Watching it, I was struck by the parallels to key strengths that founders must possess: communication, strategic execution, and resilience.

The Power of Communication

The film revolves around the struggle and - spoiler alert - eventual success in establishing communication between humans and aliens. The film highlights the critical importance of understanding and adapting to different communication styles to achieve a common goal. In the film, Louise painstakingly deciphers the alien language, which is based on complex circular symbols, to bridge the gap between two species.

As a founder, mastering your communication style is crucial for the success of your startup. Whether you're pitching to investors, negotiating with partners, or motivating your team, your ability to connect with diverse stakeholders is essential. Effective communication involves not only articulating your vision but also actively listening to others (e.g., user feedback, investor guidance etc). A founder who listens actively and adapts their communication style to suit various audiences can foster collaboration, build strong relationships, and drive their startup toward success.

Strategic Execution & Vision: Seeing the Future, Acting in the Present

In the film, Louise possesses the ability to see the future. This foresight allows her to make strategic decisions that benefit both her present and future. At the end of the film, she uses her knowledge of future events to prevent a global conflict by communicating a critical message to a Chinese general at a decisive moment.

Founders must also cultivate this dual capability: envisioning the future while executing in the present. A clear long-term vision provides direction and purpose (A to Z), but it is the day-to-day actions and decisions that bring that vision to life (A to B). Balancing strategic foresight with practical execution is essential for navigating the uncertainties of startup life.

A good example of this is Katrina Lake who founded Stitch Fix. Stitch Fix is an online personal styling service, with a clear long-term vision of revolutionising the fashion retail industry through data-driven personalisation. Despite the initial skepticism and challenges, Lake's strategic foresight allowed her to execute thoughtfully in the present by leveraging technology and data analytics to create a unique shopping experience. Her ability to balance this long-term vision with practical, day-to-day operations has been instrumental in Stitch Fix's growth and success, eventually leading the company to a successful IPO.

Resilience: Embracing the Highs and Lows

One of the most poignant themes in the film is Louise's decision to have a child despite knowing the future pain of loss. She chooses to embrace the joys and experiences of motherhood, fully aware of the eventual sorrow it will bring.

This theme resonates deeply with the entrepreneurial journey. Founders often face significant sacrifices, enduring both highs and lows. The path to building a successful venture is rarely smooth, and the emotional toll can be substantial. However, the willingness to experience the journey, with all its triumphs and setbacks, is what defines a resilient founder. Accepting the highs with the lows, and understanding that setbacks are part of the growth process, is crucial for long-term success.

Arrival emphasises the importance of adaptive communication, the ability to balance long-term vision with present actions, and the resilience to endure the highs and lows of life. As a founder, effective communication, strategic foresight, and emotional resilience are key to transforming a vision into reality. The best founders embrace the journey, learn from each experience, and stay committed to their mission, knowing that both the joys and challenges shape success.

I'm thrilled to introduce Julius, the visionary Founder and CEO of graswald.ai, as the latest addition to our portfolio at !

In a previous edition of First Look, I discussed the transformative potential of immersive content, such as 3D and XR, as both a final product and a new interface for generative AI. Graswald is at the forefront of this revolution, addressing the costly challenge of 3D model production. Their innovative approach, powered by GenAI, slashes the cost of 3D content creation by over 95% while significantly enhancing visual fidelity. This leap forward is redefining the landscape of 3D media, transitioning from outdated methods to cutting-edge generative AI and NeRF technologies. Graswald isn't just creating 3D content; they're shaping the future of digital creation for both companies and individuals alike.

Julius's journey in the 3D world began in his teenage years, and since then, he's cultivated a global community of over 170k 3D enthusiasts who rely on his tools. His deep understanding of the 3D domain, combined with a compelling vision for the future and a proven track record, makes him an exemplary leader and a joy to collaborate with.

The below is a short conversation where Julius shares his personal story, the evolution of graswald, and the invaluable lessons he's learned as a young entrepreneur leading a groundbreaking venture in the 3D space. Enjoy!.

What is your story?

My early childhood has been very much shaped by art and all its different forms. As you know, I started experimenting in 3D when I was very young, but it wasn't to make money. It was to express myself, to play around with cool new visual things. And I was playing a lot of music as well.

The whole entrepreneurial aspect came later step by step. And I didn't really plan it. I didn't really notice it in the beginning at first either. I was driven and I'm still driven by mainly building something valuable, helpful and useful in an elegant way.

When I was a kid, I was a really huge animal nerd, essentially. So I was a big fan of animals and I started drawing them. And then at some point I started doing them, building them in 3D as a 3D model for a zoo simulation game, actually. So I learned how to do 3D for a computer game with animals in them. And that was my first time.

I started creating more 3D content and I published it online for the 3D community. And I got really amazing feedback from people actually wanting to download and buy my stuff.

What are you building at graswald?

We're all about making 3D as a medium accessible to businesses and individuals that want to use it without the really complicated technical hurdles that the 3D process still entails. I was a 3D artist myself. It's something that it's very manual that you need to learn. It's hard to automate, hard to scale as well.

And this is essentially the problem that we've been trying to tackle. And we started in this entertainment specialist field, building content and tooling to simplify the creation of 3D experiences, scaling this up, making things reusable, using templates to build something in an hour maybe that otherwise normally takes a couple of weeks in a five to ten person team.

We do believe that we're at a point where there is a huge need for 3D because it is such an exciting medium. The demand is really, really high but you can't supply it right now with current techniques and processes. So that's what we're doing, essentially making this scalable by letting brands do this in -house themselves with a tool that is really as simple to use as Canva, for example.

What are your core motivations fuelling your journey and passion for graswald?

First of all, I'm a very visual person. So anything that looks really good and that tells a story that has a visual impact, is really exciting to me. Allowing other people to do this much better and allowing a lot of people to create something really meaningful, that's a really, really cool feeling. That's a really fulfilling kind of thing and that's amazing.

