Helping founders breakthrough is what gets us out of bed in the morning. With the early stage being the toughest stage for founders, the greatest value that Outward can add is making the early-stage experience easier. 

Breakthroughs are about our founders and their businesses reaching their fullest potential, whether that’s multibillion or multinational success. There will be bumps and a million no’s. We back ourselves to back you.

We invest in founders building new technology and platforms that operate at the intersection of financial services with healthcare, education, climate and other society-shifting issues.

We have chosen to make our entry investment in pre-Series A funding rounds of up to £5m. This is the toughest stage for founders and we want to help founders breakthrough.

We make our entry investment in funding rounds of up to £5m. Our investment ticket usually represents at least 50% of the round. 10-15% ownership is preferred.

As we usually invest at least 50% of the round, we often find ourselves playing a lead role including actively supporting founders in the closing of the round. This may involve round structuring and helping in discussions with co-investors. We are equally comfortable with co-leading or participating.

While we prefer to invest in post-revenue companies, our main concern is the quality rather than quantum of revenue. A minimal level of revenue can be enough for us if the customer quality and commercial terms give us conviction in the team and market opportunity.

We have, in exceptional cases, invested in pre-revenue companies.

Our intention is to support our portfolio companies with follow-on investments in at least two further funding rounds. Investment decisions will be made at the time considering funding needs, commercial progress, round composition and terms.

We have discovered thousands of founders and companies through a wide range of sources including our network of current and exited portfolio companies, co-investor friends, local communities and simply serendipity. A warm intro from a mutual contact is nice but certainly not required. We like to back underdogs. Other than that, we have no pre-conceived notions of what makes a successful founder. For a cold outreach, please use the form on our website.

Post-investment, our mission is to provide tailored support to our portfolio companies. This includes new hires, commercial partnerships, board construction, positioning for the next funding round, and marketing support. To ensure we understand the needs of the business, a Board Observer right is a part of our investment terms. Before choosing us as an investor partner in your business, we ask that you speak with the founders in our portfolio to understand Outward’s pragmatic and high-impact approach to adding value post-investment.

We are fortunate to have British Business Bank and several other institutions as our LPs, as well as a family offices and individuals. Many of our LPs are current or former founders and executives with deep domain expertise in banking, healthcare, insurance, investment management, legal services, real estate, robotic process automation, social media, software development and wealth management. We try to leverage as much of this experience as possible to help our portfolio companies.

We like to build trusted relationships with our companies. We go ‘all in’ to help our companies post-investment. For that reason, we primarily invest in companies where the founders are based in the UK at the time we make our entry investment. Of course, we expect most, if not all, of our companies will become multi-national and the founders may relocate with their businesses.

While our companies will each have a primary point of contact at Outward, we work as a collective. Outward has a flat structure where everyone has their say in a trust-filled and supportive environment. You can expect to interact with several, if not all, members of the Outward team.

Internally, the Outward team is built on and will continue to be built on strong, diverse foundations. Currently, our small team covers 9 nationalities and 6 languages. Naturally, diversity and inclusion is at the front of our minds externally. Knowing that progress takes action, we are taking specific initiatives to improve diversity and inclusion in the composition of our companies and founders.