Tech's rising stars?
36:31 Share

What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life.

To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com. That's warbyparker.com. With the Redfin app, you'll know the moment your next place hits the market.

Whether you're looking to buy your dream home or rent a suite apartment, give Redfin your gotta-have-it wishlist of property features, and you'll receive real-time notifications tailored just for you. Ready to see it up close and personal? Scheduling a tour is just a tap away. Don't wait to find your perfect match. Download the Redfin app and start searching today.

Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast. I'm Danny Fortson, Danny in the Valley. And I'm Katie Prescott, not in the city today, but in the depths of the Oxfordshire countryside. So Katie, in the country, your Wi-Fi is okay? Just about, but only because I'm at a tech conference in the countryside where the Wi-Fi is strong and the vibe is good. But I can tell you on the way here, I'm sorry, I'm looking out the window and there's a robot running across the lawn.

Like not amongst the cows, but almost. Yeah, the Wi-Fi wasn't brilliant on the way here. So do tell what conference in this week of many, many, many.

tech events, conferences, etc. Are you at and what are you doing there? Yeah, it has been the week of, well, the two weeks of European tech conferences, right? We had South by Southwest London, the first of those last week. And then this week has been London Tech Week, but also Viva Tech in Paris, where I was yesterday. Super cool. And now...

We are back in England, bucolic England, in the Cotswolds at a conference or get-together really called Founders Forum. And it is, I think, my favorite tech event of the year. So it was started by Brent Hoberman, who was one of the founders of lastminute.com, a store of the British tech scene, 20 years ago, and it's their 20th anniversary today. 20 years! That makes me feel old. And it brings together a really extraordinary collection of...

entrepreneurs, corporates and investors and a smattering of celebrities too. So Davina McCall is here, Mo Farah, James Corden, mingling with people like Alex Kendall, the founder of Wave, Driverless Cars, Renee Haas, the boss of Arm is here, Demis Hassabis,

I just sound like I'm a name dropper, don't I? No, totally. It's like the tech A-listers and a few B-listers from like the non-tech world. From the non-tech world. And so it's a fun get together and it's very small and you bump into people sitting on hay bales, literally, watching speeches. And so we've had a really, really cool day. What cool tech stuff?

Have you seen? You'd be quite jealous of the robots. There are some great robots going around. There's one French company which has developed a robot which sort of looks like a cat with little ears. It's rather sweet. It walks around. Have you seen that one? Yes. Yeah. So they're for use in hospitals. So that's quite sweet. And there's...

some kind of more dog-like robots stomping around. And then there's a real focus on longevity at this year's conference.

So Callum and I, our producer, have had quite a lot of fun. And you'll hear about this later going around the health tent. I'm sure it's got another name. I'm looking at some of the tech products in there that can help you live longer, including an ice bar that someone's been in, by the way. Cold plunge. I've done cold plunge, by the way. Have you? How long can you last in a cold plunge? I've got like a minute 15. She was saying two minutes is what you should be aiming for as a woman.

Sorry. Well, what are you doing? You need to work on your cold plunge. There's a place in down the street where we live in Berkeley that does, I think it's actually called Fire and Ice, where you do sauna and then you sweat, it's super hot. And then you jump in the cold plunge and then you go back in the sauna and then jump in the cold plunge. And I will say by the end of it,

You are like your body feels like, like you're kind of buzzing. It's interesting. I don't know if there's any science to it whatsoever, but it's kind of like, you know, it's a nice thing to do every now and then. Yeah, that's what the lady at the cold plunge said exactly that. She's like, it sharpens the brain. Yeah. Did you feel more focused? I don't know. I was trying not to focus. Yeah.

So that was kind of the whole point. I think of my toes. Now we worked out, you could probably spend a million pounds on health tech hardware quite easily if you bought some of the things in the tent. So it was the cold plunge. There's also this hyperbaric chamber, which is like a sealed pod. We sent you a picture of it. Yeah, so you guys sent me this picture and I was like, what are you guys about to blast off like Buzz Lightyear? Because it looked like you guys were in this capsule room

And like you were just about to either go to the moon or had just come back. Yes, designed like a flight podge. There are little steps up to this white chamber. It had these white leather seats. But you wear a mask and then you inhale oxygen. Isn't that what we do anyway? It's like purer than that. It's just so much better. And the best thing about it is you can change the color of the seats and have them match your sofa or your helicopter seats if necessary.

