We invest in you.
If you take one thing from this About Us, understand Solid Bond is about YOU. We're here to share our experience, funding and network to help you and your business grow.
Solid Bond is a Manchester-based pre-seed venture capital investor. We invest £150k to £500k in UK B2B tech and tech-enabled startups, usually as part of rounds up to £1m, and give founders hands-on support from experienced operators.
Founders.
Operators.
Investors.
The Solid Bond founders, Steve & Shaz never set out to be investors. They are operators, who have both scaled and run successful businesses. They know how hard it is to scale a business and they’ve learnt a lot doing so - the good and the bad. They started Solid Bond because they wanted to give something back to founders in the early stages, they wanted to share their learnings and experience. The pre-seed market is underserved, when it comes to investment, but even more so when it comes to founder support. Solid Bond changes that.
It is founder-first investment, offering funding from the earliest stage and providing time, expertise and experience to develop you and your business.
Solid Bond has guided and directly invested in over 20 fast-growing companies and helped many more secure funding.
Where we play.
We are a true pre-seed or early seed investor, supporting founders through their funding and growth journey. Many claim to operate as a pre-seed investor. Solid Bond actually does. We won’t waste your time.
Our process.
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01
Initial meeting
Share your initial pitch with us. We're always happy to chat to founders, we want to give you every chance. You'll meet the decision makers from this very first meeting
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02
Building conviction
We dig deeper. We'll test assumptions and validate your idea/model to really understand the opportunity. You get to ask us anything you want: learn how to pitch us before you pitch us.
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03
Aim your pitch
Pitch with conviction and clarity. We make a decision and quickly move to legals and due diligence. All being well, we invest and move forward together.
FAQs.
Pre-seed and early seed-stage startups across the UK. We are based in the North West and like to support local founders.
Pre-seed funding is the earliest money into a business and is most often in round sizes less than £1m. It's normally for proving out ideas and gaining validation before going to raise later stages of funding (seed, series A onwards).
It's never too early for us to meet a founding team. We often invest before you have the product or the revenue model figured out. We believe that the earlier we join, the more impactful the relationship will be.
Cheques of £150k to £500k, usually as part of rounds up to £1m. We lead and we follow.
Our process is typically anywhere from 6-10 weeks from initial meet to cash in.
To date, we've directly invested in 20+ businesses in just over 6 years
We invest in B2B tech and tech-enabled businesses at pre-seed, with cheques of £150k to £500k. Most of what we back is vertical SaaS, applied AI, and workflow tools. For full details on what we invest in and what we don't, see our Investment Criteria page.
We are focused on investing in companies at pre-seed/ early seed stages. We occasionally follow on at seed stage as parts of a larger round and normally wouldn't lead.
In short, however they need supporting. Within the Solid Bond team we have Finance, Product, Tech and Marketing expertise. We know how hard it is to be a founder, having to wear lots of hats, and it's easier if you have the benefit of experience. So we're here to talk commercial ideas through, offer network ins and help you how to avoid the mistakes that slowed us down. What’s more, you’ll find that we have your back through the good times and, more importantly, when the going gets tough.
Our primary way of investing is through equity instruments. We have invested in a range of instruments i.e. convertible loans, ASA's. However, our preference is in straight equity rounds and do not offer debt that doesn't have any type of equity component.