When I was in school I always had like five different hobbies. I was doing almost everything. I was doing art, I was doing sports, I was doing politics, I was interested in almost anything. Essentially what I'm doing right now, founding a company and leading a company is little bit like having to do everything at a very high level. I can, you know, do things creatively. I can do writing, I can work with people, I can help other companies and businesses etc. There are so many things that I'm interested in personally that touch my role in ways that I didn't expect when I started that is really powerful and and yeah just an amazing experience.

What can people reading this help you with?

Any type of support is always nice, right? Even if it's just a “this is cool what you're doing, keep doing it.” We're doing this for people who want to use 3D, who want to build something cool with it. And they are there in the big businesses as well as like on the individual side. And that keeps us going, keeps me going.

Specifically, we're at a point where we're excited to get a lot of feedback for what we're building from companies big and small. If creating photorealistic content automatically is something that you would be interested in, we'd love to speak with you.

The Fourth Turning, written in 1997, theorises that history follows a cyclical pattern with four distinct phases, or "Turnings," each lasting about a generation. It has been eerily accurate in predicting – at a macro level at least – major world events that have shaped societal evolution.

Here’s a summary of each Turning:

First Turning (High): Occurring post-crisis, this phase is characterised by strong communal institutions and weakened individualism. Society unites and optimism prevails, as seen in the American High after World War II.

Second Turning (Awakening): Marked by spiritual revival and the weakening of established institutions, this period witnesses a surge in individualism and challenges to traditional values. The Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s to 1980s, with its cultural and spiritual upheavals, exemplifies this phase.

Third Turning (Unraveling): Institutions continue to decline, and individualism reaches its peak. This era is less optimistic, characterised by societal pessimism and moral debates, such as those seen in the Culture Wars beginning in the mid-1980s.

Fourth Turning (Crisis): A decisive era of major crises leads to the dismantling of the old civic order and the establishment of a new one. It’s marked by reinforced institutions and reduced individualism, akin to the transformations seen during the Great Depression and World War II.

The book suggests that right now we are in the Fourth Turning i.e., a period of crisis. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – the theory posits that such turbulent times, while challenging, are essential for societal growth and rebirth.

It's clear that the world is screaming out for change. The current global challenges and socio-political upheavals are indicative of this. 2024 will be notable for the large number of elections, with 7 of the world’s 10 most populous nations (Bangladesh, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico) voting. Countries that are home to nearly half of the world’s people will hold elections in 2024!

Pattern Matching

A lot of VC is about pattern matching. A pattern you see throughout history is that the biggest changes and the most important innovations don't happen when everyone is happy and things are going well. Changes tend to occur during, and after, a major world event. When people are a little panicked, shocked, worried, and when the consequences of not acting quickly are too painful to bear.

What’s more, crises and periods of change often coincide with the advent of transformative technologies, laying a breeding ground for the emergence of iconic companies that redefine industries. The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis is a prime example, where economic turmoil coincided with rapid technological advancements, leading to the foundation of startups like Uber, Airbnb, and Snap, which capitalised on new digital and mobile landscapes to build billion dollar companies.

We now stand at the cusp of another significant period of change, with the world experiencing several crises and the advancements of technologies like generative AI, spatial computing and more (I’d recommend The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, for more on this). During this time, transformative startups and visionary founding teams can play a key role in shaping the future - in both positive and negative ways.

The pattern is clear: periods of crisis, combined with the emergence of new technologies, create fertile ground for visionary entrepreneurs to innovate and build companies that not only survive but thrive and dominate their respective sectors. The current landscape is an invitation for founders and investors to envision and create the future, echoing the transformative journey seen in the aftermath of previous crises.

Throughout 2024, I will be looking deeper into startups and technologies I believe can help shape our world in a positive way.

Gracia leverages AI to deliver a new type of content – ultra-photorealistic volumetric videos. Gracia follows a thesis which drove my investments into ShapesXR and Graswald => essentially immersive content (3D/XR) as the end output and new interface for AI generated content.

A problem that VR faces right now is a lack of content for non-gaming users. Beyond gaming, VR feels like it lacks a reason for people to come back and this limits growth. Gracia leverages Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) - an AI approach that allows ultra-photorealistic 3D reconstruction. I believe that this technology has high potential to significantly improve content immersiveness across several industries - e.g., sports - and that this will help to solve the lack of content in VR right now. Check out their post on Gaussian splatting video in VR here.

Founding Team - Georgii & Andrey

As mentioned in my post previously, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the motivation and the makeup of this founding team, with help from my friend and fellow VC

What core motivations and personal experiences are fuelling your journey to build Gracia?

• “We love building products that people enjoy using. Our previous experience has led us to believe that we are quite good at delivering great solutions that make people's lives better. With Gracia, having the technology at hand, it was clear that we needed to ship it to the mass audience so people can enjoy this new type of content, comparable only with the offline experience.”

How does Gracia align with your personal passions or sense of purpose?

• “It seems to us that people like us are drawn to building startups instead of launching more traditional businesses because they are inspired by the idea of creating something brand new. It's a truly great feeling to see that you are developing a completely new industry.”

When was the first time you created something and made money from it?

• “My partner and I have been friends since we were in the 7th grade. Ever since I can remember, we were constantly discussing business ideas. However, lacking money and experience, we started our careers in different fields. I went to McKinsey while my partner joined Prisma Labs. After gaining a few years of experience and maturing in our careers, we launched our first startup at the age of 24. We were fortunate to make it successful and achieved an exit just two years after its launch.”

Have you faced any doubts or fears in this process, and how have you addressed them?