I interviewed the CEO very briefly. So we'll play it. We'll play a clip of that shortly. Can I just ask, because I know there's a lot of you, you've been kind of doing the rounds. Is there anything that you walked away with from where you're like, actually, this is not a gimmick. This sounds cool. Like this is something that I could see, you know, being a goer as opposed to just kind of like,

expensive toys for people obsessed with living forever no there was nothing there for me yeah and i don't know if that's because i'm not rich enough or i'm not obsessed enough with my health um what are you pointing to david cameron david cameron's walking up is he is he coming to do a little kind of cameo on the pod no looking very tanned i have to say sharp blue jacket

um sorry i'm digressing so uh yes i didn't i don't really think the health tech hardware was for me but i can see if you're very very wealthy you also need a lot of space these things are really large there was a regenerative bed which is kind of a regenerative bed yes what does that even mean we'll play we'll play a clip and um tell you all about it

Could you tell us what is the Human Regenerator? Right, so Human Regenerator is a wellness device, right? So which provides you with a wellness therapy.

The main, the core function of it is reduction of the free radicals, reduction of the oxidative stress, which means reduction of inflammation, speeding up of the healing, slowing down of the cellular aging, and supporting every and any natural healing functions of the body by using cold atmospheric plasma, the richest source of electrons in the nature,

and providing the body with electron flow therapy, right? So why do we do that? If you think of a free radical, maybe you've heard of free radical before? No. Okay, so if you think of an atom or cell or molecule, right? All of them contain electrons, right? When an electron is lost due to another free radical exposure or toxins, radiation, etc.,

that cell or atom or molecule becomes unstable. And in biology, that's called free radical. And that's unstable molecule, let's say, that disturbs and damages another molecular cell, right? So we want to stop that because that causes oxidative stress. Think of oxidation, metal rusting, right? Cells rusting, oxidizing, getting older. So basically this naturally helps with reduction of that

lowering oxidative stress, lowering inflammation, speeding up the healing processes, etc. etc. Supporting every natural body's healing process. How much does one of them cost? So it depends where, right? But I can share the European prices, right? So it's between 142 to 154,000 euros.

Okay. Would you mind introducing yourself and telling us what exactly we are looking at? Yeah. So my name is Sat Randhawa. I'm the CEO of One Hyperbarics. What you're looking at here is the hyperbaric oxygen chamber. In essence, what that does, it gives you elevated levels of oxygen at pressure to reverse your cellular and neurological age.

So what you're looking at right now is our two person chamber where you can sit in there by yourself or with someone, watch TV, watch Netflix, work with your laptop. It's like an aeroplane cabin with the little steps getting up to it, kind of circling apart. That was our mood board, really. We wanted people to think, OK, how would I sit in my lounge? How would I sit in a first class cabin? But at the same time, we're reversing your cellular age.

And when you're inside, does the oxygen fill the space or do you wear a mask? How does it work? So we do have chambers that fill the space, but this is a wellness chamber. So you wear a mask and so you'll be getting around 95% oxygen via a mask and then the pressure will build up. And what that does is it forces oxygen through blood vessels that are closing.

creates new blood vessels and penetrates your blood plasma. So you get potentially in an hour up to a day's worth of oxygen, which is fantastic because that's the real fuel for your cells. Whilst you're doing nothing, you're sitting there and enjoying a bit of TV or reading a book. And can I ask how much would one of these cost if I wanted a two man version like this? They start from £120,000. We say start because we do get some pretty exotic requests for...

Yes, we had a client in GCC who suddenly wanted specific diamonds on the lining stitching. So we had to find the right glue that worked at pressure, that wasn't toxic, that held. And so we learned very quickly to say starts from. And so if you have a dream, we'll make it come true. But a lot of the stuff that happens is people say, I have these seats in my helicopter or my car. Can you match those? Or I have this paint color in my gym. Can you match those?

And so it's about... We all have that problem, don't we? I get very frustrated when my helicopter seats don't match my hyperbaric oxygen chamber. People don't see the struggle of it. We went to a talk, a longevity talk with the boss of Aura Rings, among others, and... Be the CEO of your health journey. Someone on stage very sensibly said, what your mother told you is basically how to be healthy. Exactly. Sleep well.

