BACKED 🏴

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Today we launch BACKED 3 - $100M seed fund to back generational frontier tech founders - right alongside our 100th investment.

Read the full announcement here: https://t.co/4gEZL20L8Z

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Last night, we hosted a proper scrap.

Fintech Fight Night brought together some serious contenders to debate the big questions in fintech and financial infrastructure.

@PaulTaylorCEO and @rorystirling traded blows on whether prediction markets are good or evil. @danonanthony and @willorde battled it out over whether banks as we know them will actually exist in the next 20 years. Alex Edwards and @vyayasan squared up on whether LLMs are a platform shift in fintech or just noise.

Each debate landed some clear hits - three emerged victorious… Congratulations to our winners Paul, Anthony and Alex 🏆

A huge thank you to all speakers showing up ready for a fight. To the crowd for getting involved in the theme and bringing the energy! And to our co-hosts @twifintech, and our true cheerleaders @goodwinlaw and @Google.

🥊Think you could stand a chance in the ring? Hit us up for Round 2.

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

The best conversations happen at the fringes. The real alpha in tech investing is at the frontier. That's why we call this annual event The Edge.

Berlin is the spot for it. No city in Europe does it better.

You arrive with a schedule. The energy swallows you whole - and spits you out the other side frazzled, inspired, and wondering where the last three days went.

On Tuesday night. Almost 400 people. And a dance floor that had absolutely no interest in stopping at 2am when we finally pulled the plugs.

There is something genuinely special about this crowd. Investors and founders who grind hard all year - coming together for one night to disconnect, so they can connect. On a human level.

Thank you for dancing with us. And a deep thanks to our co-hosts @cartainc and FOMO, and partners Bound, @mercury, and season 5 who made the night what it was:

We're on for next year. See you there. 🏴

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

A SUPER morning dedicated to Europe's comms experts. The topic at hand: navigating narratives in the age of volatility.

A huge thank you to our co-hosts @ElishevaMarcus Markus at @EarlybirdVC for bringing the room together.

Here are 3 of the punchiest takeaways:

1 - Press is its own channel, not a checkbox.
Journalists don't fit neatly into your campaign timeline - and they never will. A heads-up weeks out is worth more than polished materials the Friday before launch. Respect journalists. Give them time to prepare.

2 - Curation > headcount
Whether its an intimate 15 person breakfast or a 400+ party, we know its all about who you meet, and how you follow up.

3 - The best argument for podcasts isn't reach. It's indexability.
Founders are time-poor. But transcripts are increasingly picked up by LLMs, which means visibility that compounds well beyond the original audience. When founders push back, make that case.

See you next year SuperComms 👋

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Film makers, investors, founders and artists sipped chai over conversations ranging from how to create a cap table, to making your first angel bet. For the 7th edition of the Female Angel Investors Power Breakfast hosted alongside @Lumus_invest . This time partnered with Anouska d'Abo and the @sxswlndn team to bring together an extraordinary mix of perspectives from across industries.

The conversation went far beyond the mechanics of angel investing. Around the table were voices from the arts and media, biotech, venture capital, entrepreneurship, and community building - all exploring how we can unlock more capital, more opportunities, and better outcomes for female founders.

What made this breakfast special was the collision of worlds.

Venture investors exchanged ideas with operators, creators, and strategists. Different industries, different experiences, but a shared belief that diverse founders deserve more backing.

Most importantly, these breakfasts continue to be about more than conversation. They're about building a community that takes action - one that actively puts more money, expertise, and support behind women building the future. We encouraged the guests to take away a challenge.

NB: For this SXSW edition we opened our doors to male allies.

For the September edition, we'll be dialling up the focus for experienced angels so if that's you, or you'd like to recommend a wise investor, DM us for a seat at our Power Breakfast table.

We partner with LUMUS Investment Collective who are Europe's largest community of female angel investors. They aim to bring more women onto the cap tables of startups via education, community and syndication, and have a lot of fun doing it. This is why they are a perfect partner for us, with our mission to back Europe’s frontier founders.

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

@buildonfloweng just shifted up a gear.

We backed @parisingh and the Flow team back in 2017. Nine years on, they've launched Flow V3 - the Agentic Platform for Physical Engineering.

It’s the biggest shift in how hardware gets built since CAD. And they're not doing it quietly.

