Venture capital

September 2022

Feedr (B)

By Gary Dushnitsky, Kathryn Larin

The case describes the journey of Riya Grover and Lyz Swanton (MBAs from HBS and LBS respectively) who launched, scaled and sold London-based startup Feedr during the second half of 2010. Feedr introduced a sustainable solution offering nutritionally healthy food by leveraging technology to drive pe...

September 2022

Feedr (A)

By Gary Dushnitsky, Kathryn Larin

The case describes the journey of Riya Grover and Lyz Swanton as they launched, scaled and sold London-based startup Feedr during the second half of 2010. Feedr provided nutritionally healthy food to the workplace by leveraging technology to drive personalisation in choice and scale. Case A follo...

July 2021

The ‘Funding Buffet’: Understanding the sources of capital to finance your venture – Technical Note

By Luisa Alemany, Gary Dushnitsky

This technical note is an introduction to the world of financing entrepreneurial ventures. It is a primer on the different stages of a business and the different types of financing available. Most of the capital that high-growth entrepreneurial businesses will secure to fund their future plans is pr...

February 2021

Finance for Entrepreneurial Companies: Financing Instruments – Technical Note

By John Mullins, Robert M Johnson, Steve Pesenti

Despite today’s growing attention to bootstrapping and the use of customer funding in the financing of new ventures, many new ventures, be they a startup or a plan to grow an existing business, will require some initial injection of capital to finance the fixed assets, working capital, and operati...

November 2018

Patch: Financing the Entrepreneurial Business

By Gary Dushnitsky

Heading into Old Street Tube station in London on a chilly January day, Freddie’s mind was racing with ideas. He had just come out from another meeting with Forward Partners, a well-known, London-based venture capital firm, and it was clear the conversation had gone well. The team at Forward Partn...

November 2019

Trip4real: Negotiating Series A

By Luisa Alemany, Carlos Trenchs, Lourdes Urriolagoitia, Suzanne Jenkins

On 25 March 2014, Trip4real founder Gloria Molins was on her way to Barcelona airport, where she and her small but passionate and audacious team would meet up and fly to San Francisco to pitch Airbnb’s co-founders on a partnership, when her phone buzzed. She had received a term sheet proposal for ...

March 2017

Raising capital for Financial Butler (C)

By Bryan Stroube, Michael Bikard, Ken Mark

This case focuses on Nick Hungerford’s attempt to raise capital for his FinTech start-up, Financial Butler, (later renamed Nutmeg). The concept is a digital platform offering a revolutionary, transparent and fair service to an “untapped” market segment currently not served by wealth managers, ...

March 2017

Raising capital for Financial Butler (B)

By Bryan Stroube, Michael Bikard, Ken Mark

This case focuses on Nick Hungerford’s attempt to raise capital for his FinTech start-up, Financial Butler, (later renamed Nutmeg). The concept is a digital platform offering a revolutionary, transparent and fair service to an “untapped” market segment currently not served by wealth managers, ...

March 2017

Raising capital for Financial Butler (A)

By Bryan Stroube, Michael Bikard, Ken Mark

This case focuses on Nick Hungerford’s attempt to raise capital for his FinTech start-up, Financial Butler, (later renamed Nutmeg). The concept is a digital platform offering a revolutionary, transparent and fair service to an “untapped” market segment currently not served by wealth managers, ...

December 2014

Budgetplaces.com (C)

By John Mullins, Shira Conradi

This is part of a case series. John Erceg was in a quandary. It was a sunny spring day in Barcelona in April 2010, and he’d been negotiating for several weeks with a possible buyer for the company that he’d created from scratch and built over the past seven years. Apart from buying two Barcelona...