RAISE

In 2020, I began the process of selling my company after 8 years raising & building in London.

The pandemic hit. I was in Portugal - grounded physically, but unmoored mentally. I closed the deal from a laptop by the ocean. It felt like a victory and an untethering of my soul at the same time.

But one thing became clear: I loved the deal. I love deals. I love the psychology and emotional resonance of dealmaking and all the other interrelated dynamics. The energy, the clarity, the pressure. Not just the money - the transformation.

That was the seed for RAISE.

RAISE is a fundraising studio for ambitious founders who want more than capital - they want control, clarity, and confidence.

We work 1-on-1. We go deep. We get tactical. Yes, we do decks and strategy. But we also coach mindset, craft narrative, objection handle, cocreate Ideal Investor Profiles, and structure deals that feel right, not just look good.

This is not advisory theatre. I’ve been on both sides of the table - exited founder, 20+ angel investments, and the go-to “wingman” behind dozens of successful raises.

Some recent client results:

	•	£600k raised in 48 hours - 90% via WhatsApp
	•	£1.5m VC round flipped to £5m strategic round
	•	€8m & €50m OpCo/PropCo Term Sheet landed

RAISE exists to help founders stop winging it - and start winning it.

When I say I’m your fundraising wingman, I mean I ride with you until the wire hits.

| Fundraising Strategy | Investor Psychology | Founder Coaching | Deal Design |

Founder

Love Ventures

Joining Love Ventures was an easy yes. A London based, early stage fund quietly rewriting the playbook on UK tech.

At Love Ventures, I partner with founders from pre-seed to Series B. But this isn’t just about investing capita-it’s about helping founders refine strategy, scale with conviction, and navigate the real challenges of building a company.

We focus on more than slides and term sheets. Mindset, growth, and long-term investor trust are just as important. I leverage experience raising $56M+ for startups across the US and EU to help founders succeed strategically, culturally, and financially.

Some recent portfolio highlights:

Partnered with Tembo, Fifth Dimension AI, and Solo helping founders get investor ready and scale.
Co-invested in breakout UK startups while strengthening growth culture.
Guided founders through long term investor relationships and strategic decision-making.

Love Ventures isn’t just a fund. It’s a partner that leads with conviction, backing founders who are actually moving the needle and helping them go from overlooked to undeniable.

Venture Partner

PEF Community

A global community of post-exit founders supporting each other on life’s endless journey to find purpose, fulfillment, and meaning.

Member

PeakSpan Capital

Sector Expert (Proptech)

Stealth Startup

The ICE Network

An invitation-only community for influential tech founders and operators, blending deep relationships with world-class retreats and off-the-record insights.

Foundrs

A founder-to-founder collective focused on real talk, raw lessons, and shared growth through community-led peer groups and incredible, life and work affirming curated retreats and unconferences.

Founder Institute

Founder Institute is a multi award winning accelerator with chapters in every major city in the world.

I support Start Ups in NYC for them, especially when dealing with the very first fundraising.

Mentor

RenKap

The development management platform unlocking housing.

Advisor

Prolo

AI driven Procurement-as-a-Service for the construction industry.

Investor

Raising capital doesn’t have to be all stress and spreadsheets. 

We can even, dare I say it, make it spark joy.

Over the past 15 years, I've raised capital for my own ventures and advised over 30 businesses, building successful strategies, overcoming obstacles, and fostering long-term investor relationships.

Now, as I’m turning towards becoming a venture capitalist, I want to leverage the experience with capital and strategic insights.

My experience as an exited founder and fundraising advisor gives me a unique perspective in spotting promising startups and guiding them to success—not just as a consultant, but as an investor.

My approach:

I’m here to do more than just write a check. 
I know what founders go through.

I focus on building trust, credibility, and a shared vision for the future. 
Be it securing capital or coaching through the emotional highs and lows of fundraising, I’m here for founders with the tools they need for long-term growth.

Here’s how I’ve helped:

> Helped in raising £600,000 in just 48 hours through whatsapp! 
> Raised £1,000,000 with a strong lead VC after restructuring the GTM and Pricing Model
> Landed a £2m Term Sheet for a £3,000,000 investment round after nailing product metrics

Why I’m different:

As I transition into venture capital, I’m bringing my full toolkit to the table—fundraising expertise, personal coaching, and a deep understanding of the founder journey. 
Capital is important, but so is giving founders the mindset, resilience, and strategy to succeed.

