Meet London’s leading tech investors

Involved in investments from Papier to Deliveroo, she namechecks health tech as a current obsession. She’s an avid fan of JamJar-funded Babylon, the ‘life-changing’ doctor app which gives you a video consultation on your phone and delivers meds to your door, as well as new fitness platform Fiit — ‘the Deliveroo of fitness’ — she’s just invested in, which connects you to personal trainers via your TV or laptop so that you can work out at home. When assessing potential investments, Marrache looks for ‘a strong team, large opportunity and a hot idea’ — and is especially excited by London’s tech scene. ‘It’s almost a start-up start-up scene, versus the US which is like the conglomerate. It’s got all the busyness and excitement of a start-up. I never stop being inspired by the entrepreneurs just going for it here.’

The fintech expert

James Wise, investor in Crowdcube and GoCardless

Bermondsey-based James Wise is a tech geek at heart. As a teenager working at a Stockport garden centre, he built websites on the side for local businesses and got ‘a little bit hooked on software’. After studying PPE at Oxford and doing time at McKinsey, the 31-year-old helped launch the Social Business Trust which specialised ‘in advising entrepreneurs who had huge ideas about how they could improve society’, such as prisoner rehabilitation programmes. ‘I’m probably the only venture capitalist whose previous job was working full time for a charity,’ he laughs.

Now at Balderton Capital — he was made partner at 29, the youngest in a Series A (the first stage of financing a start-up) venture fund in Europe — Wise invests in a huge range of ‘frontier technology’. This includes two big players in fintech: Crowdcube, a platform that allows people to crowdfund start-ups, and GoCardless, an online direct debit provider that makes collecting payments easy. The great thing about tech in the financial sector, he says, is that it ‘broadens access to financial services and makes them cheaper and more effective’. With Crowdcube that means democratising investment opportunities and giving companies far more diverse investor bases. ‘I do my job because I want to be involved in exciting businesses and support them. Crowdcube allows you to find stuff you’re passionate about’ — like the Manchester bike project

that cycling-mad Wise has personally invested in. GoCardless, meanwhile, is closer to home for Wise — founder Hiroki Takeuchi was his flatmate for several years and the company was born in the kitchen the two shared.

So what’s the next area of fintech to go stratospheric? Wise is banking on insurance technology. ‘The assets people care about have shifted — we’re renting far more and experiences matter more than ownership. Insurers are going to have to shift to that new market and they’ll need pretty advanced software to do that.’

The fashionista

Frederic Court, investor in Goop, The Business of Fashion and Farfetch

‘I’m a man who has always liked shopping,’ laughs Frederic Court. Handy, then, that the Nice-born 48-year-old (‘I describe myself as an old millennial’), now based in Bayswater, has a direct line to Farfetch. Court’s Felix Capital was first to invest in the luxury clothing site, which is now valued at more than $1bn.

His venture capital firm has also invested in lifestyle-focused brands such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, The Business of Fashion and most recently fashion news website, Highsnobiety, all of which reflect Court’s current interest in ‘the emergence, especially through social media, of digital communities who build online in a very organic and authentic way’ — and how that helps them in finding ‘the brands of tomorrow, those brands that resonate with younger customers and Generation Z’.

This focus on fashion has less to do with Court’s own superior sartorial tastes — his style is a ‘mix and match’ of Saint Laurent and Gucci and Uniqlo denim — and more with the investment potential. ‘If you think about the big successes in Europe in digital, many have been around fashion, luxury and lifestyle — take the UK with Asos and Net-A-Porter.’ The only thing than can hamper that? Brexit. When he first came to London, ‘that’s where the talent pools were, and you could find people from so many nationalities. London really emerged as the best place to be for digital.’ Post-Brexit, he worries, a company such as Portuguese native José Neves’s Farfetch might never make it off the ground. ‘It wouldn’t be easy for the next Neves to come here and start a retail store. There’ll be a lot of talent that will no longer make it here.’

Photographs By Ed Miles Styled By Jenny Kennedy