #Biotech #StartupAccelerator

⛏️ One week to go: LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge Pitch Day (Brisbane) In one week, finalists pitch live at The Precinct in Brisbane to an international panel of Hitachi Construction Machinery global executives, investors and Tier-1 mining leaders with three Grand Winners announced across: ✅ Smarter Machines ✅ Smarter Mine Sites ✅ Low Impact & Sustainable Mining We’re also excited to confirm our keynote speakers: Eiji Fukunishi, Vice President and Executive Officer, President of the Mining Business Unit, Hitachi Construction Machinery, who has been instrumental in driving the company's strategy and expansion to become a true solutions provider to the mining industry, focusing on open partnerships and innovative safety, sustainability, digitalisation, and electrification technologies. Dr Neville Plint, CEO of Mining3: a world-leading mining research organisation directed by global mining industry members to deliver transformational technology for productivity, sustainability and safety. Dr Plint has spent his career driving operational performance on mine sites through the development and implementation of new technologies, and brings deep leadership experience across industry and research. He previously served as Director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute (UQ) and held multiple senior roles at Anglo American, including Head of R&D and Head of Business Improvement Projects. Discussions will focus on how to test and trial new technologies faster at site, with international and local industry leaders and investors Rio Tinto, BHP, Chrysalix VC, Main Sequence Ventures, Counterpart VC, IMDEX, Mitsubishi, Bradken, Daiwa, Itochu and JGC Corporation and Amira Global. Other startups from around the world Rithmik Solutions, TALPA Solutions and HINDSITE Industries who have successfully collaborated with Hitachi Construction Machinery will be part of the Demo Zone. If you’re in Brisbane next week and working at the intersection of mining, automation, data and sustainability, we’d love to see you there.

🚨Open healthtech founder roles We’re backing exceptional healthcare founders and researchers who are reimagining how care is delivered, connected, and safeguarded from hospital to home. Over a billion people globally face challenges tied to how healthcare is delivered, from fragmented care coordination and long wait times to limited visibility across patients, facilities and care environments. Whether you’re a first-time founder, researcher, or a seasoned operator building again, this is an opportunity to tackle healthcare’s largest and most urgent challenges including: 🔷Cardiovascular Remote Monitoring 🔷Senior Living & Residential Monitoring 🔷Skilled Nursing Facility Intelligence 🔷Healthcare Cybersecurity & IoMT Protection 🔷Medical Device & Supply Logistics 🔷Capacity Management & Patient Flow Optimisation 🔷Chronic Condition Remote Monitoring 🔷Family & Caregiver Enablement 🔷Maternal Health Innovation We co‑build from the start and provide: - €275k pre‑seed capital to kickstart venture development. - Six months of hands‑on operational support from senior operators in product, commercialisation, fundraising, and engineering. - Healthcare system access, with routes into clinics, hospitals, and industry partners to validate use‑cases and accelerate adoption. - A global founder and investor network, unlocking collaboration and capital. You don’t need an idea or a team to apply - just deep domain expertise, conviction, and the drive to transform healthcare. Apply to build with us here: app.screenloop.com/careers/founde… Or tag a founder, operator, or researcher who should be part of the future of connected care below. #HealthTech #HealthCare #FounderRoles

🚨Founder Roll-Call: we’re hiring founders to lead two new ventures tackling structural bottlenecks in the materials and labour markets for construction, from our office in Berlin. These are rare opportunities for founder-operators who want to build with capital, deep operational support and a major corporate partner: 🛠️ Founder & CEO: GreenCircle - Bankability Layer for Sustainable Construction (Germany/Hybrid) With Vonovia: build the evidence platform that makes sustainable materials bankable through pilots + procurement-ready data that unlock adoption. €760k backing. Apply here: app.screenloop.com/careers/founde… 🛠️ Founder & CEO: MeisterMatch - AI-Native Recruiter for Skilled Trades (Germany/Hybrid) With Vonovia: build an AI-native recruiter for Germany’s skilled trades shortage - WhatsApp/voice onboarding and 48-hour shortlists, with instant demand from 355 live roles. €760k backing. Apply here: app.screenloop.com/careers/founde… If you’re ready to build platforms that compound for people and systems, we’d love to hear from you.

