4 lessons from working in VC I wish I’d known as a founder

Dylan's 4 Lessons

Hello there 👋 I’m Dylan, part of the Seed investment team at Frontline Ventures. I’ve spent my career in and around innovation, from founding my own sports tech startup (MatchDay) and academic journal (Trinity Student Scientific Review) to directing global innovation budgets for a large multinational (Accenture). I bear the scars of failure from many […]

Expanding the Team: Welcoming 3 New Faces to Frontline

We’re delighted to welcome three new faces to the Frontline team, to support the deployment and management of the Frontline Seed and Growth funds, with $200m of fresh funding recently announced. Allison Graf joins as our first Investor Relations Manager, helping to strengthen our relationships with our fund investors. Allison joined us in May and […]

Landing the Plane: 5 Tips for Founders Navigating M&A

Tips for Founders Selling Startups

Here we are at the end of a decade of low interest rates, in a much tougher fundraising environment than the heady highs of 2020-21, and a disjointed and uncertain economy. VC-backed CEOs like you are now coming to an inevitable realisation: if you don’t hit revenue growth targets, you’re unlikely to attract new investors. […]

Conquering the US: 6 lessons for healthtechs

Ambitious European founders continue to look to the US to scale their enterprises, conquer new frontiers and cater to a broader customer base. The US digital health market is valued at $88B in 2023 — the largest and most lucrative in the world — and is entirely privately funded. For founders, the US offers access to more […]

Announcing Eimear Cahalin as COO of Frontline Ventures

Frontline Ventures is delighted to welcome Eimear Cahalin as our Chief Operating Officer. Eimear brings a wealth of operations and finance experience and entrepreneurial spirit to the team, having worked across a broad range of multinational organisations and successful high-growth companies. Most recently, she was CFO and co-founder of Vivid Edge, helping large corporations reach […]

What Founders Want: A survey of pre-seed and seed founders

4 years ago, a team of VCs from Creandum (Carl Fritjofsson), University of Chicago (Owen Reynolds) and Newfund (Henri Deshays) measured the disparity between how founders and VCs view their relationship with each other, and asked if self-proclaimed “value-add” VCs really could stake claim to that label. That research has been incredibly valuable for us here […]

Portfolio Update: Sitecore Acquires Boxever

Our formal relationship with Boxever ends today as the company has been acquired by Sitecore but my attachment to the team and product vision will live on. Our investment in Boxever is as old as Frontline. When we raised our first cash to invest, Jason Green (Emergence) and Brian Ascher (Venrock) advised us to look back at […]

Developers, développeurs, desarrolladors!

A brief rant into some of the trends sweeping the software world and highlighting some of the coolest European companies making the most of those trends. Developers are the most important decision-makers in the software ecosystem, and, as software eats the world, the most important decision-makers in business. That sentence would have been controversial 10 […]

Five Years of Gender Data in VC

In 2016 I was invited to speak at a conference about how Frontline derives insight and changes our investment strategy based on the data we track during our deal flow process. At the end of my talk, someone in the audience asked if Frontline tracked founder gender in that data and if so, what proportion […]

All aboard the Hype Train: How to maximise FOMO while raising VC

For most founders fundraising is a massive pain in the ass. You take 50+ meetings; get ghosted by 20, hear the market is ‘too small’ from another 15, and get told you’re ‘too early‘ by 10 you know would invest in three toddlers in a trench coat if they heard Sequoia was putting in a […]

The Importance of Speed in Venture Investing

…And why most VCs get it wrong… VCs always say that they want an entrepreneur who executes rapidly, moves fast and gets things done quickly. Why then are the majority of VCs incredibly slow when completing their own due diligence and making their investments? The average time for most VCs in Europe from first meeting […]

COVID-19 and the future of healthcare in Europe: UK edition

Map of startups accelerating change in UK healthcare This blog post is part one of a two-part collaboration between Frontline and Speedinvest. Part 1 examines the impacts of Covid-19 on Telemedicine in the UK.  Part 2 will cover DACH. In both blogs we cover respective governmental strategies, overall trends and local startups in each geographical area.  […]

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