• “We were fortunate to be able to balance our full-time jobs with the early stages of our first project. This allowed us to test the waters before fully committing to it. Later, I realised that most career coaches advise their clients to cautiously explore their passions while maintaining their current job, rather than leaving it abruptly. Sometimes, this approach helps in understanding that a certain interest, like enjoying wine, is merely a hobby and not necessarily a career path. More importantly, this method gives you the courage to take the initial steps towards following your passion. These initial steps are often the most challenging.”

How do you solve conflicts or differences of opinion amongst yourselves?

• “Regarding decision-making: It's a rare case when we have the same opinion on an issue. Healthy debates are our way of finding balance. We don’t make important decisions unless we exchange arguments and find a middle ground. Having known each other for 15 years, I sometimes feel that we can predict each other’s positions and arguments in advance. It allows us to be well-prepared for our discussions in advance :)”

How do you define success for yourself and for Gracia?

• “When a company significantly impacts people's lives or habits, sometimes its name becomes a verb (like 'to google') or a noun (such as 'Pampers' or 'Xerox'). We were fortunate to experience this with our previous startup in our local market. I observed random people referring to all QR codes for tipping by our brand's name. It's such a rewarding feeling and a clear indicator of your impact and your company's success. We hope to achieve something similar with this ambitious international project.”

Gracia has raised over 50% of their pre-seed. Contact Georgii (Co-founder and CEO) if you’re keen to chat - georgii@gracia.ai

Deck here.

The core vision remains the same - to give exposure to exciting early stage startups and founding teams.

However, something I personally want to do this year is write a little more freely. You can expect to receive - sporadically - short posts on market trends, technologies and other stuff I find interesting.

I’ll also be partnering with other VCs and focusing my questions with guests on specific areas/topics. For example, in my next post, I’ll dive deeper into motivation and the makeup of a founding team.

I hope 2024 is treating everyone nicely!

Fundraise: $3m ($500k remaining allocation)

Founder: Jia Ling Yang

Existing Investors

Edoardo Gentili, Investor

“We’re incredibly excited to invest in Playground, a platform designed for creators, by creators, to help people access a vast array of communities all-one place without the need to get out the platform. Jia thanks to her domain expertise in this field has created a platform that enables community discovery, live events, and discussion forums, creating opportunities for meaningful connections and lasting relationships. I'm looking forward to working with Jia and the team as they scale to more communities globally

My Insights

Playground stands out as an inventive community-centric platform, looking to solve a current friction point in the community space – the difficulty of forging genuine connections on traditional social media platforms. Jia’s expertise, coupled with a product designed to accentuate meaningful community interactions, presents a compelling proposition. Here are my insights:

Strengths:

1. Founder's Track Record: Jia Ling Yang boasts an impressive background in advertising and social media sectors, providing her with unique insights that inform the platform's design and functionality.

2. Mission: The platform emphasizes real, meaningful connections, differentiating itself from the myriad of other social platforms focused on passive engagement.

3. Growing Traction: With 900 communities onboard, spanning various sectors like art, music, sports, and film, it’s evident that there's an existing demand for Playground's offerings.

Questions:

Why does a Web3 solution solve a Web2 problem? While I understand the advantages of active vs. passive community engagement and the allure of community drops, I have questions surrounding the actual necessity of a blockchain application here. Ultimately, this is a longer-term thesis question boiling down to whether we see a future at the intersection of social media and blockchain.

Conclusion:

Playground's vision and the problem it seeks to address are clear. Whilst I have reservations about the necessary marriage of the problem and the Web3 solution, given Jia’s track record and the platform's current traction, there's genuine potential for it to be a frontrunner in redefining how communities interact online.

Sharing this deal with my network for those interested in pioneering ventures at the intersection of social media and blockchain.

My Notes

Founder

• Jia started her career in advertising as a creative director

  • Activating brands on new media and social platforms

    • Worked on YouTube as a client

    • Consulted internally at Facebook

    • Worked on gaming projects

      • Activision launch of destiny

      • Version 5G innovation lab

      • Collaborated with Niantic

  • Cultural Projects:

    • Worked on the global rebrand of Converse by Nike

    • Shot social for E! Entertainment at fashion week

Team

Problem & Solution

• No way to make real connections on legacy social media platforms as they are for building audiences rather than communities

• They are designed for passive rather than active engagement

• Solution => Community-centric social media platform based on active participation that incentivises meaningful connection

Product

• Web3 community activation platform

  • A place for users to discover communities and people to connect with

  • A place for creators of communities to manage experiences, content and memberships

• User Side

  • Centralises the ticketing, and rewarding of community events

    • Eliminates the need to drop links to other things in the description/chat

• Creator Side

  • Allows creators to track their most loyal fans/members in order to design tiers of the community and reward people with token-gated events

• Front end: one place to discover communities over art music and film – Spotify of communities

• Back end: Tools for token-gated events and chat

• Lightweight creator tools that help to track CRM/engagement

  

Vision

• Social media needs to be reinvented

• Experiences are what bring people together so we need to prioritise them

• Real-life experience is the most important but we can reward and augment this virtually

• By centralising community activation communities will collaborate more

  • Including subgroups collaborating with parent groups

Traction

Business Model

• Free to create a community

• $30/month to use more creator tools e.g. multi-tiered ticketing and rewards tooling

• $199/month for brands as an alternative to ad tools on legacy social platforms

  • Also charged an integration fee

• 7% of ticket sales sold on playground

Fundraise: £1.2m on a £5m Post-Money SAFE (£250k committed).

Founders: Nilsu & Emre

Existing Investors

Alexey Kosachev, CIO at VC Venture

“We invested in Wiser Media because we saw that the founders share our values on promoting culture and knowledge, as well as their ability to achieve success with their idea. The remarkable results in Turkey have given us reason to expect success in other markets, and the team's work during the CultTech acceleration program has validated our intentions.”

My Notes

Team

• Nilsu, Co-Founder & COO

  • Early employee at ‘Behavox’ – an AI-powered compliance platform purely designed for the world’s Financial Services community.

  • First-time founder.

