We invest in entrepreneurs building technology companies that rethink the way we live and work

Playfair Capital is one of London’s leading seed stage investors

We’ve been helping ambitious and exceptional entrepreneurs build brilliant technology businesses since 2013. We’ve backed the founders of more than 60 companies including Mapillary (acq. Facebook), CryptoFacilities (acq. Kraken), Omnipresent, Orca AI, Ravelin, sprout.ai, Thought Machine, Trouva and Vinehealth.

We were founded by an angel and our values drive everything that we do. Like the best angels, we are supportive, passionate investors. Nothing excites us more than working closely with founders to build successful companies.

We invest early and enthusiastically in founding teams around the world, with a focus on the UK. We thrive being a generalist tech fund with the flexibility to look at a broad range of companies. Each member of our team has particular areas of interest and focus.

It’s never too early for a first conversation.

Who we've backed

Questions

Get to know our founders | Check out our 8 questions with Playfair series | #playfairfamily

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Playfair are absolutely amazing to work with.

They provide the right kind of support when needed and give founders the space to build their company. We are excited to leverage their experience in scaling up our operations in the UK & EU.

SAI RANGANATHAN

CEO and Founder, SensorFlow

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I've really enjoyed getting to know Playfair and having them come into our seed round.

They share the passion we have for the future of autonomous flights and are very helpful and supportive members of our wider team.

ROY SHMUEL

CEO, Sightec

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Playfair have been an outstanding investor for Thought Machine.

They have supported the company through good times and rough and always been ready to give advice when needed and support when required. They are experts in the early stage market and a great partner to take companies through to growth.

PAUL TAYLOR

Founder & CEO, Thought Machine

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Playfair backed us in our very first seed round and have continued to back us ever since.

Unlike some of the traditional VCs, they have been agile, loyal and there has always been someone we know we can chat to for help or advice.

MANDEEP SINGH

Co-founder & CEO, Trouva

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70+

Founding teams backed

12

Countries invested in

Our Values

Angel DNA

Playfair Capital was founded by an angel investor in 2013 and we’ll never lose that Angel DNA. We’re on the founder’s side and that core philosophy runs through everything we do.

We take the passion and excitement of angel investing and combine it with the benefits of a fund – a strong team, the ability to write larger cheques and to follow on. When the decision makers are in the room, exciting things happen.

Founder Focussed

Founders come to us for more than just capital. We share with them deep and broad experience of operating and scaling businesses, hiring talent and navigating to the next stage of their journey.

We love getting hands on and our fund size is optimised to allow us to spend quality time with each founder. We invest because we share each founder’s passion for their business. We are committed to building that relationship.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a way of life at Playfair. We lead, co-lead and co-invest in deals and strongly believe in the benefits that multiple investors can bring to the table.

We love working with others to drive positive impact in the ecosystem and our local communities, with a particular focus on underrepresented groups such as our female founders initiative.

Our door is always open to discuss working in partnership. It’s never too soon to start talking.

Take a tour of our Founders' Studio

We recognise that one of the best ways to support our founders is to enable them to support each other. That’s why we’ve built a Founders’ Studio at our central London HQ. This is a space purpose-built and for the exclusive use of Playfair founders and their teams to use totally for free.

Our Team

Andrew Sheffield

Associate

Chris Smith

Managing Partner
Three Dots Small

Clare Zhang

Analyst

Elise Congram

Founders Studio & Office Manager
Three Dots Small

Federico Pirzio-Biroli

Founding Partner & Chairman
Three Dots Small

Henrik Wetter-Sanchez

Principal

Jeevan Sunner

Principal

Joao Nunes

Analyst

Joe Thornton

Partner

Simon Blakey

Chairman of the Investment Committee
Three Dots Small

Our Portfolio

Helping airports succeed with innovative software solutions.

Cauldron creates games beyond entertainment for the finance industry and beyond.

Supercharging infrastructure design through automation and optimisation

Heka empowers humans through benefits that are personal, inspiring, and joyful. Every person has unique strengths. And Heka exists to help people find them, and thrive through them. With over 3,000 carefully curated health and wellness experiences, Heka offers a benefit that ticks bucket-lists, not boxes.

Koala is reinventing travel insurance, turning disruptions into great experiences through technology.

Social commerce solutions for brand acceleration in China

Founded in 2017 by Dr Elizabeth Gilligan, Material Evolution uses patented geopolymer technology and proprietary algorithms to create the most sustainable materials on the planet.

Helping restaurants take control of their destiny through AI powered automation.

Omnipresent makes it easy to employ, pay and support your international team.

Grow your startup with marketing services delivered by vetted experts. Agency quality, freelance prices.

Protex AI is a computer vision-based software company providing proactive safety technology with the mission of helping companies realise an injury free workplace.

