Many of the great VC firms and solo GPs started out with funds of $10M or less. These micro VC firms have a risk appetite which is crucial to the industry, and play an important role in seeding risk capital where larger firms cannot. "Micro VCs play a pivotal role in democratizing access to entrepreneurial finance by allowing ventures to get funding from a new type of investors. Moreover, micro VCs encourage more kinds of limited partners to access the VC industry." - Micro VC (2022) Unfortunately, the associated regulatory costs make operating at this scale incredibly difficult in the UK. Admin and compliance often consumes about $1.4M of a $10M UK fund, versus just $450k in the US. As a result of this high cost, the median fund size in the US was $20M in 2024, in the UK (with just 3% of the volume) it was $88M. So, the UK not only has lower total venture capital volume, it also has fewer small funds — the worst of both worlds. This is a major bottleneck, but there is a fix. If you're interested in hearing more, drop me a DM. (Credit to @cupazhou and @samhuleatt for the graphic below, from The Side Letter.) Micro VC paper:

Meet mate, your AI growth teammate for marketers. We spent the last 2 years in stealth building the hard part first: distribution. A live network of 12B+ shopper intent signals that tells us who’s actually in-market, right now. Now mate puts AI on top of that network to find your customers and convert them. It's like Claude for your marketing team but with our own consumer distribution infrastructure underneath. We quietly signed 700 brands to the beta, drove $94.4 million in sales in 12 months for the likes of JD Sports, Brooklinen and Everlane, and are weeks away from crossing a $15M run rate. Today, we’re thrilled to be opening the beta. Drop a comment if you run an online store and we'll get you set up!

Introducing Cues: Voice & Gesture control for Matic We raised $115M and spent 9 years to make the world’s first intuitive home robot Say you spilled coffee: Point to the spill and say, "Hey Matic, clean this" and it will hear, see, locate in 3D, and go clean on its own. Matic comes with a lot of features: 1. Say "Hey Matic" - it locates your voice, turns, and looks at you 2. Say "Hey Matic, follow me" and start walking. Matic will follow behind 3. Say "Hey Matic, go clean the living room". Since it knows your house map, it navigates and just does it It's so easy, a 5 year old and an 80 year old can use it and it understands 75 different languages. Matic has 8x the airflow, specialised cleaning algorithms for rugs, corners, toekicks, mopping, etc and cleans better than any other robot vacuum. Also keeps improving with software updates. 13,000 families use and love Matic. WIRED magazine gave it a 10/10 (the only hardware to receive this rating in a decade) Buy yours at and if you don't love it after 6 months, we'll give you a full refund. To celebrate our launch, we're cleaning 300 homes with Matic in San Francisco and New York City. Comment "Matic" below, we'll send you the link to sign up and come to your doorstep to clean your home with Matic.