Gathr emerges from stealth, offering support & transparency to founders and investors
Gathr, formerly known as London Tech Drinks and London Private Equity Drinks, has stepped into the spotlight as one of the UK’s most active high-growth communities. With a trusted network of nearly 10,000 founders, operators, investors, and service providers, Gathr’s mission is to facilitate connections, foster learning, and drive growth through a range of distinct offerings, including its new Gathr to Find B2B marketplace.
This marketplace serves as a community-recommended platform, making it easy for users to discover top-tier, trusted service and software providers.
Curated over the past nine months, Gathr to Find launches with over 125 leading providers on board. These range from boutique specialists to renowned names such as Goodwin, Taylor Wessing, BDO, Wilson Sonsini, Ragged Edge, Cooper Parry, Blackrock, and Erevena. The development of Gathr builds on the success of London Tech Drinks (LTD), which enabled CEO and Founder Mark Shepherd to cultivate a broad network within the tech ecosystem.
The ethos behind London Tech Drinks, London Private Equity Drinks, and now Gathr, has always been centred on supporting people to thrive – a cause close to Shepherd’s heart, as he has openly discussed his own mental health challenges. Gathr is built around three core pillars: Gathr to Connect, Gathr to Learn, and Gathr to Find. It offers founders, investors, operators, and advisors the opportunity to connect with peers, gain insights from leading experts, and find top-tier providers to aid their scaling efforts. Each element of Gathr is united by a common goal: to help others overcome the numerous hurdles that tech companies encounter on their growth journey.
Founder and CEO, Mark Shepherd, said: “London Tech Drinks started out in Feb 2022, as a single post on LinkedIn asking if anyone wanted to meet up and go for a drink in response to my own mental health challenges and the desire to bring likeminded people together. From initially expecting 10 people maximum who would want to meet, the response has been overwhelming, with the community organically growing to nearly 10,000 people. As we scale, we have continued to launch more peer groups, to ensure people can meet others at a similar stage, sector and seniority. Gathr to Connect and Gathr to Learn are the foundations of the business to date, and now we’ve gone one step further, with the launch of our community recommended platform, Gathr to Find which we couldn’t be more excited about.”
Arabella Reeves, Former Platform Manager at Atomico and Board Member of the Global VC Platform Community, said: “Mark has built an extraordinary community spanning the entire tech landscape at Gathr. Gathr to Find marks a significant shift in how founders, operators, and investors find and choose the service and software providers they use. It addresses a critical pain point for tech stakeholders who have historically relied on word of mouth, cumbersome spreadsheets, or outdated internal databases. By aggregating meticulously curated recommendations from highly reputable VCs, founders and operators worldwide, Gathr has created an incredibly valuable and trustworthy platform that will help save time and energy in researching the best-in-class providers, allowing businesses to instead focus on their growth and execution strategies.”