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies and Mytra are already in the driving seat.

If this is year nine, we can't wait for what's next🏴

[Pari Singh @parisingh]

Agents have reached hardware.

We are launching Flow v3, the Agentic Platform for Physical Engineering.

We've spent over a year building it in secret, alongside the best hardware companies and AI research labs.

An agent can now do real engineering work: change a requirement, push the update into your CAD and simulation tools, and flag every test that needs to rerun. Iterations/learning cycles that took months are being reduced to days.

Agents are the biggest shift in how we engineer hardware since CAD.

The core innovation for the CAD era was the parametric model.
The core innovation for the Agentic Era is Flow's Systems Graph.

The systems graph is a living model of every requirement, design model, test, analysis and every connection between them. It gives every agent the full context of the system, so every change stays consistent across the whole design.

Engineers and agents work side by side on the same system. Engineers get to focus on architecture - the decisions that matter -while thousands of agents churn through rewriting reports, rerunning analysis and simulation, and triggering tests.

Reusable rockets, self-driving cars, small modular reactors, robots that make decisions, the most complex machines ever built, are defined by millions of interconnected requirements, far beyond what any human team can keep aligned on its own.

Rivian, Joby, Astranis, Skydio, Radiant, and the most ambitious hardware programs already build on Flow.
More on the launch in the comments.

@buildonfloweng

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Apply to join The Edge afterparty here:
https://t.co/uXW20CqI1n

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

June only means one thing.

SuperReturn Venture is back. And so is the The Edge afterparty.

This year, we're co-hosting our annual Berlinesque party with @cartainc and FOMO Berlin, for an evening built for the people who back the bold and build the future.

Europe's top capital allocators. Visionary GPs. Founders building what's next.

Neon-lit corners. Live artists. Berlin's best soundtracks. And the kind of conversations that don't happen in conference rooms.

We're partnering with our friends at Bound, @mercury and season5 who are building the infra stack for Europe's exceptional startups.

This year we’re opening our doors a little wider than usual to ensure there’s space for more founders and builders - if this is you, please apply and we’ll do our best to get you in!

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

BACKED x @twifintech present: Fintech Fight Night 🥊

Tuesday 23rd June. London.

We are replacing the traditional corporate snooze-fest with a glorious anti-panel. We are putting three highly contested topics on the table and throwing six industry fighters into the mix who absolutely refuse to play it safe.

Stepping into the ring:
@PaulTaylorCEO — Founder & CEO, @thoughtmachine EdwardBarrow — Founder & CEO, Cloud Capital
@kmgrose — Senior Country Director, @coinbase

More fighters to be announced.

🛎️Ding ding. The bell's rung. Register your interest here: https://t.co/uHIb0smfnO

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

BACKED and @Lumus_invest are back. And this time, @sxswlndn are joining the table.

Thursday 4th June, Dishoom Shoreditch, 8:30–10:30am.

A curated morning for women actively investing at early stage. Peer conversation, Chatham House Rules, no performance.

Seats are limited. Request to join here: https://t.co/MNR6xwZlHU

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

We back founders building the future of healthcare. 🧬

Companies working at the frontier: fixing brain disease, engineering cell-based mRNA, discovering new medicines through AI and fungi. Real breakthroughs. Near-term impact.

The people building these companies are hiring. Here's who's looking 👇

Aerska
Using RNA medicines to treat, delay, and prevent brain disorders.

https://t.co/FQBzsFj0r3

@CoMind_
Building non-invasive brain-computer interfaces that connect the neocortex with AI — no surgery required.

https://t.co/JL6TbQh8Sl

@Molecule_sci
The infrastructure layer for Decentralised Science - making biotech research community-owned and open.

https://t.co/T34f6SimVI

@OchreBio
Developing genomic medicines to rejuvenate donor livers before transplant. Based in Oxford, 15+ years in liver genomics.

https://t.co/RGs14YPGJQ

See all open roles → https://t.co/1BFPkL2Cwt

#HiringMonday #FutureOfHealthcare

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

We invest in the Future of Finance - and right now, it's hiring. 🏦

You may have seen one of our recent investments (shoutout Round Treasury 👀).

