Thunder

We're a tech-enabled investment bank for founders, by founders. We help companies navigate their capital strategy for acquiring funding to fuel their growth.

Founders: AI-assisted fundraising for companies. Join the network for free to see which investors are more likely to invest in you.

Investors: Access vetted deal flow and invest with no fees direct on cap table

Thunder X Capital, LLC offers securities through Stonehaven, LLC, a Member FINRA/ SIPC.

Managing Director & Founding Partner

Interplay

Operating Partner

PEF Community

Brining together the London PEF community

Chapter Lead

Hustle Fund

Angel Squad Member

Angel Investor & RE/VC/PE LP

Investor / Advisor 

Generation Esports

President & COO

Walmart Technology

Director Of Digital Media

LiquidSky Software, Inc. (Acquired)

Chief Revenue Officer

ConveyIQ by Entelo

VP of Marketing

Misc Small Businesses and Startups

Built, grew, and sold a few small businesses that are still actively running today.

Founder

I'm a serial entrepreneur that has raised $135M+ and has had multiple exits. I'm now on a mission to support founders with their capital strategy and acquire the capital they need to grow their businesses. 

Thunder.vc is a tech-enabled investment bank for founders, by founders.

When it comes to supporting the founders in our Thunder.vc community, here are some free resources that can help you with your capital raising efforts.

 - Fundraising Demystified newsletter - Sign up at http://join.thunder.vc
 - Free list of AI-recommended VCs specific to your business - https://web.thunder.vc/list-of-investors-vcs-for-founders 
 - Free tool to source lending partners for your working capital needs - https://lp.thunder.vc/apply-for-working-capital-for-your-startup-company
 - Private Slack community for founders - Apply to join at https://app.thunder.vc/signup

Jason Kirby

Founders think raising capital is hard.
Try selling your company while running it. ⚙️

If you’re a founder thinking about selling in 2026, here’s your M&A survival guide (from two people who’ve done it the hard way):

5 Steps to Sell Smart - Not Desperate:

1️⃣ Start early. Build relationships with strategics 12–18 months before you plan to sell. Seek partnerships, integrations, and POCs in the early days to build trust and rapport with them.

2️⃣ Know your numbers. Buyers don’t fund dreams; they fund predictability. After a few intro calls you'll know if you're ready or not with the numbers.

3️⃣ Run a process. Competitive tension is your best negotiation leverage. In today’s market, selling to a strategic is harder; that's why you need to prepare for a private equity buyer, it keeps strategics honest and makes them move faster.

4️⃣ Avoid the earnout trap. Structure cash up front. Earnouts sound great, but rarely workout. Maintain control over the KPIs of an earnout or drop the earnout all together.

5️⃣ Control your narrative. Don’t let your board, your VC, or your emotions run the process. If you're not 100% behind the narrative, it will fall apart.

Bonus6️⃣ Don't run a process without help. Selling your company is a full-time job, similar to fundraising, but even harder. As the CEO, you'll be expected to hit your targets. Having a banker or board member leading the process allows you to stay focus and drive momentum on both fronts.
  
If you want to explore M&A and want to pick someone's brain, comment below or send Oliver Low a DM! He leads M&A deals at Thunder.vc and sold his previous company, he knows what it's like to be in your shoes.

4x Exits, $100M+ Raised. Helping founders raise/exit with clarity, control, and conviction.

I just denied an applicant solely because they have a @hotmail email address. Does that make me a bad person?

I'm looking for tech forward partners who have a deep understanding of technology companies. 

If I was one of my clients and saw that the partner that's supposed to competently understand my business had a hotmail account... I'd immediately discount their abilities. That's my justification.

Is that a fair assessment? or am I just an a** hole

If you're a founder looking to hire a PR in the middle of a crisis, it's likely too late and the damage will get worse.

David Meadvin (CEO, One Strategy Group) breaks down why even the best crisis consultants can’t fix what founders don’t already have... trust.

If your reputation isn’t built before the storm hits, you’re in for a rough time.

💡 2 actionable truths from David’s experience:

1. Your reputation is earned long before crisis day. The founders who invest in team trust and transparent communication recover fastest.

2. The calmest person in the room wins. When everyone panics, composure becomes a superpower, and the board will remember it.

Founders: Don’t wait until you’re trending for the wrong reason.
Start building your “reputation reserve” now.

👇 Watch/listen to the full story:

Watch the full video here. Most founders think they’ll never face a real crisis, until they do. In this episode, David Meadvin shares what happens whe

Open article: The $100M founder’s playbook for surviving bad press by Jason Kirby • 2 min read

The $100M founder’s playbook for surviving bad press

I'm hiring a partner to join Thunder.vc... anyone else getting the AI slop applications like these?

Like they're not even trying to mask the AI. I've gotten like 10 of these identical applications via email. Their cover letters make them sound like a perfect fit, but the resume and the past jobs are WAY off, like not relevant at all. And they all say the same thing.

I hope these desperate people aren't paying for a service like this. I've already created a filter to block them.

For those of you hiring, how obvious has been the AI and what are you doing about it?