Drink lots of water, eat your vegetables, and you'll live forever. But the Founders Forum flagship initiative, what they're really proud of here, as well as bringing all these celebs and famous entrepreneurs, is also looking for the next stars, the next generation. And they have a program called Rising Stars, where they select a handful of really interesting early-stage startups from their network that they say have world-changing potential. Wow.

Wow. Okay. So who's coming up? Who's rising? I don't want to sound cynical about this because actually if you look at people that they've earmarked in the past to be a rising star, they include Demis Hassabis, the founders of Duolingo, ClassPass, Wise, Bumble. So there's some really big names in there. Okay. Yeah.

And yeah, we have been sitting in this lovely podcast hub in the middle of the field with all of the various tents with the speeches going on around us, welcoming in the rising stars today. And it's been a real privilege to meet some of the very interesting founders and hear what they have to say. Is it a regenerative podcast hub? Yeah.

I think it was being regenerated right up to the point that we were using it. Callum's still tearing his hair out. So I thought we'd hear from two of them and then we'll take a break and then we'll hear from two more. That sounds like a plan. I can't wait. So in a moment, you'll hear from a company making a rice-sized rocket-shaped robot that goes inside your brain. There's a French startup doing that. But let's start with some note-taking. Everybody is talking about it and using it here at Founders Forum. And well, I'll let him introduce himself.

My name's Chris Pedrigal, and I'm the founder of Granola. I keep hearing about Granola. So before I came to Founders Forum, I can't remember who it was, someone was talking about coming and how excited they were at saying, make sure you've got your best note-taking app.

And I was like, what's the best note-taking app? What's the best organization app? And Granola kept coming up. So tell us about it. What do you do? Sure. So Granola is an AI notepad. So it's a lot like Apple Notes, if you're familiar with that. The main idea is that you still type notes into it. So let's say you're on a Zoom call or in a meeting and you want to jot down the most important things. When the meeting ends, Granola will flesh out your notes and make them great.

So what it does is it listens in the background and then it uses AI to create great notes that still feel like your notes. Wow. So it's sort of a hybrid between a transcription service and the notes because it's your interpretation. Exactly. Yeah. It's very personal and it really feels like your personal tool for thought.

So what we notice is that people who use the generic meeting summarizers, they would still be taking their own notes during meetings because only you know what's really, really important in that conversation. So we mixed both of them. So you get the best of the automatic note summary

You don't have to take any notes if you don't want to. But if you do take notes, then the AI moves around you to make your notes great. And what stage is the company at and where are you based? Just tell me a little bit about the business. Yeah, absolutely. So we launched a year ago. We were four people then, which is too small because we've been growing rather quickly and it's been hard to keep up. We're now 20 people. We are based in London. We are entirely in London and in person. Wow.

And hiring, in case anyone listening to this is excited to work for an AI startup in London. But you're not from London by your accent? I'm not. No, I'm American. My parents are from Europe, but I grew up in New York. And what are the plans for the company then? You said you're hiring, planning to expand abroad. Yeah, so we have a really...

We think this moment in history is very special. AI, the way I look at it is AI has arrived on the scene and it's kind of useful. And I think very soon it'll be extremely useful. I think...

AI and LLMs are going to radically change the way we do work and how productive we are. And we're right at the cusp of that. Our ambitions for Granola is to go way beyond note-taking. So you start off by taking notes in meetings. But what we really want to do is we want to help you do all the work that comes out of meetings. So that feeling where you have

five back-to-back meetings and now you have all these action items for each of these meetings and you have to do those at the end of the day. Imagine a world where Granola has already done most of that for you and you can just be like, yep, that looks good. Oh, change this a little bit and then send that email. Oh yes, reschedule this thing. That's the vision of where we're headed.

to be able to do that, we really do need to build one of the best teams in the world because we're going up against the top companies out there. I was going to say, I mean, it's amazing what you're building. But when you think of what

Microsoft's doing with Copilot and even some of the smaller companies like Otter, it must feel quite challenging. There is no shortage of competition. That is true. The good news, so the biggest AI note-takers like Otter and Fireflies, those companies are all eight years old. So they've been around for a while. And Microsoft, Google, all those companies, they've had their AI summaries out there for years as well. So I think...