• Emre, Co-Founder & CEO

  • Previously founded an e-mobility company which he scaled to 200 employees and $20m ARR.

• Nilsu and Emre met at university and became close friends. Upon graduation, Emre approached Nilsu with the idea for Wiser over three years ago.

  • Wiser was initially an expert recommendation platform but they uncovered their users wanted to archive content and discover other people’s digital libraries.

• 15 FTEs (all based in Turkey)

Problem

• An overwhelming amount of content is available which makes it hard to consume content efficiently and find content that is interesting and relevant

Solution

• A shareable digital archive of your saved content with AI that recommends content based on your preferences.

Product

1. Content Curation

   • Users can save articles, specific sections of articles, and videos through their phone or browser

   • Wiser tags and categorises saved content into “curations”.

   • Users can share their curations with others

2. Content Discovery

   • Recommends you content that you have already saved based on what you have been reading – e.g. if you have frequently been reading about AI and have unread articles on AI Wiser will remind you of this

   • Recommendations also come from ‘Wisers’, real life experts in their field – e.g. if Wiser knows that a user is interested in cooking it will recommend content chosen by real chefs.

Nilsu on the Roadmap:

Vision

• Become the “Spotify of new media.”

• Winner takes all mindset → Replace all other content curation and recommendation platforms.

Business Model

• B2C → freemium model

  • Free with ads.

  • Wiser premium costs €4 per month.

  • Revenue share with creators who bring paying users

• B2B

  • Companies offer Wiser Premium as a perk of being a customer e.g., a Large Fintech company with 2 million users = £15k MRR.

  • Leveraging brand sponsorships = €50k projected ARR from 2 customers.

Traction

• Launched product in the Summer of 2022:

  • 70k Registered users

    • 30k MAUs; 1k paid users (beta)

    • 1k new users per month

    • GTM → leveraging network effects (i.e., reaching out to tech-focused content creators who bring users to Wiser thereby creating a flywheel).

  • 300 Creators

    • >5 curations in a month

    • Consist of journalists, young professionals, famous people, etc.

    • Flywheel from creators adding their Wiser link to LinkTree.

Fundraise

• £1.2m on an £5m Post-Money SAFE; £250k committed

Fundraise: £1.5m on an £8m Post-Money SAFE (£250k committed).

Founder: Omar

My Notes

Founder

• Omar founded his first social media agency at 17 years old, which he ran for 4 years.

• Following this he founded a more design-focused creative media agency, producing content for clients such as Hilton, Dell and Deliveroo as part of a marketing package.

• Hustler with a desire to build stuff.

Problem

• The current method of creating content for large brands is time-consuming and expensive.

Solution

• AI-augmented shots in minutes. Speed up workflow by 10x industry standard.

Product

1. Generate scene

   Brands input samples of their ‘visual DNA’ which are input into an AI to create similar style themes and layouts for their product.

2. Ship Products

   Brands physically send products to be photographed and digitally input into their themes of choice. Scalability questions here.

   “Live chat to content” experience – brands suggest changes that are quickly implemented via the AI system.

3. Download photos. Pay per photo right now but moving towards traditional SaaS business model.

Vision

• Become the category-defining platform in product photography.

• Eventually want to expand into B2C and creator brands using platforms like Shopify.

Technology

• AI model trained using 4+ years of proprietary data.

• Leveraging open-source models such as Stable Diffusion etc.

• Requires further automation on the photography side to become scalable.

Traction

• £100k legacy revenue this year.

• Onboarding and in talks with large enterprise customers such as Uber Eats, Pepsi and Kylie Cosmetics.

• AOV is £500 per shoot (live chat experience) + £50 per asset produced in the shoot

• 27 Brands on the waiting list 72 hours since the AI platform launched; Onboarded 8 brands so far.

Fundraise

• £1.5m on an £8m Post-Money SAFE; £250k committed from angels

• Milestones

  • Team: hire an AI researcher and account manager for enterprise accounts.

  • Further automate the photography side to open up to the SaaS market.

Fundraise: $1.1m

Founders: Michael Martin & Timothy Wu

My Notes

Founding Team

• Michael co-founded a student media publisher, growing to over 11m social media followers and 8bn video views. He is also a self-taught full-stack engineer and previously built a consumer SaaS product reaching the top 10 mental health applications in the UK.

• Tim is a self-taught AI engineer who used to be a lawyer. He has previously built a legal tech search engine using state of the art techniques in information retrieval and neural search. He replicated a DeepMind research paper within just 6 months of teaching himself programming

Vision

• Augment the entire video marketing lifecycle, from smart storage to creation and distribution.

• Become indistinguishable from a human video editor.

Problem

• If you don’t repurpose content to short form you’re not making the most of your long-form content, but significant time and effort is required to repurpose content.

• Issues with understanding ROI on video content and optimising for socials.

• The pain point is bigger (ie., the process is longer) at the enterprise level.

Solution

• Content repurposing automation

• Smart content libraries

• Content analytics and optimisation

Product

• Users input long-form content (podcasts, videos, interviews etc), and Latte leverages AI to extract the ten most relevant parts and optimises for socials (captions etc).

• ST Differentiation = quality of the product → slicker UX, more accurate subtitles, speaker detection etc. LT the defensibility comes from the data they collect as they win customers and specialise models at each stage of the workflow to provide significantly better output.

• Roadmap / next steps

  • Editing existing short-form content

  • Smart storage and content management

  • Collaboration

Technology

• Proprietary tools around audio processing, segment cutting, scene detection etc.

• Fine-tuning open-source models e..g, LLaMA → Captured 90k data points so far.

• The goal is to bring specialised models in-house on their own infrastructure, whether that be their own foundational models or fine-tuned models.

Traction

• Currently in beta. 1300 users and 12.5k clips generated.

• In the 9 weeks since introducing a pricing model, it has grown to >140 paying customers & $5.5k in MRR.

