2025 Investment Letter

Written By Amir N

Welcome to our fifth annual investment letter.

Wow. 2025… was busy. Very busy professionally, personally (we got a puppy) and for our portfolios, so let’s dive into it.

In this year’s letter we will cover the following topics:

  1. Our professional updates

  2. Investment Philosophy

  3. LP Investments

  4. New Angel Investments

  5. Follow-on Investments

  6. Dividends

  7. Portfolio funding rounds

  8. Exits!!

  9. Higgsfield. The fastest SaaS to 100m ARR in History!

  10. Selling our pro-rata

  11. Overall performance

1) Our professional updates

Last year we updated you on Amir buying Saepio which he now runs as Co-CEO. Growing Saepio has kept Amir very busy and Saepio also did it’s first acqusition this year.

PS Saepio has >1,000 clients in Europe, including a large number of famous scale-ups (Wayve, Monzo, Trade Republic, Dojo Payments etc). They use Saepio for things like (NIS2, CIS18, etc) risk assessments, pen-tests, or buying GRC platforms like Drata or Cyber Security software like Crowdstrike. The first portfolio company to use Saepio is ComplyStream. If you or any of your portfolio companies need Cyber Security, please reach out to Amir!

PPS Claire thinks this is very cringe-y to include.

Last year we also wrote about Claire setting up Haylo Ventures. Haylo Ventures then setup Haylo Labs and used it to acquire a British micro LED manufacturer Plessey, the UK’s leading innovator in microLED display technology, where she is now Chief Growth Officer. Expect some very exciting announcements from Claire in this space in 2026.

As we are now both business owner/operators, this has had a massive impact on the time we had to deal source.

So the few things we have invested in, came to us. So thank you for all the deal-flow and please keep it coming! If you have any very early stage UK investments, which are ideally SEIS, please let us know.

All this led to a very big surprise, which was us being honoured by being awarded Angel Investors of the Year by the UKBAA. We wrote a short story about this. We presume this award relates more to the previous volume of investments and the sheer amount of support we give our investments.

As such, thank you to all the fellow angels, founders and VCs, who felt us worthy of sharing dealflow with and nominating us for this award.

2) Investment Philosophy

We slightly ammended our investment principles in 2025, as we have seen investments with great user engagement (hinting at PMF) not being able to get to venture scale. As such, our principles are:

  1. Is the problem in an area we understand, can evaluate and (potentially) add value to?

  2. Is the problem described a real one that needs to be solved (and can lead to a large enough result) ?

  3. Is the solution being pitched, a possible and likely solution to the problem?

  4. [MOST IMPORTANT] Is the founding team capable of executing on the solution and do we think we can work harmoniously with them to help them.

Ultimately the terms of the deal must also reflect the early (and risky nature) of the investment and (ideally) be SEIS eligible.

3) LP Investments

We did not make any new LP investments this year, leaving us with 3 funds which we are in, 1 of which we are starting to see distributions back from:

4) New Investments

2025 was a very light investment year and our 3 investments were pre-seed, UK based and SEIS eligible.

Sylvi

Sylvi is perfect example of our early stage investing. A first time and solo founder, that’s never worked in a hot startup, with no connections in the industry, trying to disrupt an entrenched leviathan. This was a round we put together after we decided to invest.

Sylvi is aiming to take bits out of the language learning world of Duolingo through taking an AI powered penpal approach. Sylvi is run by Tom a solo founder, who built, launched and marketed the app to having meaningful MRR and profitability but was looking to fund to scale.

We were very excited about this this opportuntiy to disrupt a market led by multi-hundred login streaks by people who still can’t speak fluently and quickly helped Tom put together a super angel round for his pre-seed.

Elyndra

Our 2nd investment was into Elyndra which is building SaaS solutions for child care providers. We have a personal connection to this space and so know that solutions are needed.

We invested in Marcus the founder, as he is the cheat code. He has a banking and data science background, his parents run childrens care homes (and so know a lot of the PE roll-ups in the space) and he has a side business placing carers in homes, giving him access to the buyers of Elyndra.

Own Kind

After being introduced to Ruaraidh the founder of Own Kind, he patiently explained to us the world of Clienteling technology in the social commerce domain. After getting to understand the problem being solved and accepting that it’s a worthy one, we asked to see all of Ruaraidh’s sales data.

Our analysis showed that he had excellent GRR and NRR stats, very healthy organic growth, a strong pipeline and very low churn. In fact all were better than he told us, convincing us to invest.

5) Follow-on Investments

Late in 2025, we completed a follow-up investment in ComplyStream. We arranged their pre-seed, when it was just an idea and have seen them go live, get their first paying customers, have their first renewal (and upsell), launch new modules and hire a strong team.

This investment was a closed round to existing angels at a significant mark-up, enabling ComplyStream get to ARR size required for a large seed.

6) Dividends

An interesting side note has been Amir’s investment in OakNorth which he did as an early employee. OakNorth has been profitable since year 2 and has now paid out dividends in both 2024 and 2025.