There's a reason why granola is broken out in this space. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact of it feeling like

a useful tool that I can use and control. For whatever reason, that has really resonated with people. It's resonated a lot with the type of people who are here. By the way, a lot of founders, a lot of investors use us. And I think if we can take that same approach, but way beyond note-taking, I think there's a new product category that is going to be invented here. No one knows what it's called. And it's like this AI-assisted workspace. And I think that is...

That is the real prize. And I think that's what all the AI productivity companies out there are running towards, whether they know that explicitly or not. Whether, you know, if you're building an AI meeting client or an AI calendar client or a meeting notes thing, the end of the day, really what you want to do is you want to help people do their work with AI. And to do that, AI needs to have the right context about you and your work.

So, my name is Joanna Cartacci. I am the co-founder and chief operating officer of Hoboti,

which is a medtech company, a medical device company based in Paris. We're developing micro robots for the brain. Wow. OK, I have many questions. What do they do, the micro robots? What's the aim of them? The aim is really to help diagnose, treat and monitor neuro disease. So brain disease. What sort of things? Today, we have a really hard time accessing the brain, whether that be for cancer diagnosis, cancer treatment,

for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's. We have a hard time accessing the brain and we have a hard time understanding what's going on inside the brain. And so we're creating a device that allows surgeons to

move through the brain parenchyma, the extracellular matrix, not in the bloodstream, on the right side of the blood-brain barrier to be able to carry out a wide variety of tasks. It's a platform technology. So you have a carrier and then you have extensions that you plug into the device to adapt it to a specific medical need. And so if you attach a biopsy tool, you can go and sample tissues in different locations and

You can go and drop a therapeutic. You can go and drop an electrode, for example. So it's really aimed to addressing a wide range of pathologies by specifying the cargo, the extension that the micro-robot carries. Gosh, how extraordinary. So would a surgeon make an incision in the brain and then the robot...

Yeah.

So certain areas, certain cancers, for example, are located in areas that cannot be reached with current neurosurgical tools. And we want to provide that unlimited access into the brain to be able to therefore diagnose by better characterizing a tumor in its heterogeneity and then better deliver therapeutics in a targeted way to specific locations. How would you describe the robots? What do they look like? A grain of rice.

Gosh, as small as that. But otherwise, yeah, let's say a chunky risotto kind of rain or rise. Actually, it looks a little bit more like a rocket. So you have the carrier and then the cargo, just like a rocket would. So the carrier is very specific to the environment it navigates in. As you asked earlier, yes, it's a small incision on the skull. Today, we have larger openings when we say resector tumor or when we want to do infusion of therapeutics. But

For us, it's really a very small millimetric hole, a burr hole, and then we kind of inject the micro-robot into the brain parenchyma and it navigates along a pre-planned route.

And that rocket, the width is very small. So it's a 1.8 millimeter diameter that allows the device to be minimally invasive. And it moves through the brain parenchyma non-linearly. So you can go in 3D through the matter. And what stage is the company at? We're preclinical stage. So we are now in animal trials. We will be testing the device. I mean, we're already testing the device in animal, but we'll be in the stage for another stage.

few months and then hopefully in human trials to begin by the end of next year. Gosh, extraordinary. So when do you think this might be used in hospitals, for example? Well, in clinical settings already in 2026, 2027, but then commercially, we're looking more at 2028, 9.

And what's your background? How did you start this? Operations, but more out of personal curiosity. I actually started in linguistics and international relations. I was a language interpreter for international organizations for quite a few years before, and that gave me a lot of freedom to explore. My friends had very cool projects, and I would always lead operations in them.

And then from one project to the other, I met my co-founder. He lost his mother to glioblastoma, saw what it was like to not be able to intervene in the brain, and decided to put his robotics engineer qualities to good use. He'd been an expert in extreme environments, undersea, space, nuclear robotics. So he invited me to join him, found Hobote, and try to pull this adventure off. And so we've been having some good fun for the past eight years. Yeah.

Every idea starts with a problem. Warby Parker's was simple. Glasses are too expensive. So they set out to change that. By designing glasses in-house and selling directly to customers, they're able to offer prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Warby Parker glasses are made from premium materials like impact-resistant polycarbonate and custom acetate. And they start at just $95, including prescription lenses. Get glasses made from the good stuff. Stuffed with the best of the best.