🎉 Portfolio exit: DaySmart acquires Slick DaySmart, a US leader in vertical SaaS and payments, has acquired Slick – the UK payments-led software platform used by thousands of hair and beauty professionals. Backed early by Founders Factory, Slick built modern infrastructure for an industry that was still running on paper diaries and disconnected tools. Their all-in-one platform powers bookings, websites, payments, customer comms, marketing and reporting. 8,000+ professionals use Slick and it has processed £300m+ in bookings in 2025 alone. As part of the combined roadmap, DaySmart and Slick are developing an AI-native business coach to turn real-time platform data into actionable recommendations for salon owners. Huge congratulations to Steph Madgett, Robert Smith and the entire Slick team. #SaaS #Exit #PaymentProvider

🚀 Announcing Rio Tinto Mining Tech Accelerator Cohort 4. These six new mining tech startups will be tackling the unprecedented demand for iron ore, copper, lithium and critical minerals. The cohort will test, pilot and commercialise deeptech powering efficiency. Leveraging AI, advanced chemistry and spatial data to make exploration faster, processing cleaner, and recovery more economical. Selected from 500+ applications, the cohort is built on world-class technical talent from Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard Business School, McGill and the University of Calgary. The new startups and founders are: 🔷Chemshift Technologies Inc. (Calgary, CA): Low-cost lithium refining to transform the North American value chain. Founders: Drew Moxon 🔷 Foresight Spatial Labs (Ottawa, CA): Building the world’s most advanced Spatial SDK for Engineering and Physical AI. Founders: Julian Ramirez Ruiseco, Aevyrie Roessler 🔷Supra Elemental Recovery (Austin, US): Supramolecular receptor platform turning waste streams into high-purity critical minerals. Founders: Katie Ullmann Durham, Jordan Sessler 🔷 Material Difference (Cambridge, UK): Explainable AI that cuts drilling costs by over 50%. Founders: Gabriel Yoong, Luke Cullen 🔷 VOLUNA (Boston, US): Autonomous geochemical data collection providing faster, more accurate subsurface mineral mapping. Founders: Alexander Strange , Aaron Olson, Elias P. Fernandini 🔷 Watergenics (Berlin, DE): AI-driven, real-time water quality monitoring for water-intensive mining processes. Founders: Dr. Liviu Mantescu The Mining Tech Accelerator’s global portfolio has now raised $120M in follow-on funding, including Hades Mining (€15M Seed), Spoor (€8M Series A) and Vycarb ($5M Seed), with three startups now entering deployments in Western Australia. 🗞️ Read more about the new cohort in Metal Tech News: metaltechnews.com/story/2026/04/… #MiningTech hashtag#CriticalMinerals hashtag#DeepTech hashtag#AI hashtag#EnergyTransition hashtag#Innovation

Most early-stage founders make the same hiring mistake, they optimise for domain expertise over drive. In the first from her series on The New Hiring Playbook, Head of Talent at Founders Factory, Raluca Ciobancan argues that the safe hire, the one with the extensive CV, familiar logos, decades in-sector, can be the wrong choice at zero-to-one. In early-stage startups, scrappiness, adaptability and intrinsic motivation consistently outperform industry tenure. Raluca explains: - Why the fastest-scaling companies are hiring for motivation over credentials - The 4-part framework we use to assess founder-grade talent (starting with unfair advantage, not job titles) - Practical ways to apply this to your first five hires: real work tests, structured references, and hiring for complementary pairs 📌 The New Talent Playbook, Part 1: Hire for Drive, Not Domain Expertise Read it on the Founders Factory blog: foundersfactory.com/articles/the-n… #Startups #Hiring #Talent #Founders #Leadership #VentureBuilding #Recruitment

🚀 Investing in Venga, alongside Pico Group, to back the platform reimagining how communities gather, host and monetise real-world experiences. Despite living online, most events are still run through a patchwork of tools across WhatsApp, spreadsheets, ticket links, manual transfers and DMs. Hosting becomes operationally heavy, monetisation is limited, and scaling from intimate gatherings to larger ticketed events is painful. Venga is building the operating system for gathering – a vertically integrated toolset that brings guest management, payments, ticketing, subscriptions, communication and real-time logistics into one seamless experience designed for hosts. Helping organisers turn one-off moments into repeatable, sustainable event-driven businesses. Read the full Investing in Venga article 👉foundersfactory.com/articles/inves… #Startups #ConsumerTech #Marketplace #Payments #Communities #Experiential

Sifted has ranked Founders Factory #3 in its 2026 UK & Ireland Investor Ranking, recognising the investors backing the region’s fastest-growing companies. The ranking highlights companies including Scan.com, Fluidstack, Pinwheel, Tembo, and Xapien as part of the broader success stories behind the data - a reminder that the real credit sits with the founders and teams building industry-defining companies. The full rankings can be found here: sifted.eu/rankings/sifte… #Startups #VentureCapital #Sifted100