Though these are low yield, a very interesting development for privately held scale-ups, which are close to IPO but not quite willing to do so but are profitable.

7) Portfolio funding rounds

2025 started very slowly for funding rounds and then in H2, we saw a wave of raises across our portfolio.

Notable raises in 2025:

8) Exits!

Curve - We have been friends with Shachar the founder of Curve for a long time and indirect investors via Outward Fund I. In November 2025 Lloyds Banking Group aquired Curve in what can only be described as quite a ‘noisey’ process. Late last year we made a large investment into Curve in the form of convertible debt.

As the acqusition price ended up being lower than the amount raised, the majorty of investors sadly ended up being wiped out, including early crowdcube investors. As our investment was debt, we were top of the stack and as such first paid out and with considerable interest.

So very unfortunate circumstances, making it hard to celebrate a decent return for us, reiterating the need for all retail investors to understand preference stacks.

PS Note: the acqusition is still awating regulatory approval, which is now expected in Q2 (and for all external ‘noise’ to die down).

JKS Pubs (Cadogan Arms, The George and The Hound) - In December we saw the pub JV between JKS restaurants and a few angel investors sold through a MBO. This was a covid era ‘safe’ investment we made and ended up being a 2x return. Amir will miss being able to walk into a pub and saying “he’s an investor in it” (or emailing the JKS team asking for a last minute GymKhanna reservation).


9) Higgsfield. The fastest SaaS to $100m ARR in History!

We invested into Higgsfield AI early last year when founder Alex reached out to Claire, as they were colleagues at Snap. We’ve been big fans of the product from the beginning, with Amir using it to create children’s stories with our girls or for his cringeworthy LinkedIn content.

So as users / fans and knowing how good Alex is at execution, we quietly had decent hopes for Higgsfield AI.

Upon launch, every single hope and expectation we have had, has been exceeded. Exceeded by a lot. But we’ve not been able to talk about it, as we always respect our portfolio founders wishes, only talking about their achievements, after they have.

Alex has been very cautious about talking to the press (though there is a very recent and excellent YouTube video here), so our updates below are all taken from what you can Google:

Higgfield became the fastest company to hit $100m ARR ever. It took 5 months. Lovable needed 8 months and Cursor 12 months. Additionally on Black Friday they did $1m in new ARR.

Not sure who revelead this one, but Higgsfield rejected an acqusition offer from Meta.

Also Higgsfield become a (paper) unicorn. Didn’t even make a fuss about it!

PS Amazingly there are some newer and even more startling updates, but we can’t share them until Alex does!

10) Selling our pro-rata

Just as in 2024, we sold a small amount of our premption pro-rata allocation, under the terms of a bare trust, to a family trust. It was for Howbout’s strategic round.

I.e. Our names remain on the cap table, we fund the startup from our account but part or all of the investment would be funded by a SFO/MFO, who under the terms of a bare trust would own the tax obligations and slightly less than 100% (i.e. minus our fee) of the allocation they funded.

At the moment we are doing this without charging carry and so purely with an upfront allocation fee.

If you are interested in doing something similar with us as our portoflio matures and our allocations massively increase, please reach out.

Note: We only sell our pro-rata pre-emption rights, if the founders agree, regardless of what our rights are. As such, we did not offer allocation in Higgsfield’s Series A but if Alex allows it, will do so for the Series B.

11) Overall Performance

We didn’t see any more start-ups shuttering in 2025, though we can imagine this happening to 2 more in 2026

So at this stage of the 25 tech investments where we have invested at the earliest stage (so excludes Curve and JKS Pubs), this is where they stand:

  • Strategic before Series B - 1, 4% - Howbout

  • Series A - 3, 12% - Lapse, Higgsfield, Konvi

  • Seed / Series A Bridge - 5, 20% - Algbra, GlobalComix, Konvi, ID Wise, Creator OS

  • Seed - 6, 24% - Yurtle, Firenze, Omada, Sooper Books, Homefans, HomeCooks

  • Still on Pre-Seed - 6, 24% - OnTime, ComplyStream, Push That Button, Sylvi, Quiver, Elyndra

  • Acquired - 1, 4% - AURA Fertility

  • Shuttured - 3, 12% - FROW, Aisle 3, Bunsen

  • Total - 25

Statistically, these results are to be expected, so nothing to worry about but they have created a red flag for us in our investment thesis. We will not invest in a founder that struggles to raise money (this is proving to be a sign of future repeat pain) and/or has a very unproven TAM for the market they are entering. 

 

PS

As always we use AI to create an image for our annual investment letter. This year’s image was generated by CHatGPT.

We took our photo from the angel investment awards and used the prompt: “Can you please make this photo of Claire and I into a manga picture instead?”

If you go through the images for each of our annual investment letters, it’s a really good tracker of AI progress!

Amir N
Next

2024 Investment Letter