Firstminute capital is a seed fund backed by numerous unicorn founders and chief executives. The firm invests globally at the pre-seed and seed stages.
Brent brings extensive venture capital and founding experience, having co-founded Founders Forum Group, firstminute capital, and Founders Factory alongside two unicorn exits. He currently serves as general partner at firstminute capital and co-chair of Enterprise Britain.
The seed round was co-led by Fly Ventures and firstminute capital with participation from prominent angel investors.
"Current AI systems are great at generating code to complement a codebase, but they can’t reason about software as a complete system. Reasoning requires understanding and modelling the environment to ensure language models work reliably. We’re building something fundamentally different – an AI that understands not just how to write code, but how to turn the description of a user’s intent into reliable, production-ready solutions. Beyond the deep tech element to building such a system, we’re also reimagining how the right product experience should look like. In the private beta of our product CodeWords, we noticed how the users’ main role was shifting to more of a project manager or product owner."
The pre-seed round was backed by investors including firstminute capital and Tuesday VC.
"Building my first startup straight out of university and scaling it to a team of over 500, I knew we had to become an effective learning organization. Yet I couldn’t find a simple way to equip our teams with the learning opportunities they needed to continuously grow their skills, learn more, and move faster."
The financing round was co-led by Speedinvest and firstminute capital to help double the startup engineering team.
"In one case, a machine learning engineer used Tenyks to identify the root causes of 80% of their algorithm’s failures. These findings helped them deliver higher quality results to their customers because of the significantly improved system performance. Moreover, future new deployments can be onboarded in half the time because the engineers can now focus their efforts on alleviating the key bottlenecks,"
The seed round was led by NfX and Galaxy Digital to support global expansion and team growth.
"Few things are as impactful on economic growth, the human effort, and technological innovation as financial services. If we’re to continue to grow as a society, we need to make sure our financial systems are following suit. Crypto is one of the most promising technological frontiers for advancing finance and payments. For years however, the industry was focused on speculation, creating products like crypto exchanges. Unlocking crypto’s use cases seemed like an afterthought. Now we feel it’s time for the industry to start delivering useful applications and Ramp is here to make the mainstream transition to crypto much easier."
The Cambridge-based semiconductor IP supplier raised the funds to scale its engineering and commercial teams in Asia and North America.
"What excites us about Agile Analog is the potential for scale. Every other analog IP supplier is restricted to selling a limited range of standard IP products. But because Agile Analog’s unique technology enables it to create the IP that the customer wants, it can satisfy a wider range of customer requirements, and integrate more functionality into a chip design. As a result, the company is not limited by the size of today’s analog IP market – Agile Analog’s addressable market is potentially as big as the analog chip market. That is a huge opportunity which OMERS Ventures is pleased to help Agile Analog explore."
The funding round was led by firstminute capital and will support the development of new products beyond the DK-One.
"This is one of the most highly-anticipated stages of our business and a really important step. We’ve spent time talking to our customers and industry specialists, and seen huge enthusiasm for DK-One’s potential. Now up and running, this will be the first time we can use a pre-production machine to demonstrate the DK-One’s commercial and nutritional benefits in the real world and thus demonstrate our vision for the future of food. I am proud of our amazing team for the work they’ve done to get this far this quickly, despite the challenges of the pandemic. We are all really excited to begin fulfilling our customer’s expectations."
The seed round was led by Ocado with participation from Hoxton Ventures, firstminute capital and Taylor Brothers.
"At Karakuri, we are dedicated to providing smart new ways to create and prepare fresh personalised meals. Consumer eating habits in and out of the home are changing rapidly as demand increases for healthier options that match specific dietary requirements. This growth in menu personalisation is putting huge pressure on restaurants, cafes and other food retailers. These providers have historically relied on identically mass produced meals to maintain their profit margins. By using robotics and machine learning, Karakuri’s systems provide localised micro-manufacturing within an existing restaurant, retail or commercial kitchen. Our systems prepare personalised meals onsite in real time to the exact requirements of each customer. At the same time, our technology aims to minimise food waste, packaging and distribution costs and all of the associated environmental impact."
