Latest news with #growthstage
Zawya
10-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Thinkroom and The Oracle Group launch Oracle Innovate Lab to support Eswatini entrepreneurs
This founder-focused programme is designed to support early and growth-stage entrepreneurs in Eswatini who are serious about scaling their businesses and stepping into new markets. Launching in August 2025, the six-month programme will combine one-on-one mentorship, hands-on masterclasses, and practical sessions to help founders build, pitch, and grow with purpose. The hybrid format allows for both online learning and in-person connection, creating a balance between access and accountability. Eswatini is full of ambitious founders, but access to deep support, capital, and practical business education remains limited. Many founders are navigating their entrepreneurial journey without the tools or networks they need to break through the next level of growth. This programme is designed to close that gap. Oracle Innovate Lab, powered by Thinkroom, exists to create a space where local founders are equipped and backed with the kind of hands-on support and experience they deserve. 'Having been a participant in a Thinkroom-led entrepreneurial development programme, I would strongly encourage all qualifying founders, especially those in fintech, to apply to this programme,' says Sebastian Patel, co-founder/COO of Franc Group. 'Access to support, mentorship, and network can be a game changer.' This programme is designed specifically for Emaswati founders, who are ready to put in the hard work and see results. Entrepreneurs across all sectors are invited to apply, however SMEs in fintech with solutions aligned with Oracle's strategic objectives are preferred. "Founders in Eswatini are not short on innovation, grit, or drive. However, they need the support infrastructure around them to take that next big step. With Oracle Innovate Lab, we are creating a space where we can intentionally build growth in ten high-potential SMEs," says Catherine Young, founder of Thinkroom. "This partnership with Oracle is an example of what it means to build meaningful growth with partners who want to make real impact. We are excited to kick off our first cohort with the Oracle Innovate Lab." The Oracle Group has long supported businesses in Eswatini. Through this programme, it is taking its support to the next level by becoming a key hub for entrepreneurial development. 'Oracle Innovate Lab is a call to action for local founders,' says David Takis, CEO of The Oracle Group. 'At Oracle, our mission has always been to support local businesses in solving real problems. This programme has been specifically designed to give founders the tools, access, and support they need to grow and become the next generation of entrepreneurs shaping the Eswatini economy.' Applications are officially open and will close on 23 July 2025. SMEs who are ready for the next step in their business growth journey are invited to apply here. About Thinkroom Consulting Thinkubate is powered by Thinkroom Consulting, an SME capacity builder focused on providing market access to entrepreneurs through specific programmes and interventions. Thinkroom partners with large corporates and institutions (such as Standard Bank, Absa, The World Bank and Hitachi Construction Machinery Southern Africa) to deliver entrepreneur development programmes to 20+ countries. Thinkroom is a 50% partner in Grindstone, a structured entrepreneurship development programme, and a 50% partner in Grindstone Ventures, a post-seed, pre-series A fund. For more information, visit: About Oracle Innovate Lab The Oracle Innovate Lab, powered by Thinkroom and backed by Oracle Group Eswatini, is a business accelerator designed to support high-potential entrepreneurs in Eswatini. Through hands-on mentorship, targeted training, and strategic networking, the Oracle Innovate Lab empowers Swazi businesses to scale sustainably while driving economic innovation and impact across the region. For more information, visit: All rights reserved. © 2022. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
Forbes
27-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
10 Startup Jobs That Are Crucial But Rarely Hired Early Enough
Hiring is a game of leverage. Growth stage startups that think beyond the obvious roles can set ... More themselves up for faster execution and less firefighting. In this article we explore the undervalued roles in a startup team. After the very early stages, once an enterprise starts growing (organically or through funding), founders often focus on hiring exclusively developers and salespeople. While those roles are essential, many equally important functions are either delayed or handled ad hoc, leading to inefficiencies, burnout, or missed opportunities. This article explores roles that are often underestimated or under-prioritized in the early days but can dramatically improve startup execution, speed, and resilience. 1. Generalist Operations Lead Every startup needs someone who can connect the dots across tools, people, and workflows. Yet early operations hires are often postponed until 'things are chaotic,' which is precisely when it becomes hardest to onboard one. Early-stage ops leads don't just 'keep the lights on'; they handle finance, vendor setup, customer support, legal paperwork, internal tooling, and logistics. Hiring someone who thrives in ambiguity can free up the founders to focus on growth or product, which is extremely important if the founder or founders are technical specialists. 2. Technical Program Manager Even startups with a solid engineering team often delay hiring a TPM, thinking it's only needed at scale. But the earlier you have someone who can manage cross-functional planning, organize releases, and flag bottlenecks, the faster your product can evolve. This role becomes critical when product, engineering, and design start pulling in different directions. At companies like Stripe and Airbnb, early TPMs were instrumental in translating vision into execution. 