Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

Laura Modiano leads Founder Experience at OpenAI, a newly created function designed to help startups build, grow, and scale on the world's leading AI platform. Having previously worked with startups at AWS and now at OpenAI, Laura sits at the intersection of founders, technology, and the future of company building. In this episode, Laura shares how AI is fundamentally changing the startup jou...

What does it take to build an AI company a decade before the world realises AI is the future? In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Barney Hussey-Yeo, Founder & CEO of Cleo, the AI financial assistant helping millions of consumers make smarter money decisions. Barney started building Cleo years before ChatGPT brought AI into the mainstream. Today, Cleo has grown in...

What happens when software adapts to humans, rather than humans adapting to software? In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Jonathan Sanders, Founder & CEO of Light, the AI-native finance platform redefining how businesses manage money. Jonathan's journey spans investment banking, consulting, Pleo, founding Juni, and now building Light. Along the way, he has d...

Steve Domin, Founder & CEO of Duffel, the company rebuilding the infrastructure layer of the global travel industry. Duffel is taking on one of the most complex and outdated sectors, creating modern, developer-first APIs for flights, hotels, and more. Backed by investors including Index Ventures and Benchmark, the company has raised over $50M to transform how travel is bought and sold. Steve s...

Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO of Ori, is now part of Radiant following its partnership with Brookfield. Mahdi is building at the centre of one of the most important shifts in technology: the global race to scale AI infrastructure. We cover:  From telecoms to data centres: lessons from building infrastructure businesses from age 20   Why Ori chose the harder path of building for a future that did no...

This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Charlotte Palmer, Vice President of Venture Capital at Integra Global Advisors. Charlotte sits on the other side of the table as an LP, backing emerging venture funds globally. In this episode, she lifts the lid on how LPs actually evaluate VCs, what really matters beyond headline performance, and why many GPs still get fundraising wrong. We cover: • H...

This week on Riding Unicorns, we welcome back Alan Chang, Founder and CEO of Fuse Energy. Since his last appearance, Fuse has scaled rapidly, reaching a $5B valuation and setting its sights on £1B ARR. In this episode, Alan breaks down what it really takes to build a full-stack energy company from scratch, and why solving energy is one of the hardest and most important challenges of our time. We c...

What does a genuinely great VC fund look like today, from an LP’s perspective? In this episode, James and Hector are joined by Dave Neumann, Investment Manager at Schroders Capital, one of the most experienced institutional investors in venture. With a career spanning decades and exposure to top-tier global funds, Dave shares how leading LPs actually evaluate venture firms, and where many GPs get...

Tony Jamous first joined Riding Unicorns in January 2023, just after Oyster became a unicorn. Since then, the company has raised its Series D, Tony has moved into the Executive Chairman role, and Hadi Moussa has stepped in as CEO. In this episode, James sits down with both Tony and Hadi to unpack what really happens when a founder hands over the CEO role in a high-growth company. They discuss why...

Nikola Mrkšić is the Co-Founder and CEO of PolyAI , one of the world’s leading voice AI companies, helping enterprises automate customer service through conversational AI at massive scale. Before PolyAI, Nikola was a machine learning researcher and part of the team behind Siri. In this episode, he joins James to unpack what the world is only now starting to understand about voice AI, why most auto...

This week on Riding Unicorns, Matt Wilson returns to the podcast. Matt previously joined us in September 2022 to talk about Omnipresent, which has since been acquired by Deel. He is now back building Jack and Jill, one of the most talked-about venture-backed companies in Europe right now. Jack and Jill is bringing conversational AI to job hunting and hiring, with two agents built for two audiences...

Nicolò Frisiani is Co-Founder & CEO of Lupa , the world’s first enterprise-ready AI operating system for veterinary clinics. Lupa has raised over $25m from investors including Singular and Firstminute Capital, and is on a mission to modernise a sector still running on 1980s technology. In this episode, Nicolò shares: Why Lupa started as a consumer app and quickly pivoted to a full-stack operat...

George Davis, Founder and CEO of Lorum. George has been deep in payments for years: Head of Product at TrueLayer, then co-founder of BVNK, and now building Lorum to tackle the hardest layer of the stack: global clearing. We get into: Why payments becomes an obsession if you look closely enough What “rebuilding clearing from the ground up” actually means, in plain English Virtual accounts, ledgerin...