Market

• Capitalising on the growing trend toward short-form content e.g., TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Spotify etc

• Startups that solve the full workflow and build really good products leveraging AI will win in this space. Whether you fine-tune or build your own models.

GTM

• Social-driven GTM (leveraging Michael’s experience). Receiving a lot of inbound but also reaching out directly on LinkedIn.

• Targeting small businesses where the sales cycle is smaller. PLG approach to enterprise customers.

• Figma approach → Community help grows the product but revenue is driven by larger enterprise embedding Latte in the workflow.

Fundraise

• Raising $1.1m, 80k committed from angels

• Milestones

  • Grow high-quality revenue (PLG driven) → $1m ARR

  • Team: hire engineers to mobilise the data and continue fine-tuning models. Growth hires to hit ARR target.

GDevelop is a no-code game engine that lets you create, publish and monetise a video game without any development experience. Their mission is to democratise game creation.

Deck: Here

Fundraise: £500k

Founder: Florian Rival

My Notes

Team

• Florian is GDevelop’s founder. Former Meta & Google engineer (Android Games devX team).

• 6 FTEs: 3x engineers, 1x product designer, 1x content creator (and Florian).

Motivation

• Florian built the GDevelop prototype ten years ago as a passion project.

• He’s always been naturally curious about how he could make fun games

• Drive → insanely motivated to build something that lets people create amazing games and apps.

Problem

• Gaming is huge but very few people can create a video game like they can a book, video, song etc.

• Why? Fundamentally you need imagination but it’s also super complex and requires a lot of technical knowledge. Even for companies, games are inaccessible unless you're a game studio.

Solution

• Easily understandable no-code creation and publishing tool for games. Available on browser and mobile (iOS & Android).

• Super intuitive and easy. Create a game in 5 minutes here. 

• gd.games → publishing platform where creators are building hit games (high-quality games are being created. See here).

• Tech is open-source which allows GDevelop’s community to improve the product continuously. 167 extensions built by the community; 4.8k stars on GitHub

• Roadmap

  • Leverage GenAI so creators can generate assets and the logic for games from prompts.

  • Go Multiplayer → Increased social features to unlock network effects between games.

Vision

• Moonshot → “The platform where all interactive and gamified media can be created.”

• An end-to-end platform for gaming creation, publishing and monetisation.

Traction

• 200k monthly creators (people building games).

• 21k monthly active games (games users are playing).

• All organic.

Market

• B2C: 3bn gamers worldwide; $200bn annual revenue. 1% of gamers on Roblox and Minecraft are also creators on these platforms.

• B2B: technology has applications beyond the gaming consumer market (promotional games for brands, workshops, presentations, pitch decks etc).

GTM

• People discover GDevelop because they want to create games without knowing how to code.

• Strong SEO —> #1 for “create a game” on Google.

• Active communities on socials (especially Discord & Reddit). Strong WOM acquisition.

Monetisation

• Freemium approach for creators. Create games for free but get more for paid tiers (i.e., levels, multiplayer etc).

• Recently introduced enterprise subscriptions for startups and larger businesses - multiple seats, removing GDevelop branding etc. Currently have 2x clients who want to white-label the platform.

Fundraise

• Raised £1m in May-21 led by Seedcamp with Ascension also participating.

• Raising a £500k bridge to accelerate growth ahead of raising a larger round

  • Accelerate game creation with generative AI.

  • Social features (multiplayer → unlocks network effects between games).

  • Validate monetisation (marketplace + subscriptions + game monetisation).

Neon Wild is a personalised family entertainment platform that has re-invented how stories are told, all powered by patent-pending generative AI avatar technology.

Deck: Here

Fundraise: $1.5m on a $7.5m Post-Money SAFE ($1m committed).

Co-founders: Matt, Stephanie, Matt K & Carlos

Motivation

Providing a platform where any child anywhere can become a hero. We’re building a safe, secure and fun virtual world for the next generation.

Vision

The Roblox for reading; we want to become the go-to family entertainment platform within the growing virtual world ecosystem.

Product

Phase 1: Highly cinematic, engaging and personalised stories.

Phase 2: Playground experiences and worlds built on top of the stories.

Phase 3: Neon Wild Studio; UGC pipeline for creators to build their own personalised stories and playgrounds.

Traction & Feedback

We have a live alpha with 100 families testing the product and 2000+ families on our waitlist. We’ve found that kids love to spend time creating their avatars and parents want to lean into safe virtual world experiences that their kids crave

Market

The no.1 thing kids spend money on is virtual goods and they are spending 6+ hours a day on a screen. What can we learn from the last 20+ years to make these spaces socially and emotionally safe?

We see an opportunity to co-create UGC with parents and their children. I’m excited about this as a parent for my children.

On the tech side, breakthroughs in GenAI have allowed us to turn anyone into a fully animated 3D character, however, foundational 3D models are not something you can get off the shelf right now.

GTM

We’re focused on building trust with parents. We get our message out to parents through both paid and organic channels, whilst also receiving a lot of inbound from parents looking for a safe space for their kids. Longer term, we’re building a community of parents and content creators.

Team

We’re a battle-tested team. I worked with Carlos and Matt at Magic Leap and I met Stephanie at coding school, we go way back! I feel very lucky to have such a strong co-founding team.

Deck: Here

Raising: £2m

Team: Saul, Wojciech, Shuowang & Chung

TLDR/L -

• quester allows for the easy indexing and curation of content by communities. They describe themselves as a database of databases.

• So far, there has been strong traction: 18k MAU, 50% MoM growth, and 40% two-month retention.

• The co-founders met at university and through their first EdTech startup, Doxa.

• GTM is focused on building and fostering communities with monetisation as a key priority over the next six months.

• Their mission is to create a new standard for search, driven by the community and supported by AI.