3. Customer Success Support is reactive. Success is proactive. Early-stage startups often overlook customer success until churn becomes a problem, but by then, valuable insight has already been lost. Hiring someone who can onboard customers, collect feedback, and monitor usage helps prevent silent churn and can increase retention early. Startups like Notion and Figma invested early in community-style customer engagement, which gave them feedback loops before they scaled. 4. Recruiter Оr Talent Lead Founders often do all hiring themselves early on, which makes sense, up to a point. But once you're hiring for more than one role at a time or scaling beyond referrals, a dedicated recruiter or talent lead can save enormous time. This role pays off quickly: crafting job descriptions, managing funnels, and keeping momentum in candidate conversations is a full-time job. Startups that delay this hire often miss great candidates due to slow or inconsistent processes. 5. Finance And Accounting Lead Most startups wait until their first funding round is closed or until taxes are due to think about finance. But early financial hygiene - managing burn, forecasting runway, and tracking invoices, often prevents costly mistakes down the line. An experienced part-time finance operator or early controller can help founders make better decisions without relying only on gut feeling. 6. Product Marketing Marketing isn't just for after product-market fit. A product marketer can help shape how the product is positioned from day one, run early customer interviews, and test narratives. In startups like Slack and Superhuman, early PMMs played a crucial role in crafting language that resonated. Without this role, products often struggle to articulate value, which slows down both user acquisition and fundraising. 7. Internal Tools Engineer / No-Code Ops As teams grow, inefficiencies compound. Startups that invest early in internal tooling via software engineers or no-code automation specialists scale faster and with fewer headaches. This hire helps automate onboarding, reporting, internal dashboards, and repetitive tasks. It's a multiplier role — especially in lean teams. 8. Design Systems Or UX Ops Founders often hire designers to work on user interfaces, but few think about UX infrastructure. A systems thinker in design can help enforce consistency, build component libraries, and reduce the design-to-dev gap. For startups shipping fast and often, this role helps avoid messy product interfaces that become expensive to clean up later. It also keeps cross-functional teams aligned. 9. Compliance/Legal Advisor This is especially critical in regulated sectors like fintech, healthtech, or anything involving user data. Waiting too long to get legal and compliance advice can result in technical rework, regulatory delays, or worse — penalties. This doesn't need to be a full-time hire early on. But having someone on retainer who understands your space can de-risk future launches and investor due diligence. 10. Content/Documentation Specialist Content is often seen as a growth function, but early documentation - onboarding guides, internal SOPs, product notes, and public help docs - sets the tone for scalability. Startups with strong documentation reduce onboarding time (for employees and users), get fewer support tickets, and enable async collaboration. This role can start part-time or as a hybrid content/marketing hire.
TechCrunch
06-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Why investing in growth-stage AI startups is getting riskier and more complicated
Making a bet on AI startups has never been so exciting — or more risky. Incumbents like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are scaling their capabilities fast to swallow many of the offerings of smaller companies. At the same time, new startups are reaching the growth stage much faster than they historically have. But defining 'growth stage' in AI startups is not so cut-and-dried today. Jill Chase, partner at CapitalG, said on stage at TechCrunch AI Sessions that she's seeing more companies that are only a year old, yet have already reached tens of millions in annual recurring revenue and more than $1 billion in valuation. While those companies might be defined as mature due to their valuation and revenue generation, they often lack much of the necessary safety, hiring, and executive infrastructure. 'On one hand, that's really exciting. It represents this brand new trend of extremely fast growth, which is awesome,' Chase said. 'On the other hand, it's a little bit scary because I'm gonna pay at an $X billion valuation for this company that didn't exist 12 months ago, and things are changing so quickly.' 'Who knows who is in a garage somewhere, maybe in this audience somewhere, starting a company that in 12 months will be a lot better than this one I'm investing in that's at $50 million ARR today?,' Chase continued. 'So it's made growth investing a little confusing.' To cut through the noise, Chase said it's important for investors to feel good about the category and the 'ability of the founder to very quickly adapt and see around corners.' She noted that AI coding startup Cursor is a great example of a company that 'jumped on the exact right use case of AI code generation that was available and possible given the technology at the time.' Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW However, Cursor will need to work to maintain its edge. 'There will be, by the end of this year, AI software engineers,' Chase said. 'In that scenario, what Cursor has today is going to be a little less relevant. It is incumbent on the Cursor team to see that future and to think, okay, how do I start building my product so that when those models come out and are much more powerful, the product surface represents those and I can very quickly plug those in and switch into that state of code generation?'