James sits down with Dr. David von Rosen, the serial founder behind Lottoland and 25 Degrees, and the Principal of the VONROSEN family office, through which he invests globally and pan-sector in fast-growth pre-IPO startups. David does not pretend to have one neat playbook. He prefers volatility, backs ideas that feel genuinely new, and invests like an operator, often taking a significant stake so...

Harrison Rose co-founded Paddle, one of the UK’s standout B2B billing and payments companies. Now he is building GoodFit, a go to market platform helping teams prioritise the right accounts, at the right time, with the right data. In this episode, Harrison breaks down a simple idea most teams still get wrong: before you buy another shiny GTM tool, make sure you are actually selling to qualified cu...

Ben Freeman is the Co-founder and CEO of Omnea, an AI native procurement and supplier management platform used by companies from the mid-market through to enterprise, including Synthesia, Typeform, Spotify, Monzo, Albertsons, and The Adecco Group. Ben’s path to procurement was not obvious. From running a bootstrapped events business in Manchester (and dropping out of uni), to a stint in investment...

James and Hector sit down with James Cadwallader , CEO and Co Founder of Profound , to unpack how AI is reshaping the internet and what that means for every brand on the planet. James explains why large language models are not just a new interface, but a fundamental platform shift in how people retrieve information. Instead of humans clicking blue links, user agents now visit the web on our behalf...

Ariel Harmoko is the Co Founder and CEO of Artifact AI. Ariel joined James and Hector for a conversation that moves from race tracks to reconciliation engines. Ariel grew up in Jakarta, was thrown into Go Karts at eight, and went on to race professionally all the way to Formula 3 alongside the likes of Lando Norris and George Russell. That early immersion in high performance teams, engineering and...

Andrew D’Souza is the Founder of Boardy, the Creandum backed AI super connector reshaping how founders and investors meet and build trust. Before Boardy, Andrew co-founded Clearco, one of the first revenue based financing companies. Clearco deployed over $5bn to thousands of businesses, scaled to six hundred employees, and passed one hundred million dollars in revenue. Andrew is one of the few fou...

Erin Platts is the CEO of Octopus Ventures and former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank UK & Europe — one of the most pivotal figures in the UK tech ecosystem. In this conversation, Erin opens up in remarkable detail about her personal journey from two decades inside SVB to leading one of Europe’s most active venture firms. She shares the inside story of the SVB collapse — the all-nighters, the adren...

Lee Veitch is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of SuperAwesome, the world’s leading kid-tech and youth marketing platform. SuperAwesome powers billions of kid-safe digital transactions every month — helping brands like LEGO, Disney, and Nickelodeon connect with young audiences responsibly and safely. Lee takes us behind the scenes of a remarkable 13-year journey — from the early days of fear,...

The AI rollup transforming property management This week on Riding Unicorns , we sit down with Dan Lifshits , Co-Founder & COO of Dwelly — the AI-first lettings and property management platform reinventing how landlords, tenants, and agents interact. Dwelly is on a mission to modernise the UK rental market by acquiring traditional letting agencies and rebuilding them with technology at their c...

Hector is joined by Gauthier van Malderen , Founder and CEO of Perlego, the “Spotify for textbooks” and one of Europe’s leading edtech scale-ups. Gauthier shares the remarkable journey of building Perlego from a personal frustration with expensive university textbooks into a global subscription platform transforming access to educational content. He reflects on early failures, the turning points t...

This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Paul Becker, Co-Founder & CEO of re:cap, a fintech platform helping digital businesses unlock capital and understand their financial position through intelligent forecasting, real-time data insights, and flexible financing. In this wide-ranging conversation, Paul walks us through re:cap’s journey from an idea for automated due diligence software to...

Ali first joined us in January 2022, when Babylon was still one of the most ambitious healthtech companies in the world. Today, he returns with a new mission, building Quadrivia and its clinical AI assistant, “Qu” , designed to automate millions of repetitive healthcare workflows and rebalance the global shortage of clinical labour. In this episode, Ali reflects candidly on the rise and fall of Ba...