Stop by a Warby Parker store near you. With the Redfin app, you'll know the moment your next place hits the market. Whether you're looking to buy your dream home or rent a suite apartment, give Redfin your gotta-have-it wish list of property features, and you'll receive real-time notifications tailored just for you. Ready to see it up close and personal? Scheduling a tour is just a tap away. Don't wait to find your perfect match. Download the Redfin app and start searching today.

Ryan Reynolds here from Int Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless. How did they get 30, 30, how did they get 30, how did they get 20, 20, 20, how did they get 20, 20, how did they get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month? Sold! Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. ♪

So is your Wi-Fi still working? Yeah, unlike in the hotel that we stayed in last night, we can carry on. I really want to hear about that hotel. It's probably because it was not regenerative. You know, very analog mattresses and everything. It was, and it was a little bit Fawlty Towers-esque. And I...

There wasn't much room left in the inns around Soho Farmhouse when we booked to try and find somewhere to stay. But unfortunately, we also convinced others to stay there as well. So I think I'm slightly persona non grata amongst some of the...

the American tech firms here today who maybe aren't used to this sort of thing. Anyway, next we're going to hear from an AI company that is designing new materials from scratch using AI. And then afterwards, another AI company making agents, AI agents for all sorts of clients. And then we'll come back and have a quick chat and try and get back to London somehow. Fabulous. Well, AI is, of course, the rising star, is it not? Yeah.

It really is. AI has risen.

So my name is Chad Edwards and I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Casp AI. And what does Casp AI do? So we're using artificial intelligence to design new materials from scratch. So in the same way that ChatGPT is transformed in the way that we think about generating text, we're using the same underlying technology to actually generate entirely new materials for applications, including semiconductors, new batteries, carbon capture materials. Yeah, a whole bunch of different material classes. Wow.

And what sort of materials are they and how does that actually work? Yes, I guess it depends on the specific application in which we're talking. So if we're talking about carbon capture, for example, which is an emerging sector, there we basically design what can be described as filters or membranes that selectively bind CO2 from the atmosphere over oxygen and other gases that you find in the atmosphere. Once it's then bound to a membrane, we can then use it, recycle it or transform it into other products.

And then in battery space, we're working on entirely new materials that make batteries in automotive more energy efficient, have more charge cycles and longer durations, etc. So materials is an entirely broad space and there are lots of really fascinating material classes with lots of problems to still be solved. And how do you approach using AI to do that? Is it a question of putting all the information about different materials together and then applying AI to that?

So I think in the large language model world, we've seen these really large foundation models take hold and everyone's racing to train these really large models and we're now running out of techs to do so. In our world, I'm of the opinion that smaller models are actually more suited. So you can fine tune small models depending on the material class that you're working on. Let's say for carbon capture, we can fine tune models with specific materials for carbon capture.

There is some evidence to suggest that training really large foundation models for materials has some benefit. But for an emerging company like us, our focus is really on smaller models. We can't afford to be training these really, really large foundational models. What's your background? How did you start the company? Yeah, so I grew up in Wales. I was the first person in my entire family to ever go to university. Ended up sticking around for 10 years, did a master's in chemistry, PhD in chemistry, then went to business school and did an MBA. I then fell in love with quantum computing of all things, joined Google, first of all.

And then after Google joined a startup in Cambridge called Cambridge Quantum Computing and helped grow all the commercial operations of that company.

Stayed there for six years and then we merged with Honeywell in 2021. And then I started to see the disruption that machine learning was starting to have on material science. And now it felt like a good time to building a company in that space. So I had the good fortune of connecting with a very well-known machine learning researcher called Professor Max Welling. He's arguably the most famous machine learning researcher in Europe. And he just left his role at Microsoft and very weirdly had exactly the same idea at the same time that I did, which was to build a startup using machine learning for materials discovery.

