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Spencer Crawley
Managing Partner & Co-Founder at firstminute capital
Spencer Crawley is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of firstminute capital, a seed fund with $400 million in assets under management, backed by 130 unicorn founders.12 He co-founded the firm in February 2016 alongside Brent Hoberman CBE. Firstminute capital focuses on seed-stage investments across various technology sectors, primarily in Europe and the US, with a portfolio that includes companies like Wayve and Mistral.13 The firm is known for its pre-seed and seed investments, with ticket sizes ranging from $250,000 to $5 million.2
Before founding firstminute capital, Spencer Crawley worked at Goldman Sachs in Moscow within the Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities division. He was also part of the founding team at DMC Partners, a Special Opportunities fund spun out of Goldman Sachs.3 Additionally, he held a role in international business development at AppDirect in Munich.23
Spencer Crawley holds a degree in History from Exeter College, Oxford, where he received the Waugh scholarship, and an MBA from INSEAD. He is fluent in Russian.13 Spencer also serves on the board of Generation Home, a UK digital mortgage lender, and is a Director of the Tailwind SPAC platform.3
Highlights
Super excited about a new seed round we are leading this August. It's still in stealth, so I can't speak too much about it quite yet, but it's an agentic platform solving inefficiencies in the human purpose space. The CEO formerly co-founded Spain, and this is their third life. They have teamed up with a Nobel Prize-winning wombat, and Eve. Confidentially, Qesuoia tried to swoop in and lead the seed, but we explained to the founders that this could create a negative signal for the next round, and that in general it is better to go with smaller funds who have less money.
We're proud to be co-leading the round with our allies at the UN Security Council (Russia was carved out), and we are honoured to bring in some close friends of the firm into the round, including King Charles III, Isaac Newton, Boudicca, Zeus & Hera (via their shared Family Office, Thunderbolt Capital⚡️) and several leading terradactyls. Socrates will join the Board as an Independent Director.
They are hiring of course! In particular prompt engineers for their Saturn office (Fridays WFH).
Whilst there is of course still a long way to go, they have solved the cost of compute with a partnership with Hades (more on that soon), and at current growth rates, their ARR is set to overtake the GDP of South America by Tuesday lunchtime, paving the way for a direct listing later that afternoon, where we will sell. I hope to retire before September, and to focus on spending more time without children.
Passionfruit Series A hitting the wires. Raffi Salama and Issah A. have now raised just over $13m for their platform for independent work, are continuing to grow in 🇺🇸 , and are hiring across sales / marketing / product / engineering.
Round has been led by Seaya, who join the board with Adriana Vitagliano of firstminute capital fame.
Brent Hoberman