My mission: To give founders an unfair advantage in fundraising, scaling, and building investor confidence.
Let's turn those tough investor meetings into accelerated growth and success. 🚀

Portugal just saw a landmark fund raised: €120M.
Not because Portugal is huge. Because it’s small.
And that’s exactly the advantage.

Armilar just closed €120 million in its Fund IV, marking one of the largest venture funds in Portuguese history.

For context, Portugal has about 10.5 million people slightly larger than the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here’s why this matters beyond Portugal:

Small home markets force global thinking from day one.

When your entire country has 10.5 million people, you can’t rely on local scale.

You have to think international immediately.

No domestic scaling as a crutch.
No “let’s dominate Portugal, then expand.”

It’s global or nothing.

This is the same pattern seen in:

📍 Scandinavia: Spotify, Klarna, Revolut founders couldn’t rely on home market scale. They built global products from the start.

📍 Israel: 9 million people, yet produces more unicorns per capita than almost anywhere. Small market = global discipline.

📍  Estonia: 1.3 million people. Skype, Wise, Bolt all built for the world, not Tallinn.

Portugal is following this playbook.

And LPs are noticing. €120M isn’t just a vote of confidence in Armilar it’s a bet on Portuguese founders producing globally ambitious companies.

Here’s the fundraising lesson:

If you’re building in a small market, don’t apologize for it. Use it.

Investors don’t fund local ambition.
They fund global ambition.

And small markets force that discipline faster than large ones.

A founder in the US may start by thinking “We’ll just own the US market first.”

A founder in Portugal, Scandinavia, or Israel can’t.
They have to think global from day one.

That clarity is an advantage, not a handicap.

Before your next raise, ask yourself:

Are you building for your home market? Or for the world?

Small markets know the answer immediately.
Large markets take years to figure it out.

The €120M fund isn’t about Portugal being big. It’s about Portuguese founders thinking globally.

That’s what LPs fund.

PS – Amazing to hear the inside story straight from the source with Pedro Ribeiro Santos at our dinner last week. 
Truly inspiring journey!

Nick Katz, FRICS

Connecting people & place to create a better planetary experience 🌍 

I'm obsessed with the intersection of property and technology and its impact on the planet and people.

I’m addicted to personal and professional development as well as founder, team and investor psychology and dysfunction.

I’ve worked in a number of sectors across commercial real estate, property technology, climate and regeneration covering 3 continents - some highlights include:

- acquiring industrial buildings
- finding and negotiating office space for anchor tenants
- becoming the first LEED Accredited Professional at my RE Firm in 2009
- selling and deploying SaaS solutions in to REITs
- building software for the construction industry
- developing consumer facing apps to manage household finances and payments
- engineering back ends and an API platform for solving complex multi-utility billing and rent collection
- advising on modular housing construction
- getting my permaculture certification along with my wife in Portugal
- launching and financing real estate funds and projects
- raising angel, family office, PE, institutional & venture capital for proptech companies and real estate funds

I'm at my best operating, advising and investing where people and place meet.

Exited Founder Turned Investor | Founder @ RAISE - Fundraising & Growth Strategist

Wednesday night I co-hosted Love Ventures private dinner alongside investors managing €400M+ in growth capital.

The wildest part was how a room full of founders who’ve built billions in enterprise value & AUM  ended up being more human and hilarious than anything Web Summit could’ve planned.

What began as a packed day of Web Summit conversations and an The ICE Network founders investors meetup somehow transformed into one of the most energising evenings I’ve had in Lisbon.

📍A table I’ll never forget

- Founders with real exits.
- Operators who’ve built through every kind of chaos.
- Investors with meaningful firepower.

And our sponsor, Atempo Growth, a €400M+ growth debt fund deploying capital at a speed most people underestimate until they hear how it actually works.

Instead of posturing or pitch theatre, the room gelled instantly.

At one point, half the table was literally crying laughing.

Ten minutes later, the same group was dissecting why most acquirers still underutilize founders after an exit, and how much institutional knowledge is routinely left on the table in M&A.

It was the kind of honesty that only shows up when people have lived through both the wins and the bruises.

📍A masterclass I didn’t expect

I’m deeply comfortable in the world of equity pre seed, seed, A rounds, pricing dynamics, founder psychology.

Debt, though, is a different language.

Listening to Sacha from Atempo Growth walk through how they deploy alongside trusted VCs from €2M tickets all the way up to €50M was the kind of education you don’t get on X or in a blog post.

There’s an entire universe of tech debt financing most early stage founders never get to see up close.