And so I'm not a huge believer in fate, but I think that was a moment of fate. And we're 12 months into our journey now. So it's been a great start. And where are you based? So we're spread out across Europe. So Cambridge, Amsterdam and Berlin is kind of our main centers at the moment. How many people are you? We're a team of 30. And are you raising funds at the moment? We're not. No, we did a seed round 12 months ago and we still have sufficient runway. So we're not capital raising at the moment. Yeah. Headstand building. And what stage are you at then? When do you see this change?

rolling out commercially? So we're already commercial. We have customers already. So we have big automotive customers who are looking for new battery materials. We work with some of the world's largest semiconductor companies and also working in the space of carbon capture with some of the big oil and gas majors and also carbon capture companies. So we have commercial contracts and my philosophy is a company should be commercial from as early as possible. Otherwise, we risk ending up becoming an academic group.

So, yeah, we're already commercial. We have our first materials in the lab, which has happened 20 times faster than typical. And so, yeah, this isn't a pipe dream or some kind of fairy tale. It's happening today and it's moving much faster than perhaps most people realize. Do you miss the world of quantum?

I'm still a big fan of quantum. I think in the long term, it's going to have a really big impact on the world. We had Jensen Huang yesterday saying it was an inflection point. Yeah, that seems to be a change of tone. So I don't know why he's learned that perhaps the rest of us haven't learned yet. But yeah, it's great to see technologies like quantum now getting the attention of Jensen.

My name is Emma Burrows. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Portia AI. And what is Portia AI? What do you do? We are agent infrastructure. So we're an open source SDK for creating reliable agents in production. What's SDK? So how would a layman understand that?

Essentially, it means we're like a coding development kit. So we make it easy for enterprises, scale-ups, particularly in regulated industries to create customized agents, AI agents, automated systems to do human-like tasks. And this is something that we're hearing more and more about as a sort of next phase of AI, the rollout of agents. How would you describe them to someone who doesn't know what they are?

Yeah, so agents, typically the definition has two kinds of pieces. The first is autonomy. So you give them the ability to make decisions about how they're going to accomplish a particular task, typically described just like, you know, send an email to so-and-so, schedule a meeting, etc. And you also give them tools, which could be they're able to browse the Internet,

call APIs, even use a computer like a human. And so how complicated can the tasks that you give them get? How good are these agents going to be? So I would say the technology has just got to the point where we need it. Agents are built on top of LLMs under the hood. And so in the last three to six months, the advancements in LLMs have actually made it possible to do real production grade things.

of pretty complicated tasks that previously just were not possible. And so those are things like, for example, you know, you want someone to read a refund policy and an email and make a decision on the basis of it. You can now have an agent do that. Wow. So they actually make the decision.

Yes. And then is the point that there is a human in the loop or would you get somebody to check every 20 decisions? How does that work? That's a great question. So within Portia, we have human in the loop is like a really important concept. And what we tell customers is you can kind of scale it up or down depending on how comfortable you are with the risk profile of the task. Got it. That's kind of how you can create...

with this new kind of technology, I would say. And when you talk about regulated industries, do you mean finance, healthcare? Yeah, particularly fintechs. We work with a bunch of fintechs, but also climate tech, insure tech, less so health tech, actually, I would say. Our ideal customer profile is not AI native because they tend to implement everything from scratch. It's the companies where this is not their core business proposition. And so the health tech companies tend to be slightly more AI native, I would say. How

How quickly are you seeing agents roll out? You've heard Microsoft talk about them, Salesforce, the big players are there. Yep. How long do you think until...

normal people, for want of a better word, will start working with agents in their workplaces? For a personal agent perspective, you know, so go to Claude, for example, integrate it with a few tools like email, for example. I think you'll start to see more and more people doing that as part of their everyday workflow. Using it more like a personal assistant. Exactly. Yeah. I think that that is already, you know, very prevalent within, you know,

you know, the people in my kind of cohort who are very tech forward and you will see that adopted very widely the same way ChatGPT has been adopted.

The types of agents that we build are slightly more to be integrated within systems. And I think that there is a lag of those being adopted because, as I said, you know, three to six months is not long enough to have large companies have pushed this all the way through production. So, you know, our agent deployment cycles are probably anywhere from kind of two to six weeks, I would say. But in bigger companies with more process, et cetera, will take longer than that.

And tell us more about the company. Where are you based? How many people do you employ? When did you start? We started a year ago. My co-founder and I met at Stripe. I was a CTO for Stripe UK. We're now about nine people, so mostly engineering. We're about six in engineering, including myself.