3 portfolio companies are hiring right now. All building in and around financial infrastructure:

🧠 @thoughtmachine
Cloud-native core banking tech designed to replace the legacy systems quietly breaking everyone's experience. Their platform, Vault, lets banks actually move at pace.
→ https://t.co/eRRiLESKVo

💳 @BCBcrypto
Banking and payments infrastructure built for the crypto industry. Accounts, FX, transaction processing - the institutional plumbing that makes digital assets work at scale.
→ https://t.co/8vhjsKDReT

🪙 @GetOnramper
Fiat-to-crypto, simplified. They aggregate payment methods, currencies, and providers so users can actually get in without the friction. → https://t.co/zg6EiD2TdV

Finance not your thing? The rest of the board is worth a scroll. → https://t.co/1BFPkL2Cwt

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Creatives, this is your sign ✨

We’ve got some seriously fun creative roles live across the BACKED portfolio right now. Whether you’re a storyteller, brand builder, or even vibe specialist, there’s something here for you 👇

🪐 Head of Marketing – Supernal at @_InfinityConst

Infinity builds and scales a portfolio of AI-native companies designed to redefine entire industries - Supernal is one of its newest ventures, built for ambitious growth from day one.
https://t.co/dyVALlCVHY

💡 Founding Product Marketer at @tryhighlight

Highlight is rethinking how teams understand and act on user feedback - turning real customer insight into better products, faster.
https://t.co/AN3GCfKdNo

⚙️ Technical Writer at @thoughtmachine

Thought Machine is building cutting-edge AI systems that help enterprises deploy and scale intelligent solutions across complex workflows.
https://t.co/vwA7j9lUgC

🏝️ Senior Product Marketing Manager at @amenitiz

Amenitiz provides all-in-one software that helps hotels and rentals manage operations, grow bookings, and deliver better guest experiences.
https://t.co/s7M1chp53R

✈️ Content Marketer at Borderless

Borderless makes global hiring seamless - helping companies find, hire, and manage talent anywhere in the world without the usual friction.
https://t.co/PY8uZOMC9V

🕹️ Vibe & Experience Specialist at @Immutable

Immutable is building the infrastructure for web3 gaming - powering the next generation of digital ownership and player-driven economies.
https://t.co/tUEhpE2VRV

So stop doodling.
(Unless it’s in Figma, then carry on.)

👉 Apply here: https://t.co/1BFPkL2Cwt

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

COMPANY FINANCE FUNCTIONS ARE OPERATIONALLY HEAVY. ROUND TREASURY RAISED $6M TO AUTOMATE THEM.

Congratulations to @POS_js and @hayyaan, founders of Round Treasury, on raising $6M in a seed round. We’re excited to be a part of the journey.

Round is building an automated finance function for high-growth companies - starting with treasury, and moving toward fully-automating payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, expenses and FX. Round manages payment approvals, funds payment runs and payroll, and reconciles books to invoices - removing 75% of the manual work that absorbs finance teams’ time.

In less than a year, Round has already processed over $500m in transactions!

Pac brings incredible execution speed and commercial leadership; Hayyaan, previously a senior engineer at Amazon, brings the experience to build autonomous systems and scale an engineering platform.

The ambition is simple: finance functions should run themselves (their operations should be automated), so the humans can focus on making decisions rather than moving the money around.

Round, we are going to help you scale and get you in front of CFOs. We have got your back 🏴

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Our first LONDON BIO in the Bay Area brought together 70+ founders, scientists, operators, and investors building at the frontier of therapeutics - and the energy in the room said it all.

It wasn’t just optimism. There was a real sense that how we build in biology is shifting - with new computational approaches, evolving drug modalities, and AI starting to change how discovery actually happens.

Huge thank you to our speakers @nanli, @SGRodriques, and @LakshAithani - and to our partners @SiliconVlyBank, @CooleyLLP, and @awscloud.