• Previously raised £240k from Twinkl Hive, CVC arm of the Twinkl publishing firm, as well as an assortment of angels from Ventures Together, including cofounders of Memrise, Onfido, Crowdcube & Let’s Do This.

Full recording available on the Podcast section 👀

Team

Where did you guys meet, and why did you decide to start working on quester? 🏃‍♂️🔨

Saul, CEO

I met Wojciech in 2014 at university. We had similar education experiences and co-founded the largest registered society at the university. I tutored after uni and realised I enjoyed watching how information was transferred from one community to another. I reconnected with Wojciech and co-founded a company called Doxa before founding quester together.

Wojciech, CGO

I came to the UK as a child and didn't speak English at the time. I went to schools that were not known for academic performance, and that encouraged me to do a lot of self-learning/teaching through internet forums like Reddit. This instilled in me an appreciation of the internet as a vast bank of information and a degree of scepticism about how information is conveyed, organised, and made accessible to those who are not experts in a field. 

I went on to study at Oxford. After university, I worked as a tutor while pursuing a master's degree at LSE. Meanwhile, I co-founded Doxa with Saul, which provided mentoring and built curriculums using free online content. Through this, I realised that current systems could be more efficient, appealing and fitting for students in the 21st century, and we wanted to create something more dynamic and engaging. This led to the evolution of quester.

Shuowang, CPO

I met Wojciech and Saul in the summer of 2020 while working as a tutor for Doxa. They approached me about my future aspirations, and I shared that I was interested in starting my own tech company, particularly in the field of education. They suggested I join their team, so I did. Initially, I had a diverse role but eventually settled as a Product Manager. What attracted me to work on quester is that the end goal aligns with my vision of making an impact using technology.

Motivation, Vision & Value Proposition

What is quester and what are you trying to achieve? ✨

We're trying to organise the world's information for Gen Z. 

We've seen many massive online communities build their own equivalents of Google and search engines using other systems like Notion and Airtable. They're good, but they're fragmented, and they need to be better optimised for the purpose of search. 

We want to create the perfect place for these communities to collaboratively curate content they care about so every community can easily access their own search engine.

What is your GTM strategy? 💪

Wojciech: Our GTM strategy is all about building and fostering communities. Our approach is to identify communities with evidence of communal curation and convince content leaders within those communities to shift over to quester and take their audience with them. 

Over time, this creates loops by which more and more members of the community shift into the consumption of that content as well. We plan to apply this approach to communities where we see evidence of communal sharing on other platforms. 

What is your monetisation strategy? 💸

Saul: Initially, we wanted to create a platform where anyone could access and share content for free, similar to how Reddit started. However, we realised that these communities put a lot of time and effort into curating the content, and it is only fair for them to be rewarded for the value they have created. 

Monetisation has become one of our key focuses over the next six months. We want curation powered by membership, similar to Patreon, where you can subscribe to a community and reward them for the valuable content they have curated.

What has been the biggest challenge in building quester? 💪

Saul: Team. Finding the right people, especially a CTO, was difficult and took time and effort. I even had a deadline for when I would give up on finding the right person, but ultimately, Chung approached me about joining the team on deadline day! Without him and other key team members, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Wojciech: Budget. Everything we have done so far has been done at a fraction of what most other companies would spend. Despite this, we have built a strong product and have a growing presence on socials. We have been prudent with our money, which is a great lesson to carry forward, but it's time to double down on what we have.

Product

What are the key features of your current product? 👨‍💻

Shuowang: There are three main features of our product. 

1. quests: powerful lists of resources that can be curated and published publicly for anyone to access. 

2. communities/parties: spaces within our platform where users can set up and invite their friends, give them access roles to collaborate on quests together, add data points, vote and organise their resources to create an online social library of resources. 

3. votable data points: tags that can be attached to any resources or content, allowing users to organise, add data, and structure resources in a useful and meaningful way.

What feedback have you received about quester? How do you incorporate feedback into product development? 👩‍💻

Shuowang: quester users are fearless in giving us their honest opinions. Through TikTok and Discord, users can provide direct feedback on what's working and what’s not.

I set up direct conversations with curators to get their feedback, which I then use to improve our product development. I write up all the feedback in Notion, tag every point made and rank them by priority. This helps to feed into our product roadmap and ensures that we're addressing the most pressing issues on users' minds.

Market

What is key to acquiring Gen Z as a user base? 🔑

Wojciech: Authenticity is key. The age of traditional advertising is ending, and younger users expect more creativity and effort in marketing. I don’t believe in relying on traditional ad-based methods.

We think deeply about our marketing. Where can you add value? What problems are you solving? And where can you add humour and creativity to make that message a lot more convincing and compelling?

What key trends are you are seeing in the market? 📈

Wojciech on Search: we believe search will go through a pretty fundamental change over the next couple of years. Google has struggled with more visual search forms, such as TikTok, where users can find content and learn things through videos. Community spaces, like Discord and Reddit, are also becoming more important as people go directly to their communities to seek advice from people who share the same interests.

Saul on AI: The traditional opinion here seems that as chatGPT and other AI/ML applications are built, people will use them to get all the answers they need. We think those applications will give you factual information, but the key to the next generation of search is AI plus community.

Fundraise

What are you looking to raise now, and what milestones are you hoping to achieve with this financing round? 💸

We are raising $2m. This is what we want to achieve in 18-24 months:

1. User metrics: maintain our growth rate and improve retention.

2. Monetisation: monetise before the next round.

3. Team: build out the development team.

4. Product: integrate AI/ML tools.

Motivation, Vision & Value Proposition

Why did you start Mtion? 🔨

I believe deeply in our mission, and what 3D immersive spaces can do for people in social constructs and entertainment. Virtual environments can be a level playing field for people across borders and boundaries, and as we continue to build the metaverse, we can bridge existing gaps. 