🚜🌏 Meet the winners of the LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge Together with Hitachi Construction Machinery, we’ve launched the LANDCROS Innovation Studios Mining Challenge to identify world-leading startups building breakthrough mining technologies across three themes: 🔷Smarter Machines: Automation, operator intelligence, energy efficiency 🔷Smarter Mine Sites: Connected operations, real-time data, decision layers 🔷Low Impact & Sustainable Mining: water, emissions, circularity and reduced footprint This challenge gives startups direct access to Hitachi Construction Machinery’s industry expertise and pilot opportunities, alongside Founders Factory’s global ecosystem of investors and commercial partners. 📍 Next up the startups will pitch live in Brisbane on 16 April to an international panel of Hitachi Construction Machinery global executives, investors and Tier-1 mining leaders. The day will culminate in the announcement of three Grand Winners across the strategic themes.

Launching the latest business from our Venture Studio – Malcolm. Insurers want to tap into the massive distribution potential of AI, but they cannot safely connect 20-year-old legacy pricing APIs directly to consumer LLMs without risking regulatory failure. In using Malcolm, insurers are able to deliver their products where their customers want them, compliantly, to unlock the next generation of products, information, and buying experiences. Malcolm modus operandi: ➡️ Universal agent integration: seamlessly handles intent from any major AI runtime (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) or custom Insurtech co-pilots. ➡️ Routing engine: intelligently maps unstructured AI requests into strict JSON payloads, routing them to the exact legacy APIs required for Car, Home, Travel, or SME insurance. ➡️Compliance pipeline: a built-in regulatory safety net featuring an immutable audit ledger, behavioural analysis, and hard-coded product guardrails to guarantee fair value and prevent silent mis-selling. ➡️ Plug-and-play tooling: Malcolm provides a set of off-the-shelf tools and components that allow you to design your own AI experiences and control the user journey. Read more about our new studio venture and founder Tim Graham: foundersfactory.com/articles/launc… #VentureBuilding #Startups #Insurtech #AgenticAI #AIAgents

🚀 Congratulations to Alomana on a €4M funding round to accelerate Alo, its AI operating layer that goes beyond simple assistance, focused on enterprise execution. The round is led by CDP Venture Capital SGR (Corporate Partners I – ServiceTech), with participation from Italia Venture I – Fondo Imprese Sud, Kairos Ventures (ESG One), Gresilent Holdings, Italian Angels for Growth (IAG) and Club degli Investitori. Alomana deploys a universal intelligence layer working across data, documents and applications, elevating AI from helpful chatbot to repeatable execution. Over the past year, Alo has been implemented across finance, manufacturing and pharma, supporting workflows like risk and security, financial controls, operational automation and advanced analytics, delivering real operational gains. Alomana joined the Founders Factory and Mediobanca MBSpeedUp Accelerator in 2024, and it’s been exciting to watch the team build toward production-grade enterprise deployments. Congrats to Giuseppe Ettorre, Daniele Ligorio and team. #VentureCapital hashtag#EnterpriseAI hashtag#AIAgent

🎥 Last month we closed out our Hospital to Community Accelerator, delivered in partnership with InnovateUK, with a Demo Day focused on moving care closer to patients and communities. Over 12 weeks, founders worked alongside our partners and specialists to pressure-test early to mid-stage solutions built for real-world implementation. The energy in the room reflected a shared reality across the wider system that shifting care into the community requires tools that improve access, reduce burden on clinicians, and deliver measurable outcomes. Our cohort presented across diagnostics, triage, rehabilitation and care coordination: - Sensore: automated pressure ulcer prevention mapping - Papcup: non-invasive cervical screening - Arcus Dental: digital dental check-ups from home - Punto Health: AI-powered dementia management platform - Auracare: AI triage for primary care providers - Dotplot: early breast cancer detection from home - Myonerv: wearable device to monitor and treat stroke-induced paralysis - Circe: clinical group therapy platform for women - William Oak: integrated diagnostics for nutritional deficiencies - Lifeyear: a modern operating system for cardiac care Huge thanks to everyone who joined, supported, and helped push these solutions closer to deployment. Watch the recap video below 👇 #HealthTech #NHS #CommunityCare #DigitalHealth #Innovation #Startups #UKRI