Last night changed that for me.

📍The real outcome

- Deals were sparked.
- Partnerships were born.
- New friendships took shape.

But more importantly:

It proved again that the real value of Web Summit isn’t just the event it’s the rooms you intentionally curate around it.

Thank you to Adrian Love and the Love Ventures team for bringing me in as a venture partner and trusting me to co host something this meaningful.

Thank you to Atempo Growth for sponsoring the evening & for being both brilliant and genuinely fun.

And to Sacha, who is unintentionally one of the funniest people in European finance.

Grateful to so many cool folks’s mix of friends, clients and investors! Christophe, Helene, Vicky, John, Lawrence, Martin , Pedro, Rob, Alexander.

Finally, to the venue..Torel Palace Lisbon’s best kept secret. 

Thank you for the warmth, the views, and for making the night feel cinematic.

More nights like this. More rooms like this.

The right group. The right energy. The right conversations.

The kind that don’t just make a night memorable..they shift how you think!

At 41, I’m finally starting my dream project today!

🎙️ It’s called RAISE - No BS Fundraising Podcast

A podcast about the messy, beautiful, frustrating side of raising capital. 

Not the decks. Not the jargon.
The doubt. The courage. The faith.

At 24, I started my first business/ side hustle in the US
At 26, I failed & moved to London
At 29, I tried again & built my first company, 
At 30, I raised my first pre seed round £150k
At 37, I sold the company to Goodlord, the UK’s #1 letting agent software

Kept advising, building and investing in startups globally.  

At 41, I have invested in 19+ startups, raised $56 Million. 

I am finally launching something I never had.
The right fundraising advice the one that works.

📍 How to build trust with investors
📍How to recover from a “no”
📍How to raise smart, not just fast
📍 How to tell a story that earns conviction  

Raising capital doesn’t have to be all stress and spreadsheets.

It can spark joy when you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and who you’re building with.

The first episode of RAISE is live with the OG Tom, no spoilers.
🎙️ Link: <https://lnkd.in/dQUjPVGb>

If you’re a founder raising right now, or even dreaming about it someday.

This podcast might just be the most honest conversation you’ll hear this week.

Thanks for reading till here. 

And yes!

If you’ve ever had a dream you’ve put off, go DO IT!!

It’s never too late. I am 41 and just starting.

Half the people at this breakfast were old friends from London.
The other half had moved to Portugal. 
And I realized my network had moved with me.

I was at Web Summit in Lisbon last week.

On day one, I went to the The ICE Network breakfast at MAMA SHELTER.

Small group. Founders, investors, a few exited entrepreneurs.

Seeing my network in the room, I realized my London network has become my Portugal network.

Not because I built a new one from scratch, but because strong relationships are portable.

When you move cities, your real friends show up.
Either they visit, or they move too, or you stay connected across borders.

The people I was closest to in London? 

Several of them are now based in Portugal Adrian Love, Benjamin James Lambert, Thomas A., Helene Guillaume Pabis, Hayley Sudbury, Niccolò Corsini, Raph Crouan, Duncan Cheatle, Maria-Sophie Greiner, Vicky Wilson and Bretton Putter, Niccolò Corsini, Raph Crouan, Duncan Cheatle, Maria-Sophie Greiner, Vicky Wilson and Bretton Putter.

We didn't plan it. It just happened.

And a huge shoutout to the co lead of The ICE Network Chloe Johns, as well as Alicia Navarro and Rob Elkin.

Tourist founders try to "break into" a new city and struggle. 

Founders with real communities? Their network travels with them.

I didn’t “network my way into Lisbon.” I moved here, and my community came with me. 

Some physically. 
Some digitally.
Some by visiting for events like this.

But the trust was already there.

So founders don’t optimize for building a new network.
Optimize for deepening the one you have.

Strong networks are portable. Weak ones aren’t.

Build the kind of community that travels.

I spent 4 years chasing a $250M dream that didn’t happen!

Involved the OG Richard Branson and ultimately never took off.

But this failure taught me to build my company that I sold in 2021.


Costa Rica. 10,000 acres.

A biological corridor for organisms migrating between dry forest and tropical forest under threat from non sustainable development.

The plan:
Four boutique hotels, each running on different renewable energy solar, hydro, wind, geothermal.


We made our way to Richard Branson through my co founder.
He was interested for a time.
Then decided to focus on building a spaceport instead.


Four years. $250 million we never raised.
The project never got done.