What is it like being a solo founder? 🏃‍♂️

It’s been a wild ride but also a great one. I’m a persistent person, and when I set my mind to something, I execute it with vigour. I have an awesome team who have supported me throughout my journey.

What is your vision for Mtion? 🚀

We are building the metaverse with a utility-focused approach. Similar to Roblox but for the streaming and video game space.

What is your core value proposition? ✨

For streamers, it’s a way for them to differentiate themselves. It provides them with a tool for creativity and monetisation.

For fans, it’s a new way to experience and engage with the streamer through these more immersive, video game-like experiences.

Product

What are the key features of your current product? 👨‍💻

Mtion is a desktop application for streamers that provides a simple interface to create 3D content. Assets can be dragged and dropped into 3D spaces so that the area reflects the streamer. The content designed by the streamer can be published as experiences for fans through the web, mobile, AR/VR, etc.

Demo Video here.

What feedback have you received from your early users? 💪

The feedback we have received has been amazing. We launched our closed beta in early October and streamers using the platform have responded really well. We’re seeing such cool stuff beyond what we expected!

Market

What wins in the metaverse? 🔑

From the user perspective, bridges need to be built between different platforms. To reduce friction points, we need to start thinking about the user experience as multimodal.

Deck: Here

Raising: €500k EUR

Team: Filipe & Bruno

Team, Vision & Value Proposition

Why Crowdclass and how did you meet your co-founder? 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️

We’re university friends! We both studied software engineering in 2005 and lived together for a couple of months.

I have a passion for education and founded an EdTech startup in 2012. We’ve both been involved with the Web3 space for a while, so we started looking at how to build a bridge between the two.

What is your vision and mission as founders? 🚀

Our vision is to transform how skills, learnings and achievements are recognised into what we call 'user-owned, decentralised and peer-to-peer recognition.’

We enable schools to issue certificates with a lower risk of fraud. At the same time, students can own and use them to manage their achievements. Through these certificates, they can collect badges and credentials so future employers can quickly and easily verify their skills and learnings.

What core problems are you solving? ✨

1. The inefficiency in verifying credentials. Companies spend billions of dollars per year on screening services.

2. Many skills and learnings need to be verifiable because they don't come with a certificate or proof of achievement.

   

What is your biggest challenge currently? 🔨

1. Finding PMF. We have been iterating a lot around core needs.

2. The macro envrionemnt. We have become more effective in managing our resources in the best possible way.

Product

What are the key features of your current product? 👨‍💻

We are focused on two segments - courses and events.

Our current product is in private beta. It allows organisers to easily create digital badges and certificates that can be used as verifiable assets, whether for proof of learning or proof of attendance.

On the other side, we have developed a way for the certificate receiver to claim their badges as NFTs and save them in their wallet.

Where is the product going? 💪

We see the product becoming a bigger app ecosystem that serves three core stakeholders: issuers, claimers and verifiers.

We're still very focused on the issuers and the claimers right now. For claimers, we want to add social features (sharing badges, adding other wallets etc). For the issuers, we will provide better analytics, access to APIs, white labelling etc.

And later down the line, we also want to build better verification tools. E.g., a token-gated job that only people with a certificate or set of credentials will have access to.

Market

What is driving growth in this market? 📈

The user-owned and decentralised movement is a key element of growth for us and the huge fragmentation of how learning now accrues. Careers are more dynamic now than ever, and the skills we learn today might be different from the skills we need in 5-10 years.

What are the biggest challenges within Web3 currently? 🕸️

Web3 is the vehicle for our value proposition. How can we leverage Web3 technologies to become as invisible as possible, where people are part of Web3 without realising they are?

The usability of wallets, or how people manage their assets on Web3, has to improve greatly.

What do you believe is the key to winning in this market? 🔑

To be aligned about the Web3 ethos on the backend, yet make the Web3 component as invisible as possible by creating user-friendly and familiar consumer experiences.

Fundraise

What are you looking to raise now, and what will you use this funding for? 💸

We are raising €500k EUR. Our goal with the funding is to speed up product development and user growth for a larger seed round next year.

Deck: Here

Raising: $2m

Team: Anne & Roman

Team, Vision & Value Proposition

What are your backgrounds, and how did you meet? 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️

Anne, CEO - Operations expert and marketing strategist. Anne has supported emerging technology startups through growth and acquisition. As a journalist, Anne covers the cutting edge of developments across the metaverse and web3.

Roman, CCO - Writer, musician and filmmaker. Roman performs in the band Miro Shot and has directed short films, documentaries and music videos for several artists.

Anne and Roman first met when they were both working on a VR gaming and live music project, looking for a way game engines and gaming culture could create a new kind of concert experience.

Why did you decide to work together? 🤝

Roman: Anne felt like the missing link in all the things I had a blind spot for, and I could focus on artists and make a tool I felt was important for us to use.

Anne: When I saw what Roman was doing in bringing together a combination of game engines, metaverses, live music and experiences, I thought this is something we can develop into a really exciting business together.

What is your vision and mission as founders? 🚀

We’re shaping Ristband around our belief that the metaverse will become the digital twin of everything that happens on earth. In the same way, every shop, restaurant, or movie exists on the internet, it’s logical to assume that the same thing will happen with events, exhibitions and other venues involving the creative arts. 

In five years, Ristband will be the destination for everyone who wants to discover new content. It will also be the toolkit for artists, creators and brands to build in the metaverse.

What is your core value proposition? ✨

For artists, it’s about enabling creativity in the metaverse by creating amazing experiences, engaging your audience, and accessing the tools you need to make a living.

For fans, it’s about having a space where you can learn, discover and socialise.

Product

What are the key features of your current product? 👨‍💻

With Ristband you can access virtual worlds right from your browser, attend events happening in the real world and create content - such as a game - and host it on our platform.

What has been your biggest challenge with the product so far? 💪

Our biggest challenge was creating the music metaverse stage at SXSW. It was a mad sprint to create a product the public could access and one that would run in real-time alongside a physical event.

