Investor Profile: Firstminute Capital

Not many seed funds can call on the founders of Supercell, Adyen, Farfetch, Checkout.com, Zalando and Ocado as their investors. Firstminute Capital can — and that founder-dense investor base is exactly what makes the London firm one of Europe's most founder-friendly seed investors.

Founded in 2017 by Brent Hoberman — the entrepreneur behind lastminute.com (sold to Sabre for $1.1bn in 2005) and Made.com — and Spencer Crawley, formerly of Goldman Sachs, Firstminute describes itself as a $500m AUM seed fund backed by over 130 unicorn founders, investing across Europe and the US. Its debut fund was $100m in 2017, followed by a $160m second fund in 2021, with RIT Capital Partners — a first-time backer of a European VC — as anchor investor.

The firm's pitch to founders is simple: it writes the first cheque, up to £4m, into pre-seed and seed rounds, and it can lead. Sectors span AI, health, fintech, SaaS, deeptech and hardware, climate, consumer, marketplaces and gaming — a genuinely generalist brief. Early bets include the skincare brand Typology, the encrypted messaging platform Element and the data-analytics provider Skew, which exited to Coinbase. More recent backing includes StandardX's £10m seed round, alongside robotics and AI-native startups like Benford and Reimagine Robotics.

The edge for founders is the network, not just the money. With founders of companies like Flixbus, iZettle, Babylon, Calm, Check Point, MuleSoft and MongoDB on the cap table — plus figures like Google's Eric Schmidt — a Firstminute-backed startup gets introductions and operator wisdom that most seed funds simply cannot offer. Hoberman himself has backed nine unicorns at seed stage. The team splits its attention: Hoberman hunts in healthtech, longevity and climate; Crawley focuses on data privacy, collaboration tools, the creator economy and climate; partners cover fintech, SaaS, open source, deeptech and robotics across London, DACH, the Nordics and French-speaking Europe.

Half the portfolio comes from the UK, with the rest split between continental Europe and North America, and the firm is comfortable in both B2B and B2C. For an Indian founder building for global markets from day one, that transatlantic posture — and a bench of unicorn-founder LPs who have built in exactly those markets — is the real attraction.

Beyond the cheque, Firstminute runs like a founder community. Through Hoberman's Founders Forum network, portfolio founders get plugged into a global circuit of operators, corporates and follow-on investors — the kind of warm introductions that turn a seed round into a Series A. The firm's platform team and community leads run programming across its hubs, and its LinkedIn updates show a steady cadence of seed and Series A follow-ons, suggesting the firm reserves meaningful capital to double down on winners rather than spraying and praying.