And then a couple of folks on the more business side. And we're based out of London. Any fundraising at the moment? No, no. We were very lucky to have fundraised from General Catalyst as our lead and first minute as well last June. So we've been going about a year now. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of the rising stars you've met aren't raising. Do you feel there's a sort of trend to try not to raise at the moment or is that kind of...

too general a point to put on it just because the market's difficult? I think that there is more understanding of the nuance of venture capital, right? It used to be the case, you know, maybe four years ago, back when you think about 2021 and the very hype-y raises that were happening then, that kind of you just had to raise. Every 12 to 18 months, everybody just wanted to be raising. And if you weren't doing that, I think there was a fear you were going to fall off this like bandwagon. And now I think there is more of an appetite for...

thinking carefully about, you know, your business model and where you want to take it and making sure the investment is right sized for your company. Obviously, you still see a bunch of hype based stuff, but...

Yeah, it is. It's just quite striking because I think if you'd asked, as you say, four or five, you know, top entrepreneurs in 2021, they would for sure kind of be raising money or have just raised money. Yeah. I mean, obviously also the productivity gains you get from AI mean people are also keen to kind of explore keeping companies more lean. And so that's going to substantially change VC dynamics over the next five years, I would say. Four very, very, very different companies.

I'm presuming that's very representative of the weird and wild and interesting things you're seeing there, the people you're meeting. Is there kind of when you think about 20th year of Founders Forum, what's going to stick with you? I think what's been lovely about today is how overwhelmingly excited everybody is about the European tech scene. And it's something I saw yesterday at VivaTech in Paris as well with Jensen Huang there hosting GTC.

I went to the keynote speech and I know you've, you've seen that out in San Francisco. I mean, it was, he's, he's seen as quite a, a God, isn't he? Yes. The tech geeks, but was there a T-shirt cannon? There was not, but they draped actually quite chic T-shirts with, um, Callum shaking his head. I thought they were quite chic for tech T-shirts over the, over the chairs with like pictures of Paris on, but,

It was really, really, I haven't been to Vivatech before and I don't know a huge amount about the French tech scene. It was really interesting to go there and see a lot of the big French companies that you think of like LVMH and the beauty companies that are really doing very exciting things in the tech scene. And then coming here and meeting people like you've just heard from and seeing all of the things that they're doing. And I did a panel earlier with Julia Hoggart, the boss of the London Stock Exchange, who

And it's really heartening to see what she is doing to reform capital markets and how things that I think the UK in general has a tendency to sort of hate itself. And we're very, very cynical about our capabilities in tech. And I think being here really has made me optimistic about it. And there's a sense of positivity that you don't often get. You don't.

You don't. It is, I will say, going to tech things like this when you're kind of surrounded by all these people trying crazy things, it is by its very nature optimistic. And so if you meet enough of these people and they're just like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do this insane thing that probably won't work, but I'm going to try.

It can be kind of contagious where you're like, oh, this is pretty cool. You know, it's not all terrible. Everyone's got an enormous smile on their face. You know why everybody's so happy? The smoothies? No, no. It's that sweet, sweet, pure oxygen. You know, people are just walking around high on that O2.

Anyway, that's Founders Forum and four of this year's rising stars. I should name the other seven too. So Adam Clarke and Samo Farah. You might have heard of him. Oh, yes, I've heard of him. Yes, yes. Tom Preston Werner, 180 Studios. Toby Brown, the teenager we reported on earlier this year with his company Beam. Yes.

Do go and read about him and his company on thetimes.com. Walter Goodwin from Fractile, Cameron Fink from Aru, I hope I'm reading that right, Michelle Liu from Vesem, and Danny, guess who? Your bestie. Who? Who?

Philip Johnson of StarCloud, the new name for Lumen Orbit. Data centers in space. Yeah, they are a rising star. Did you just say data centers in space companies are rising star? Do you see what you did there? That's not a black hole. Yeah.

What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life.

To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com. That's warbyparker.com. Each customer is unique. Every shopper is different. So why are your e-commerce search results still one size fits all? Generic experiences don't create loyal customers. They drive them away.

Coveo's AI search delivers relevance at every step, anticipating what shoppers want even before they ask. The result? Better discovery, higher conversions, more profit. Visit coveo.com slash commerce to see how it works.