Take a glimpse of the evening 👇

See you back in London soon 🇬🇧

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

We started Q1 2026 at full speed.
A few moments we loved being part of:

Founders doing their thing:
🏴$60M for Aerska (RNA treatments for brain disease)
🏴$220M for @OLIXComputing (photonic AI chips)
🏴$40M for @tryhighlight (your desktop’s shared intelligence layer)
🏴£2M for Keith (a new kind of AI law firm)
🏴£56M for Vuelo (Book Now, Pay Later for travel)

And 250+ people through our doors:
🪩AI VC Hackathon (20 funds at BACKED HQ)
🪩Founder Exchange + Drinks with @edsteele_
🪩Female Angel Investor Power Breakfast (International Women's Day edition)
🪩BACKED AGM with 100 LPs + friends
🪩LONDON BIO in San Francisco
🪩BACKED x @StrandVentures hackathon

Much more to come.
See you BACKERS in Q2 👋

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Huge congratulations to co-founder @PimDeWitte and the whole Highlight team on their $40M Series A led by @khoslaventures.

More than a desktop assistant, @tryhighlight turns ephemeral knowledge into collective intelligence. Replacing manual prompting with autonomous action, always-on presence throughout your workflows, shared team memory and scaled collective intelligence.

Originally spun out of @gen_intuition - a frontier world model company and the creator of @Medal_TV, the largest games recording platform globally used by millions of gamers worldwide.

But they’ve just levelled up.

Welcome to the team, @sergeisorokin, as Highlight’s new CEO.

Sergei helped scale Discord from the early days to 150M+ users, building the product org and monetisation engine along the way, with previous experience at Yahoo and Facebook.

Bold thinking. Built by operators who’ve done it before 🏴

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

San Francisco, you did not disappoint!

For our first ever BAY BIO, we brought the 11th edition of LONDONBIO across the Atlantic for an evening with people building the future of biology.

A huge thank you to @SGRodriques, @LakshAithani, and @nanli for your candid conversations.

There was a clear thread throughout the evening: biology isn’t just accelerating - it’s being fundamentally reshaped. With new tools, new company models, and a new generation of founders rethinking the fundamentals.

We got into what it really means to build AI-native biotech companies, where today’s models still fall short, and what it actually takes to turn them into real drugs. With a very exciting real-world example… watch this space 👀

A huge thank you to our partners @SiliconVlyBank, @CooleyLLP, and @awscloud for backing the vision and making this happen.

And of course, to everyone who joined — you’re the reason we do this 🙏

But for now… London is calling 🇬🇧
See you all for our next event, back at the home of LONDON BIO.

#LONDONBIO #Biotech #AIBio #SanFrancisco
@yasminsiraj_usa @Jack_O_Meara

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

Register your interest for London Bio in San Francisco: https://t.co/p2disIJARs

[BACKED 🏴 @BackedVC]

If you haven’t heard (we’ve only mentioned it a few times…), the LONDONBIO community are heading to San Francisco for our first ever BAY BIO 🇺🇸🧬

It’s a big moment for AI x Bio — AI isn’t just supporting research anymore; it’s reshaping how we understand biology from the ground up.

If you’re a scientist (or ML engineer) ready to be part of that shift and community, here are some standout roles from the BACKED portfolio shaping the future of Biotech x AI 👇

🧪Research Associate at @OchreBio
Ochre Bio is building RNA therapies to treat chronic liver disease — combining cutting-edge wet lab science with computational biology to uncover novel targets.
🔗 https://t.co/RRUAwkhTlk

🧬Research Scientist/ Senior Research Scientist - CRISPR R&D at @PhytoformLabs
Phytoform is applying AI to CRISPR-based gene editing in crops — accelerating the development of climate-resilient, sustainable agriculture.
🔗 https://t.co/lQey1HHb0B

🦠Scientist, Phage Display, Antibody Discovery at @labgeni_us
LabGenius is using machine learning to design next-generation antibodies — integrating automation, computation and experimental biology in one tight feedback loop.
🔗https://t.co/3jxvephX9S

🧑‍🔬Bioprocess Specialist at @hoxtonfarms
Hoxton Farms is building cultivated fat to transform the future of food — scaling cell culture and bioprocessing to make sustainable alternatives viable at commercial level.
🔗https://t.co/v0Le6bcIsi

🤖Senior Machine Learning Engineer at @CoMind_
CoMind is developing next-generation brain-computer interface technology — pairing neuroscience with advanced ML to decode human brain activity in real time.
🔗https://t.co/PTx0iRtqZp

👉 If you want to join BAY BIO, register your interest using the link in the comments.

And as always, explore these roles, and more, on the BACKED Jobs Board: https://t.co/1BFPkL2Cwt

#HiringMonday