Koble raises £1 million pre-seed round to re-engineer startup investing with AI

We're pioneering the Quant VC movement

We’re delighted to announce that Koble has raised £1 million in pre-seed capital to re-engineer startup investing with AI.

The round was led by leading venture capital firms Pitchdrive and Modus, with participation from a group of prominent angels dedicated to exploring the disruptive potential of AI in startup investing. 

Proceeds will be used to further develop our groundbreaking algorithms and technology platform, which identifies early-stage investments that outperform the market, mitigating human bias and capturing sustainable alpha for investors.

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At Koble, we’re on a mission to re-engineer the ethics, economics, and scalability of startup investing. 

Our co-founders, Damian Cristian and Guy Conway (having previously co-founded venture builder Zero 1 and raised $10 million in venture capital) have dedicated years to building a unique dataset and groundbreaking proprietary algorithms to transform the process of sourcing, evaluating, and investing in pre-seed and seed-stage startups.

We’re tackling a huge problem. Just 2.5% of early-stage investments yield the target 20x+ return, which means less than 5% of VC funds return the target 3x on investment. The costs are massive:

• LPs lose money (or worse avoid early-stage investing altogether)

• Founders with good ideas cannot access capital

• Ultimately, economic and social progress suffers

The truth is out there. Technology and systematic strategies have already transformed public markets, unlocking trillions in value.

Now, for the first time, Koble is using quant strategies to disrupt early-stage startup investing, delivering repeatable risk-adjusted LP returns that outperform traditional human-centric VCs.

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Koble is unique. Our technology platform – years in the making – pulls massive volumes of unstructured company and founder data from multiple sources, feeding data to a proprietary predictive deep learning model that calculates the probability of success for startups.

The benefits of quant investing for startups, investors, and society are obvious:

• Capital is routed to the people and ideas that deserve it most

• Investors get better risk-adjusted returns

• Society moves forward

At Koble, we believe in good startups over hyped startups, and first principles over FOMO.

Our quant models have no concept of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, personality, and physical appearance. Our groundbreaking deep learning model recommends founders and startups that often differ from the traditional VC investment profile. This makes Koble a good choice for investors who understand the importance of making venture capital fair and inclusive for all.

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 “The “normal science” of the venture capital industry relies on subjective value judgements. Everyone’s sat around the table comparing founders, startups, business models with the same metrics. We’re coming at this from a completely different angle, asking what if the paradigm shifted and startup investors adopted a dispassionate, quantitative approach? Investors have spent the past decade saying that quant VC is impossible. They're wrong, and we have the data to prove it.”

– Koble Co-founder and CEO, Damian Cristian 

“For the first time – thanks to the proliferation of private markets data and new liquidity tools – the underlying technological conditions are right for machines to beat humans at early-stage startup investing. Koble is pioneering the Quant VC movement.”

–  Koble Chairperson, and Co-founder, Idio (acquired), Edward Barrow

“When we met the Koble team we were excited by their vision of the future of startup investing. Their approach aligns with the data-driven investment engine we are building. There’s so much opportunity to advance the way early-stage investing operates, so having Koble in our portfolio is very complementary to us.”

– Pitchdrive Co-founder & Managing Partner, Boris Bogaert

By applying groundbreaking data-science to startup investing, Koble better serves founders, investors, and society.

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Koble

Koble’s team and investors are passionate about bringing quantitative strategies to private markets in order to unlock massive value. 

Powering the business is a group of visionaries – data scientists, builders, and investors – who recognise the limitations of traditional VC and believe there is a better way to invest in startups.

Pitchdrive

Pitchdrive is a radical break from traditional early-stage investing. They get funding in the hands of great founders as soon as they can – in weeks, not months. Because entrepreneurs should focus on building a company, not on talking to investors.

With their data-driven engine, they can qualify seed-stage ventures faster than anyone on the market. This allows them to make seed-stage investing scalable for founders and investors. Post-funding they also provide hands-on support in the form of network introductions, value add partners (up to €750k in value) and expert sessions. By founders for founders.

Modus

Modus is a holistic Venture Platform that invests in people first and provides entrepreneurs with more than just the financial investment needed to succeed. By combining operational, institutional, and financial capital, it provides a foundation for the development of innovation ecosystems through building and supporting startups in MENA and other emerging innovation markets.