But here's what I learned:


1. Big vision pulls incredible people. 

First person to say yes: Laurel Colless, former Head of Sustainability at Nokia in Japan. She became my co-founder. 

She then brought in: 
📍Damon Zumbroegel, architect from San Francisco 
📍James Fiorillo Ortega, CFO who'd successfully exited an island resort

We also brought on Daniel Janzen, one of the world's foremost biologists. An audacious idea can pull together a team to move something forward.

2. I had no idea how to raise money.

📍We had the vision. We didn't have the process.
📍Same thing happened later when I wanted to buy a building in East London for a sustainability focused hostel.

Great idea. No clue how to access the capital.

3. The "failure" was my real education.

I learned more about entrepreneurship from that project than I could have any other way.

Years later, I built acasa. Ran it for eight years.
That Costa Rica dream crash?
It made the successful one possible.

It’s still a dream that burns inside me 
If you want to see the deck, comment DECK & DM me.

Happy to share maybe one of you will find my Leonardo DiCaprio / Richard Branson out there who wants to fund it or even take it as their own 😉

Sometimes what doesn't work teaches you how to build what will.
Agree?

Nick Katz

Founders obsess over competitors decks.

Investors barely look at them. Here’s what they’re actually evaluating.

You’ve studied the competition. You know their metrics, their positioning, their weaknesses.

You’re ready to explain why you’re better.
But in the meeting, the investor doesn’t ask about competitors.

They ask:

Market timing
Customer acquisition strategy

Why now

Here’s what’s happening:

Investors aren’t comparing you slide by slide to other startups in your space.
They’re asking: “Is this the best way to deploy capital right now?”

Best compared to what?

Other startups in different sectors

📍Late stage safe bets
📍Keeping cash dry for next quarter
📍A hundred other uses of that same capital

This is the comparison trap.
Investors place you in a mental box within seconds of your pitch.

That box determines their:

📍Risk tolerance
📍Return expectations
📍Timeline assumptions

If you’re in the wrong box, your metrics become irrelevant.
You’re being evaluated against the wrong benchmarks.

Most founders fall into this trap passively.

The investor says:
“Oh, you’re a marketplace.” Or: “This is X for Y.”

And suddenly you’re stuck in that comparison set.
SOLUTION? After raising $56 million, this is what I concluded.

The best fundraisers do something different.
They define the category themselves.

They control:

📍How the problem is framed
📍How the market is sized
📍What success looks like

Not with buzzwords.

With precision about what they’re building, how their customers are responding and why this specific use of capital makes sense now.

Your competition isn’t other founders.

It’s the mental model investors use to categorize you.
Shape it early, or spend the whole raise fighting the comparison trap.

Your pitch is perfect. Your numbers work. 
Investors are interested. But the wire never comes.

I know that feeling. Here's what's actually missing.

I was building an eco resort in Costa Rica.
The vision was clear: 
📍 Four hotels powered by renewable energy
📍 A biological corridor preservation project
📍 A casino funding conservation

I'd assembled an exceptional team. 
📍 Former Nokia sustainability executive. 
📍 World renowned biologist. 
📍 CFO who'd successfully exited an island resort.

The pitch deck told the story.
The financial model worked.

We got meetings. We got interest. 
We got close with the OG Richard Branson.

But we never got the wire. Here's what I missed:

Vision attracts people. 
Process converts them.
I could paint the picture.
I couldn't navigate the deal mechanics.

The term sheet negotiations. 
The due diligence choreography.
The investor update cadence that keeps momentum alive.

Those aren't glamorous skills.
But they're the ones that close rounds.

When I started my next company in 2013, I learned fundraising process before taking meetings.
Not just vision. Process.

Sold it in 2021.

Your deck gets you in the room. 
Your process gets you the check.

Still struggling? Write to me.

In 2024, I watched something happen in fundraising that felt eerily familiar.

Every investor, every founder, every WhatsApp group suddenly pivoted to AI.

Overnight, FinTech wasn’t cool. PropTech wasn’t cool.

If your deck didn’t have “AI” in it, people politely stopped reading.

Here’s what I’m seeing now from inside the trenches:

Every VC is deploying almost exclusively into AI,
Not because every AI company is great,
But because they’re afraid to miss the next OpenAI.

Most AI founders haven’t been around long enough to know what churn looks like.

Year three will be brutal for many when the first enterprise contracts quietly disappear.

Funds that used to back high growth SaaS have frozen deployment unless you’re either:

1️⃣ “Explosive AI” (1,000% MoM growth), or
2️⃣ Profitable.