Finextra
28-05-2025
- Business
- Finextra
Storonsky-founded fund Quantumlight raises $250m for AI-guided investments
QuantumLight, a quantitative venture capital firm founded by Revolut's Nik Storonsky has closd on a $250 million fund for backing founders across AI, Web3, Fintech, SaaS and Healthtech. 0 The $250 million Fund I, which closed at hard cap, is backed by a global group of top-tier LPs, including billionaire tech founders and prominent institutions. Since launching in 2022, all 17 of the company's deals to date have been recommended by its proprietary AI model. Speaking to Sifted, CEO Ilya Kondrashov, says: 'We just believe that machines are able to do it better. Not only do they have perfect memories, they are also not swayed by emotion, by fear of missing out on a certain hyped deal.' The Fund's proprietary AI model, Aleph, is purpose-built to identify outlier growth-stage companies. Says Storonsky: 'Our ambition is to build the world's best systematic venture capital and growth equity firm - and support the new generation of founders by sharing some of the operating principles that we developed at Revolut.' This includes the launch of playbooks for portfolio companies to learn from the success of Revolut in hiring top talent and driving high-performance companies. Says Kondrashov: 'Our goal is to make the invisible operating systems behind iconic companies like Revolut visible and replicable. Founders shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to building high-performing teams. By sharing these tools and frameworks, we're helping scale-ups move faster from day one.'
Associated Press
12-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Longwood Fund Strengthens Growth-Stage Investment Team
- Vikas Goyal, MBA, promoted to Partner to lead growth stage investments in late preclinical and clinical stage biotechnology companies. BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS / ACCESS Newswire / May 12, 2025 / Longwood Fund, a venture capital firm creating and investing in science-based companies that develop important treatments to help patients, today announced that it has further strengthened its investment team with the promotion of Vikas Goyal, MBA, to Partner, focusing on growth stage investments in late preclinical and clinical stage biotechnology companies. Mr. Goyal has more than 20 years of experience as both a venture investor and executive focused on business development and transactional related initiatives in the biotechnology industry. He joined the Longwood Fund team in 2024 as a Venture Partner and led Longwood's investment in Evommune's $115 million Series C round of financing to advance their clinical-stage pipeline addressing chronic inflammatory diseases. 'We are excited to welcome Vikas and further strengthen our team at Longwood Fund,' said Christoph Westphal, MD, PhD, General Partner at Longwood Fund. 'I first worked with Vikas in 2011 when I was President and Head of SR One during a similar period of market dislocation. Longwood is actively making new investments, including recent investments in Newleos, Evommune, Engrail and Solu, and we continue to seek new investment opportunities. Vikas' successful track record as a biotech investor and dealmaker will be incredibly beneficial as we invest in and support a new generation of novel healthcare companies.' 'I have deep admiration for Christoph's, Aleks' and the whole Longwood team's commitment to biotechnology company building and venture investing,' said Mr. Goyal. 'I am honored to be promoted and to continue to help Longwood Fund support our syndicated growth investments.' Mr. Goyal was previously Senior Vice President of Business Development for Pandion Therapeutics. He initially joined Pandion as a Board member and investor in 2018 and ultimately joined the company full-time in 2019 taking the company through a research collaboration with Astellas, an IPO and the company's acquisition by Merck for $1.85 billion in 2021. Mr. Goyal joined Pandion from SR One, where he invested in and served on the boards of 19 early-stage biotech companies including Morphic Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly), River Vision Development (acquired by Horizon), Nimbus Therapeutics (Tyk2 acquired by Takeda), Spero Therapeutics (tebipenem acquired by GSK) and Pandion (acquired by Merck). River Vision and Horizon developed Tepezza™ (teprotumumab) a new standard of care in the treatment of Grave's Orbitopathy and the first therapy ever approved for the indication. Earlier in his career, Mr. Goyal was a Consultant at McKinsey & Co's Pharmaceutical practice in New Jersey, a co-founder of Extera Partners and a Business Development Manager at Infinity Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Goyal earned an MBA in Health Care Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Neurobiology from Harvard University. Longwood Fund Longwood Fund is a venture capital firm dedicated to creating and investing in novel healthcare companies that develop important treatments to help patients while driving significant value for investors. The Longwood team has a long history of successfully launching and building important life science companies while providing operational leadership and strategic guidance. Collectively, the Partners at Longwood Fund have co-founded ~25 companies with over 20 launched or marketed drugs and therapies, as well as over two dozen clinical-stage assets, all focused on helping patients in need. Companies founded by Longwood Fund, or its principals prior to the founding of the Firm, as lead investor and CEO/CBO include Acceleron, Alnylam, Be Bio, Immunitas, Momenta, Newleos, Pyxis, Sirtris, Solu, TScan, Vertex, and Weaver. For more information, visit Contact InformationArielle Jackson Head, Corporate Communications 617-351-2590 SOURCE: Longwood Fund press release