Spoke my mind on the AI bubble and where I think it's going and shared some personal deal dynamics I rarely mention publicly. Check it out on the The Mergers podcast

Jason Kirby sold his startup for $40M - but only after the CEO of Samsung Electronics went to prison and nearly blew up the deal.

Investors got greedy.

The new Samsung CEO shut everything down.

Jason's team showed up at 9am to celebrate… and there was nothing to announce.

Welcome to the world of venture capital — where founders are often left holding the bag.

This week on The Mergers, Kenneth Kashif Thomas and Rory Mason sat down with Jason Kirby, now founder of Thunder.vc, to hear the wild behind-the-scenes of what really happens when you raise, scale, and try to exit a venture-backed company.

Jason has:

- Raised $100M+, 
- Sold 4 companies
- Advised on $200M+ in founder exits
- Navigated M&A deals with Walmart, Samsung, Verizon... and lived to tell the tale
- Watched VCs ghost founders when they no longer show “breakout velocity”
- Built Thunder VC to help bootstrapped and “orphaned” founders find exits, growth capital, or both

In this episode:

🖊️ What most founders get dead wrong about term sheets, preferences, and secondary sales
🖊️ The dirty secret of management fees and why VCs often win even when startups lose
🖊️ How to create “phantom leverage” when you have no options left
🖊️ Why AI is a bubble — and why that might not matter

If you’re a founder, investor, or operator - you need to hear this

🎧 Listen here: https://lnkd.in/dDCNNsTr
 📺 Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eNztGnxG

When Oliver Low sold his startup, he thought he’d hit the dream exit.

Instead, he walked straight into a trap most founders never see coming:

The earnout...

He hit his growth targets, but the parent company missed theirs — and the big payout disappeared.

Nine out of ten earnouts fail for this exact reason.

That’s why, at Thunder, we help founders structure exits, not just chase them.

Here’s the truth no one tells you:

Selling early isn’t losing. It’s creating optionality.

Once you have liquidity, you can take bigger swings, with less risk — and 10x your next outcome.

But you only get there if you understand deal architecture: competitive process, buyer psychology, and clean incentives.

Oliver Low breaks it down in this week’s episode:
 🎧 “How to Sell Your Startup: The Founder’s M&A Playbook”

💡 Tactical takeaways:
- How to avoid the 9/10 earnout failure rate
- Why selling in the fourth inning is often smarter than waiting
- How private equity is changing founder exits forever

Listen on: Youtube Spotify Apple Most founders wait too long to sell and end up losing leverage. In this episode, Jason Kirby and Oliver Low share the

Open article: The M&A playbook for founders in 2025 by Jason Kirby • 2 min read

He left venture capital to help take Life360 from Seed to a $7B public company. 

When Itamar Novick joined Life360, it wasn’t yet the household name it is today. The team was small. The product was early. The vision was big but uncertain. 

Like every early-stage company, there were challenges: 

💬 Raising VC capital was tough. 
💸 The company didn’t have much cash. 
🚀 The future was uncertain. 

But instead of staying in VC, Itamar made the rare move, he joined the founding team, betting his career & his networth on building something lasting. 

Years later, that decision helped shape Life360’s journey to 80M users, $200M+ raised, and a dual listing on the ASX and NASDAQ.

In our latest episode of $100M Exits, Itamar shares: 

🔥 Why he left venture to join a scrappy startup 
🔥 How Life360 scaled from early chaos to IPO readiness
🔥 What founders can learn from dual IPOs and post-IPO growth

Watch the full video here. When Itamar Novick joined Life360, it wasn’t yet a global brand — it was a small, ambitious startup still proving itself. T

Open article: The VC who quit to build a $7B company - Itamar Novick on Life360’s wild ride by Jason Kirby • 2 min read

The VC who quit to build a $7B company - Itamar Novick on Life360’s wild ride

NeuroNest Live

NeuroNest is a gamified, interactive AI-powered learning platform for Gen Z, designed to bridge the AI skills gap in the workforce. The platform offers personalized, bite-sized lessons and real-world practical AI applications to make AI education accessible, engaging, and effective.

CEO & Founder

Bakstage.AI

Bakstage.AI is an AI-powered sales platform that converts website visitors into customers by enabling visitors to connect with the businesses’ sales specialists via our 1:1 Premium Video Concierge Service.

Co-founder & Advisor

Co-founder & CTO

Founders Network

Lead Mentor

MassChallenge

MassChallenge connects entrepreneurs with the resources they need to launch and succeed immediately. It is the largest-ever startup accelerator, and the first to support high-impact, early-stage entrepreneurs with no strings attached.

