Wayfin

Private-capital intelligence and workflow. Founders find suitable funders and build credible cases. Funders and advisers review with structured evidence.

[City A.M. @CityAM]

[Partner Content]

Are private assets here to stay? 📷

As more companies pivot away from public listings, private markets have transformed from a niche choice into a foundational pillar of institutional finance.

Read more about private assets with Barings: https://t.co/R1F3LNAJEa

#PrivateMarkets #AssetManagement #PrivateEquity #FinanceNews #UKBusiness #Investments

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

A GP doesn't open your data room assuming you lied. They assume the documents drifted — deck sells the future, model survives a stress test, cap table records what happened. Four places they rarely agree, and what each tells an investor. New piece below.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

UK PRIVATE-MARKET SIGNAL

Veremark is opening a £6m+ secondary share sale on the LSE’s PISCES market.

Auction: 7 October
Sellers: staff + early investors
Third tech company to use the market

Private-company liquidity is getting real infrastructure.

Choose possibility.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

The UK is the world’s third-largest VC market.

Yet more than 80% of scale-up capital raised by its leading companies comes from overseas.

That is the gap behind the Phoenix Court commitments.

The scale-up funding problem begins with the LP base.

Choose possibility.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Congrats to @SpamRoss, @mduvall_, and @numeral (YC W23) on their $100M Series C!

Numeral automates sales tax compliance end to end, from registrations and calculations to filings and payments.

They handle US sales tax plus VAT and GST across more than 90 countries, all in one system. More than 3,500 businesses run their compliance on Numeral, including Supabase, Eight Sleep, and Graza, with transaction volume up 327% in the past year.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

Primary sources:

British Business Bank:
https://t.co/PAk9NNX5ZA

NatWest Group:
https://t.co/hLRRvFa9E2

Choose possibility.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

NatWest has made its first direct LP commitment to an independent VC fund, backing Phoenix Court.

British Business Bank: £50m
NatWest: first VC fund commitment
M&G and HSBC: also investing

The money spans seed, early growth and scale-up.

Choose possibility.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

UK PRIVATE CAPITAL — 2025

£25.0bn invested
1,434 companies backed
9 in 10 investments went to SMEs
£58.7bn raised by UK-managed funds

A founder’s usable market gets smaller once stage, cheque, geography and instrument are applied.

Source: UK Private Capital.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

THE MONDAY CAPITAL REVIEW

Twenty minutes. One owner for every live conversation.

What changed?
Who owns the next move?
What date?
What is blocking progress?
Continue, clarify or stop?

No owner and no date means it should not sit under active.

Save this for next Monday.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Wafer (@wafer_ai) is building a fast AI inference cloud that uses agents to optimize GPUs and run open-source models at industry-leading speeds. The result is the low cost of open source with the latency of a much smaller model.

Four months after launching the cloud, they went from zero to $8 million in ARR and just raised a $40M Series A.

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC's @snowmaker sits down with Wafer co-founders @gpusteve and @gpuemi to talk about going from UChicago undergrads to building one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies in just over a year. They share how a college side project became Wafer, how they got GLM 5.2 running 2-3x faster than anyone else in the market, and why speed, not just cost, is pushing enterprises toward open-source models.

00:48 — What Wafer Does
01:35 — Going From $0 to $8M ARR in Four Months
04:21 — Scaling Faster Than They Could Keep Up
09:14 — How AI Makes AI Faster
11:21 — The Pivot That Changed Everything
14:41 — Why Open-Source Models Are Taking Off
18:03 — From a College Side Project to Wafer
23:33 — Advice for Starting and Joining Startups

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

£100m for new UK venture funds.

The route:

Fund managers apply
Up to 10 funds are selected
Mandates are published
Deployment begins
Capital announced today may take months to reach a founder.
Source: British Business Bank.

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

CAPITAL FLOW — UK

£100m has been announced through the British Business Bank.

Fund managers apply this autumn
Up to 10 new VC funds
Mandates follow
Deployment follows
Founders: track who is selected, what they can fund and when they start.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

A simple check before the second investor meeting.

Complete these five lines:

Entry stage
Typical first cheque
Approved geographies
Date of last new investment
Remaining decision-makers

If you cannot complete the card, you know what to ask next.

Save it for the next raise.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

CAPITAL SIGNAL — ASIA

Asia generates roughly one-third of global output and holds only 4% of global private credit.

APAC funds raised $2.7bn in Q1 2026
AUM forecast for 2030: $142bn
A large economy can still have a small capital route.

Source: Reuters / Preqin.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

Capital Signal: Africa

Debt and structured capital: $134m → $305m
Period: Q1 2024 → Q1 2026
Share of startup funding: 29% → 51%
Increase: 128%
Africa’s startup capital mix is changing.
Source: Africa: The Big Deal. Transactions above $100k, excluding exits.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

Inside Wayfin, these are separate capital states:

Introduced
Reviewing
Circled
Committed
Wired
A warm conversation is not a commitment. A commitment is not cash.
Serious capital conversations happen in Wayfin, not in 40-person email chains.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

Every advisory firm has three CRMs.

The licensed one.
The spreadsheet one.
The inbox one.
Only one is current. It is usually the one leadership cannot see.
The problem is not discipline. It is asking people to record work they have already done.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

Africa’s startup capital stack is blending.
Debt capital grew from $134m in Q1 2024 to $305m in Q1 2026 — up 128%. Its share of funding moved from 29% to 51%.
More routes can fit more businesses.

Source: Africa: The Big Deal.
Choose possibility.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

Blended finance for African startups is rising.

Debt and structured capital grew from $134m in Q1 2024 to $305m in Q1 2026 — up 128%.

A broader capital stack gives more businesses more ways to finance growth.

Source: Africa: The Big Deal.

Choose possibility.

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

Blended finance for African startups is rising.

Debt and structured capital grew from $134m in Q1 2024 to $305m in Q1 2026 — up 128%.

A broader capital stack gives more businesses more ways to finance growth.

Source: Africa: The Big Deal.

Choose possibility.