Everyone else? Out of scope.

We’re watching a classic bubble pattern play out again.
hype → herd → overfunding → overhiring → correction.

Some analysts are already calling this 26x larger than the dot com bubble in 1999–2000.

That’s not my stat that’s the market whisper.

If that correction hits, it’s going to be painful to be
A high growth AI company with no real margins.

Because when the music stops, everyone starts asking:

📍 What’s your retention? 
📍 Who’s your customer? 
📍 What problem do you actually solve?”

Meanwhile, the “boring” sectors:
PropTech, FinTech, analog experiences

They’re quietly building with real customers & sustainable ARR.

For example, one of my portfolio companies just broke £2M ARR selling into global real estate firms.

Deal cycles are long (3–9 months), but once you’re in, churn falls off a cliff.

That’s not sexy, but it’s real.
You’re in a river of honey.. slow but sticky

I’m not anti AI. I’m anti delusion.

I’ve raised money for AI founders, advised AI funds, and built with AI tools myself.

But right now, too much money is chasing too few fundamentals.

And that ends the same way it always does:

With VCs ghosting founders and founders ghosting payrolls.

So if you’re a founder outside the hype..stay there.

If you’re building something boring, beautifully boring, don’t pivot because Twitter says so.

Because when the AI tide recedes, discipline will be in fashion again.
Agree?

Flew to Minneapolis, my first time in US for someone else’s business, not my own! 

Writing from this studio as I realise: 

Venture studio turning loss streams into profit engines for the worlds biggest companies.

That’s what I flew into on Sunday:)

I’ve been brought in by Olaf N. Lee, founder of Prototype Garage, a skunkworks style industrial inventor studio building IP out of created and repurposed hardware and transforming “loss” line items into new profit streams.

Over the next few days, I’ll be working with Olaf and his team on:

📍  Narrative + capital strategy for multiple subsidiary companies

📍  Positioning workshops inside their headquarters

📍 Deep dive strategic sessions with their CFO, designers, and venture studio leadership

Here’s the part that still blows my mind:

Olaf found me on LinkedIn.
Quietly followed my posts for months.
And then flew me across the world when it was time to raise serious money.

No outreach. No funnels.

Just my personal brand doing its work.

Thanks to Saloni and team for helping me build such a cool personal brand on LinkedIn 

Olaf is one of the very first clients I acquired directly through LinkedIn
It led to some of the biggest, most high impact work I’ve ever done.

It reinforces a belief I hold very deeply:

When your positioning is precise and your content is honest, you don’t chase capital and people. 
They chase you.

———-

If you’re preparing for a fundraise Seed, Series A, or growth & want help shaping your narrative, pitch, and investor strategy/ deal flow, DM me “Fundraise”.

Happy to help you :)

The world's youngest billionaires didn't build a sexy consumer app.
They built infrastructure for AI data labeling.
Here's why the "boring" businesses raise the biggest rounds.

Brendan Foody, Adarsh H., and Surya Midha are all 22 years old.

They just raised $350M at a $10B valuation for Mercor, making each of them billionaires.

They beat Mark Zuckerberg's record as the youngest on the Forbes list.

What did they build?

AI data labeling infrastructure. 

Mercor connects AI labs with tens of thousands of human experts to clean training data for frontier models.

📍Not a consumer app.
📍Not a social platform.
📍Not a shiny AI chatbot.

Boring infrastructure that every major AI company needs.

Here's what I see constantly:

Founders think investors want sexy.

📍 Consumer products. 
📍 Platform plays.
📍 Viral growth.

So they chase markets that are crowded, noisy, and hard to differentiate in.

But when I look at the biggest raises and fastest paths to unicorn status, it's almost always infrastructure.

The companies solving unsexy, hard problems that everyone needs:

📍 Stripe didn't build a consumer fintech app.They built payment rails.
📍 Databricks didn't build analytics dashboards. They built data infrastructure. 
📍 Snowflake didn't build BI tools. They built data warehousing. 
📍 Mercor didn't build a recruitment app. They built AI training infrastructure.

Boring. Essential. Fundable.

When your product is something every major company in a massive industry needs, you don't have to convince investors it matters.

The TAM speaks for itself. The necessity is obvious.

Consumer apps fight for attention and prove unit economics.

Infrastructure companies get inbound and negotiate terms.

Before your next raise: Stop asking "Is this sexy?"
Start asking "Is this necessary?"

The 22 year old billionaires figured that out.

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