Startup Judge

SaaStock Founder Membership (SFM)

Member

NY Tech Alliance

techLGTM

Podcast Host

FX HedgePool

Head of Engineering

Datamarx

• Grew and lead the engineering team to build the world’s first digital bank for Securing, Controlling and Monetizing first party personal data (B2C)
• Created the firm's proprietary Programmatic Data Collection unit for running extremely accurate targeted campaigns. (B2B)
• Key member of Senior leadership responsible for overseeing firm’s tech strategy, product, investor meetings and marketing
• Architected and developed a proprietary data security system that handled user specific  encryption and decryption leveraging multi-sig. leveraging RSA/AES, DynamoDB
• Lead the development of a bank like transactional system that keeps track of consumers earnings and spending on the DataMarx eco-system 
• Lead the development of a highly scalable real-time data ingestion platform that handles processing of the user’s data from various sources such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. Capable of handling multimillion requests per second using Apache Spark, Kinesis and AWS EMR
• Lead the development of a highly scalable real time analytics ingestion pipeline to capture user's online activity
• Lead the development of Datamarx’s browser extension that finds instant rewards, provides faster browsing and provides enhanced privacy
• Lead the devops & secops at Datamarx
• Setting Technology standards and making sure that all software development and practices are in line with ISO 27001, GDPR and CCPA

Director Of Engineering

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

• Implementing best practices/standards for data ingestion into Firm's internal Data Lake. Creating data 
 ingestion pipeline jobs using Sqoop and Customized Map Reduce jobs.
• Setting up and managing yarn cluster resources/ other services through Cloudera distribution.
• Converting old Informatica jobs to Spark and translating new functional and technical requirements into 
  detailed design. 
• Work on various POCs efforts to migrate applications to AWS.
• Coming up with intelligent ways to equip IBD sales reps with ROE metrics.

Software Architect

Seasoned engineering leader, industry speaker, and CEO & Founder at NeuroNest | Co-founder at Bakstage.AI, passionate about leveraging technology to solve complex problems and help businesses grow.

Over a decade working with AI, and 15 years working in tech, I have trained, mentored, and built high-performing teams from the ground up multiple times. My career includes pivotal roles at Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley, where I led technology development for Investment Banking divisions. I co-founded FLYX, a social networking platform for movie and TV show enthusiasts, and led the engineering at FXHedgePool, a financial technology platform.

I'm building NeuroNest to tackle the critical AI skills gap for Gen Z, driven by the concern that the rapid AI boom is outpacing our educational efforts. NeuroNest is a gamified, AI-powered learning platform, blending workforce skills and AI agents to bridge the AI skills gap.

I'm grateful to have been recognized for my contributions to AI-driven technology innovation as one of the "Top 10 CTOs to Watch in 2022" by Entrepreneur Magazine and a "Top 50 Tech Professional of 2023" by OnCon Awards.

I have secured important and impactful patents on encryption and web security. I serve as a mentor to multiple startups via FoundersNetwork, a judge at MassChallenge, and a guest speaker at Stevens Institute of Technology. I actively contribute to various startup founder communities, sharing my expertise in AI, scaling technology, product development, and building high-performing teams.

Preet Raj

Pretty interesting read I came across and thought it might be helpful. 
According to 6sense’s “Science of B2B” report, buyers are already ~70% through their journey before ever engaging with a seller. Makes sense since business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase. 

That means reps shouldn't be teaching buyers what the problem is anymore, they should be helping them make sense of all the information they already have. 

Modern selling starts later and goes deeper. 
It’s about clarity, timing, and trust. 

We think a lot about this while building Sellible.ai, helping sales teams adapt to this through practice that builds confidence and muscle memory, not scripts. 

Curious how sales leaders are thinking about this? 

Link to article in comments! 

#salesenablement #salestraining #B2B #futureofwork #sellible Sellible (by NeuroNest)

This is for my early stage founder friends, especially those building B2B companies.

Most customer discovery is fake.

Founders show up with a long list of questions they pulled from blogs and accelerators and try to get through all of them in 30 minutes. I’ve been guilty of this too.

The only thing that you should care about is understanding how your prospects are solving the problem today? You're looking for broken processes, not validation of your idea.

Attached is a simple slide that I put together. Hope this helps some early-stage founders who are in the messy discovery phase right now.

P.S: if you have questions, happy to chat.

Sellible (by NeuroNest)

Sellible - Customer Discovery That Actually Works for Early-Stage B2B Founders

“AI sales coaching” is the new buzz, and a lot of platforms are trying to replace the coaching that managers do.
That’s the part I’ve never bought into.

After hundreds of conversations with sales leaders, here's what we learnt:
They don’t want an AI coach. They want their coaching to scale.

The issue isn’t that managers don’t know how to coach. It’s that they don’t have the time to do it consistently.

So instead of going down the “AI replaces the manager” path, we took the opposite direction with Sellible:
- Let AI handle the repetitive, manual review
- Let AI surface what needs attention
- Let AI embed feedback into daily practice
- But keep the sales leader’s judgment at the center

Because the best sales teams aren’t run by AI, they are run by great managers who finally have the bandwidth.

The result so far:
Sales leaders using Sellible.ai are getting 10–12 hours back every week and coaching more, not less. And now they can focus on revenue and pipeline while also being proactive in coaching their reps at scale.

P.S. Reach out if you’d like to learn how sales teams are winning with Sellible.ai.

Sellible (by NeuroNest) #salesenablement #salestraining #B2B #futureofwork #sellible

taplio

The Battle

Jason Kirby

Preet Raj

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taplio

The Battle

Jason Kirby

Preet Raj

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jason Kirby's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreJason Kirby's LinkedIn Performance