ThatRound closes pre-seed funding round to improve startup fundraising in the UK

The platform helping early-stage founders find the right investors has raised funding in just two weeks to build out its AI matching engine and grow the team.

ThatRound, the platform bringing structure and transparency to UK early-stage fundraising, has closed a pre-seed round, led by founder Bradley Jones and completed by a group of 20 angel investors from Aligned Syndicate. The round closed in two weeks and carries EIS qualification.

The funding will be used to expand ThatRound’s AI matching capabilities, develop its LLM-powered learning engine, and hire three new roles: an Account Executive, a Marketing Executive, and an AI Lead. The hires mark a significant step for a business that has grown from a one-person operation to a team of nine in under a year.

ThatRound launched in March 2025 with a single aim: to replace the cold outreach, personal-network dependency, and structural opacity that has defined early-stage fundraising in the UK for decades. Since launch, over 500 founders have signed up. More than 1,500 structured funding applications have been submitted through the platform. Of the deals ThatRound’s AI matching engine surfaces to an investment partner, 62% result in an intro request — two in three. That figure is a direct product of how the matching engine works: rather than filtering on sector or stage alone, it maps nuanced investor preferences, thesis fit, and team type before a deal is ever surfaced to an investor. Every application that doesn’t proceed receives specific feedback on fit, giving valuable signals to founders. In a market where most founders hear nothing at all, ThatRound’s model is deliberately the opposite: precision for investors, transparency for founders.

“More than 1,500 structured funding applications have gone through ThatRound’s matching workflow. Of the deals our AI engine surfaces to investors, two in three result in an intro request. And every single founder whose application doesn’t progress receives specific feedback on why — on fit, not a standard rejection. That second part shouldn’t feel remarkable, but in early-stage fundraising, it does. The fact that founders find that level of transparency unusual tells you everything about how the market has been working until now.” 
Matt Thomas, Co-Founder, ThatRound

The platform currently lists 320 funding partners, with 70 actively using ThatRound to help source deal flow. One founder used the platform to help close £500,000 in six weeks.

This comes at a time where deal volumes fell 7.9% in 2025 to 5,887, but total equity invested rose to £24.0bn. Capital is still being deployed, but is more concentrated into fewer, larger rounds. Average deal size hit £4.22m, the highest since 2021. Investors are being more selective, while the fundraising tools available to founders haven’t kept pace.¹

Jones argues that this isn’t a problem of access, it’s a problem of infrastructure, and that the technology to fix it has only recently arrived.

“Early-stage fundraising has relied on cold outreach, fragmented networks, and personal connections for decades — not because nobody tried to fix it, but because the technology to fix it didn’t exist. Matching startups with investors is qualitative, preference-driven, and constantly changing. Database filters and tick-boxes were never going to crack that. What’s changed is that large language models can now understand and match on the kind of nuanced, interdependent preferences that early-stage investing actually runs on.” 
Bradley Jones, Co-Founder and CEO, ThatRound

Jones has almost two decades of experience across finance, startups, and angel investing, previously exited a software business, and co-runs Aligned Syndicate, an angel syndicate backing UK pre-seed and seed-stage companies. He co-founded CROSSIP, the non-alcoholic spirits brand, and has operated on both sides of the fundraising table. He led the ThatRound pre-seed round personally.

“The platform was already working. Over 500 founders have signed up. Angel networks, syndicates, and venture capital funds are now actively sourcing deal flow through ThatRound, and not one has left. The results founders are seeing are unlike anything they’ve had before. We didn’t raise because we had to. We raised because the demand is real and the timing is right. AI is dramatically increasing the number of companies being started and reducing barriers to entry. The infrastructure problem isn’t going away — it’s getting bigger.”
Bradley Jones, Co-Founder and CEO, ThatRound

ThatRound plans to use the round to bring more of the early-stage fundraising market onto the platform, with a focus on expanding beyond its existing investor and founder base.