Foundy’s platform provides technology startups, including SaaS, eCommerce and Web3, with affordable access to UK and international buyer and investor networks as well as the advisory services and resources to complete rewarding exits for their shareholders. Foundy is using the £1.25m of funding to grow its engineering, marketing, and account management teams as it expands its platform’s product offering and international presence. The lead investor, Fuel Ventures, is a VC that has also led early-stage investments into Amazon’s European rival, Onbuy and Amazon store acquirer, Heroes.

Foundy has built its marketplace with the mission of modernising the M&A industry for startups. Traditional acquisition processes can easily take 9 to 18 months, incur unnecessarily high fees on both sides, ​​and suffer delays due to inefficient communication around due diligence and legal documentation processing.

‘Buying-Then-Building’ has become an increasingly popular strategy for acquisition entrepreneurs, fund managers and corporate development teams in light of current market volatility. Buyers and investors are provided with an opportunity to gain instant access to profitable revenue streams and wider customer bases, rather than taking on the risk of building a similar product or service from scratch. On the sell side, startup shareholders, including founders, investors, and employees, get the opportunity to turn a fragment or all of their equity into cash in return for all of the time, effort and resources they invested. EY’s latest M&A report from July 2022 states that “even though capital market conditions have tightened sharply, PE firms still have large amounts of cash that will need to be deployed.” Meanwhile, according to Deloitte, 92% of executives at corporations and private equity investors expect the number of acquisitions to potentially rise in 2022.

Foundy’s marketplace allows buyers and investors to discover and cross-compare startup profiles and then immediately initiate conversations on the platform. Meanwhile sellers avoid feeling overwhelmed by having to rely on fragmented information sources and unvetted advisors.

Each seller’s profile is purposefully anonymous on the marketplace and startups are given control of which buyers and investors have access to confidential information such as financials. Startups however, are required to display key metrics, company highlights, and basic financial information in order to start conversations with buyers on the platform.

Founders will soon also be able to choose to add integrated metric feeds from platforms such as Stripe in order to show potential buyers further transparency into their startup’s performance. The company also aims to provide expert guides, and informative podcasts on the exit process as well as legal document templates. 

Mark Pearson, Managing Partner at Fuel Ventures adds: “We are excited to be supporting Foundy’s journey. The company will play a major role in the ecosystem as a whole because by helping startup shareholders more easily liquidate their shares via full and secondary buyouts it will in turn incentivise more and more people to both work and invest in startups.”

JP Lewin, Foundy’s Founder & CEO, developed his vision for completely modernising the acquisition process after his first-hand experience of building and then selling his last technology company.

“I found that the traditional startup acquisition process is painfully slow and complex for founders, buyers and investors. Foundy is on a mission to alleviate the current issues and modernise the process by providing access to every aspect of the deal lifecycle in an all-in-one platform.”

JP continues: “We are continually engineering Foundy’s technology and client support infrastructure to help startup founders sell their company for a rewarding valuation as little as 30 to 90 days and at up to 5x lower cost compared to other brokers and advisory firms.”