Market

What is driving growth in this market? 📈

Gamers were traditionally a large demographic that many brands didn’t have access to. Now we’re seeing the habits of gamers changing, especially GenZ, and this has been triggered by the pandemic. We believe that soon, everything will exist in a real-time digital space.

What do you believe is the key to winning in this market? 🔑

The key is providing compelling experiences. Why is World of Warcraft so sticky? Why did GTA V outsell Thriller in three days? It’s because these experiences have been so incredibly designed, and that’s why some metaverse platforms will explode, and others will crash and burn.

How do you view the current market landscape? 🌐

Current platforms enable things to happen in the metaverse by tapping into big IP or one-off events. None of these platforms have unlocked the wider market that enables any artist to access, create and monetise.

Fundraise

What are you looking to raise now, and what milestones are you hoping to achieve with this financing round? 💸

We’re raising $2m and are currently in the process of applying for our second Epic MegaGrant. The funding will go towards -

1. Retaining and growing our excellent team (CTO, marketing lead, community manager, BD).

2. Technological integrations e.g., motion capture, spatial audio.

3. Implementing various blockchain solutions.

Deck: Here

Raising: $1m with $400k committed.

Leadership Team: Maddie, Benedikt, and Maia

Team, Vision & Value Proposition

What are your backgrounds, and how did you meet? 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️

Maia, CEO - over five years of product & marketing experience from Fortune 500 companies & startups.

Benedikt, CTO - former founding member of Photos AI team @Apple with over 10 patents in machine learning.

Maddie, CCO - former sales manager at Diageo managing national accounts worth over £20m.

Maddie and Maia met while pursuing an MBA degree at London Business School. They are both Walpole’s Luxury Leaders of Tomorrow.

What is your vision and mission as founders? 🚀

Fashion is the largest eCommerce industry worldwide, with the highest return rates (up to 60%) & lowest conversion (1.7%.)  Beauty is close behind. Beyond easy payment & fast checkouts, shopping experiences have remained relatively unchanged for over a decade. Our driver is our knowledge that five years from now, we will fundamentally transform the way people shop online for beauty and fashion.

What is your core value proposition? ✨

We bring content to commerce in an entirely new way by combining UGC with proprietary AI matching technology. Through hyper-personalisation, Vestico gives shoppers the confidence and inspiration to buy more (10x increased conversion) and return less (-17% decrease in returns) while gathering critical data to inform the retailers on the whole value chain from marketing to manufacturing.

Product

What are the key features of your current product? 👨‍💻

There are multiple, but the ability to hyper-personalise shopper experiences through body and face matching is really important. Out of millions of images and videos, we are able to show any shopper 5-10 pieces of content that is most relevant to their shopping experience. 

How has the product evolved since you began work on it? 👩‍💻

As a team, we are extremely data-driven, so from day one, we knew that we would only continue building out capabilities if we found solutions that truly worked. After testing Vestico on fashion and delivering market leading results in returns reduction, engagement and conversion, we got approached by a massive beauty conglomerate asking us to build a similar solution for beauty. We have, and we are, so excited to share it with the world. 

Market

What is driving growth in this market? 📈

The consumer is spending increasing amounts of time in the digital world, and they naturally expect that to extend to shopping. The digital world is offering increasingly engaging, exciting and inspirational experiences to the shopper. Think about TikTok and its growth during the pandemic. The most natural place for people to shop is online, it's what makes sense to them. 

It’s no surprise that eCommerce fashion and beauty are here to stay and grow. On a global scale, it is predicted to reach an annual growth rate of 14.2% between 2017-2025 and will amass over £1 trillion in sales by 2025.

What do you believe is the key to winning in this market? 🔑

1. Finding a way to connect with Gen-Z customers. According to a recent Bloomberg report, young students and professionals now command around $360bn in disposable income, and it’s growing. Around 80% of Gen-Z say that they will only buy from brands they feel represented by, so retailers have to take notice.

2. Covid-19 has significantly accelerated public demand for purposeful production, so creating value chain processes that are sustainable is no longer a “good to have” it’s a must-have. Chanel issued a £500m sustainability-linked bond last year and vowed to shift to 100% renewable electricity operations by 2025. Equally, 23 enterprise brands and textile companies, including Nike, Adidas, Burton, Burberry and Timberland, pledged to use 100% sustainable cotton by 2025. While these strides are promising, they are far from complete.

What will the market look like in 5-10 years? 🗓️

We will be living in a world where Gen-Z has huge spending power and is driving the industry. The market will be more inclusive, sustainable and data driven. Retailers will be using data to optimise their value chain processes, produce less waste and deeply personalise experiences for their consumers.

Fundraise

What are you looking to raise now, and what milestones are you hoping to achieve with this financing round? 💸

We are raising $1m, with $400,000 committed, and have three major milestones we will hit with the raise.

1. Hiring and growing the team.

2. Growing the business and signing on 20 enterprise retailers by 2024.

3. R&D: we’re looking forward to starting some key research initiatives around image background segmentation for the luxury segment, enterprise analytics and more.

First Look—Explore the digital content economy 🔥

Welcome to First Look! Every month, I post a Q&A with founders in the digital content ecosystem raising their pre-seed/seed.

We cover the essentials with a mix of written and audio content.

Hit me up if you want an intro to any of the startups written about!

But wait… what is a digital content startup? 🤔

Great question.

In its simplest form -

1. Digital content is core to their value proposition.

2. They are producing, distributing or monetising digital content.

3. They are influencing how we work, play, learn and communicate in the future.

Digital content touches every element of our lives, now more than ever. Through Community + Capital, Supernode Global supports the next wave of entrepreneurs that are defining this space. Check out our portfolio here.

✍️ Posting schedule

Subscribers will receive a fresh post on the first Monday morning (GMT) of every month.

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