Orca AI innovates the marine navigation sphere, providing an intelligent technological solution for collision avoidance in maritime transport.

Pioneering data curation to solve complex diseases.

Recycleye is at the cutting edge of machine learning and computer vision to enable digitisation and automated sorting in the waste industry, accelerating the world's transition into a circular economy.

Rensource develops and manages critical infrastructure that powers the productivity of small and medium sized enterprises.

Bridging gaps between businesses using technology, to ensure what our customers require is always available and within reach.

SensorFlow provides a smart wireless IoT solution that monitors, analyses and automates your hotel room environment.

From today’s delivery and inspection drones, to the flying passenger taxis of tomorrow. Sightec is opening up our skies to safe, reliable and high-performance air mobility with pioneering computer vision and AI flight technologies.

Hands-on tech coaching in 1-hour slots, live with an expert.

AI powered fraud filtering & claim automation

Book unique European wedding venues & suppliers for your big day.

uMed want to help create a world where children no longer die from disease, and adults live life in good health. To achieve this they are working towards removing the barriers to high quality medical research and healthcare delivery.

Vine health are on a mission to improve the quality of life and survival of people going through cancer.

Bringing zero trust security to enterprise communication.

Andela is a new kind of technology partner for Fortune 500s and startups. Blending the best of outsourcing and in-house hiring, Andela integrates full-time genius-level remote software developers into your team.

Appear Here is making space rental as easy as booking a hotel room. Their platform seamlessly connects landlords' vacant spaces to people with great ideas. The vision is to create a global network of spaces so people can make their idea travel.

Chronext is the leading global online marketplace for buying, selling and servicing luxury watches.

Clarify is a self-service API that allows developers to make audio and video files just as searchable as textual information like web pages and word documents.

Crypto Facilities is a London-based financial services firm and provides risk management and trading solutions around digital assets such as bitcoin.

Good.Co is fixing hiring with user-driven analytics that measure culture-fit. Taking a provocative, consumer-first approach Good.Co is building the world's largest culture graph of talent and companies through user-driven data.

Hassle is the simplest way to book a vetted cleaner online. Acquired by Helpling (Rocket Internet) in July 2015.

Hullabalook put the disco into the ways shoppers discover products on retail websites. Their beautiful, playful product discovery experiences are proven to increase CVR, AOV and Engagement and will make you think that a Retailer's current filters, facets, search and navigation were created in the dark ages.

Lantum is an online marketplace for doctors to fill their diaries, and practices and hospitals to fill their rotas. We are disrupting medical recruitment by replacing recruitment agencies with technology.

Learnerbly is a professional development SaaS platform that allows SMEs to manage the development of their staff using planning tools and curated content that flex around each individual's personal needs.

Mapillary uses server-side computer vision to build an immersive street view representation of our world using crowdsourced photos taken from any capture device.

Mobius Motors designs, manufactures, and sells durable, affordable vehicles for Africa's mass market. The team are reimagining the car by designing their vehicles around common road terrain, transport usage, and consumer income.

Numerai is a technology company pioneering distributed artificial intelligence for capital allocation. In December 2015, we created the world’s first encrypted data science tournament for stock market predictions.

On Device Research use mobile technology to help brands and their agencies measure marketing effectiveness.

Onfleet offers a simple and easy way for businesses to manage and analyze their local delivery operations. Our product includes intuitive iOS and Android apps for drivers, a powerful web dashboard, and seamless communications and realtime tracking for customers

Oradian is a global technology provider developing solutions to enable financial inclusion.

Poundit is a Philippines based ecommerce company supplying a wide range of electronics, gadgets and accessories at unbeatable prices.

Ravelin has developed a unique system to tackle the ever-growing problem of CNP (Card-Not-Present) fraud, which accounts for the largest proportion of e-commerce fraud today. The company brings machine learning intelligence to CNP fraud prevention, using real world data to detect fraud patterns unique to each business.

Seldon increases engagement and revenue by providing a smarter personalised user experience. Seldon Cloud helps the world’s leading media and e-commerce companies leverage cutting edge big data technologies, machine learning algorithms, and social data, to provide the most intelligent solution for personalisation, recommendation and targeting.

With a combination of mobile technology, specially designed robots and a local hub system, we aim to make local delivery faster, smarter and more cost-efficient.

Thought Machine is building technology to revolutionise banking.

Automation is the new growth engine. Tray.io allows you to integrate your entire stack with the leading general automation platform.

Trouva is the a marketplace for independent bricks and mortar retailers. We show you, in real-time, what fashion and home products are in local shops around you. You can buy items for instant collection or same-day delivery. For retailers, we give them the technology to drive more customers into their shops.

Unmade are changing fashion design and manufacture. By controlling industrial knitting machines in a new way, the company can make a different garment every time.