Mission Studio
We’re building the next generation of mission-led startups. Our Mission Studio will create and scale new tech startups reducing household carbon emissions and improving health through tackling obesity and loneliness.
Applications opening soonIn partnership
with Nesta
Our Mission Studio is a collaboration between Founders Factory and Nesta. Nesta is the UK’s innovation agency for social good. It designs, tests and scales new solutions to society’s biggest problems. Nesta’s three missions are to give every child a fair start, help people live healthy lives, and create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet.
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A unique way to start a mission-led business, with reduced risk
Build a business from scratch with our expert team
You'll join our studio team and spend up to 6-months validating your idea and building the product alongside a team of functional experts across product, design, talent, data science, engineering and growth.
Capital to launch and scale
If you've proven the concept, we'll invest £200k to help you launch. We will also help you hire top talent to take you to the next stage.
Once you've launched, and incorporated as a standalone business, you'll join our award-winning Accelerator Program.
Access to Nesta and our wider network
Alongside support from the team at Nesta, we will unlock significant value from our wider network of investors, partners and founders across geographies, and we'll help you to raise your next rounds of capital to rapidly scale.
Our areas of focus
Nesta's three innovation missions are A Fairer Start, A Healthy Life, and A Sustainable Future. In line with these missions, we’ve identified three areas that we’re looking to build new ventures around. These are:
Accelerate household decarbonisation & improve productivity
Reducing household carbon emissions
Building solutions that will rapidly accelerate the decarbonisation of UK households. The goal is to slash home carbon emissions by 28%, paving the way for the UK to meet its legally binding target of net-zero by 2050.
Productivity
New ideas that develop and harness productivity growth in green skills in order to make the economy bigger and greener
Improving health and narrowing health inequalities
Obesity
Building ventures that make food healthier, healthy eating easier and healthier food more accessible and affordable. The goal is to halve the prevalence of obesity in the UK by 2030, increasing life expectancy by an average of two years for ten million people.
Loneliness
Investing in solutions that effectively tackle loneliness. Our goal is to help people remain productive, independent and socially connected across generations.
Narrowing the outcome gap for disadvantaged children
By 2030, our goal is that the UK will have eliminated the school readiness gap between those born into deprivation and their peers, with similar gains at age 16 among students receiving free school meals.
We're your team of functional experts
We're your team of industry experts, investors and entrepreneurs, and we're ready to work with you from day one.
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Are you an aspiring founder with a bright idea?
A cornerstone of the Mission Studio is our ‘Diversity by Design’ strategy. We’re looking to attract, nurture, and invest in diverse founders from all backgrounds, particularly those who may have previously lacked the opportunity to found their own business.
As a venture builder we can provide bespoke operating support, mentorship and the ability to earn a salary while founders build their business - essentially overcoming many of the barriers to entry that diverse groups often face.
Our next focus theme is 'reducing loneliness amongst older generations'. If you're passionate about this area, and are already developing a potentially venture-backable business idea, then we'd love to hear from you.
Note: we will be opening up applications for the other themes soon, along the following rough timeline:
A Fairer Start: October 2022
A Healthy Life: February 2023
If you're interested in submitting ideas for any of these topics in advance, email: missionstudio@nesta.org.uk
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A community for life
Founders Factory and its sister organisations have built the largest technology ecosystem in Europe.
We will unlock significant value from our network of investors, partners and founders across geographies, and we'll help you to raise your next rounds of capital to rapidly scale.
Born in our Venture Studio
Raised $51m
Sector AI
Raised £14.5m
Sector AI
Raised £7m
Sector Fintech
Raised $3.1m
Sector EdTech
How Nick and Marcus launched Bower Collective
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Bower Collective joined the studio program to launch their hybrid eCommerce / subscription platform selling Earth’s best home and personal care products with an innovative reuse and refill program to eliminate plastic waste.
Through Founders Factory's support, Bower Collective were able to launch and scale the business quickly; closing a £400K round to continue momentum and unlocking unfair advantage with a partnership with Reckitt. The Bower Collective team received weekly support from the Head of Surface Care and leveraged expertise from their R&D teams, Washing Experts, Packaging Business Unit and the Head of Sustainability.
Interested in building mission-led startups?
If you're a founder with ideas for solving problems around home carbon emissions, obesity, and tackling loneliness, apply to our Mission Studio now.
You may be wondering…
Typically, a venture studio turns ideas that are sourced and vetted within the organisation, into venture-backable businesses - hiring a CEO and founding team when the time is right. At Founders Factory, we believe some of the best ideas come from entrepreneurs and real-life experiences, so we have two paths to founding a business with us:
Apply to join our studio with your own idea (Apply Here).
Apply to join our studio to launch one of our existing concepts (View Concepts Here).
We're looking for ambitious entrepreneurs who want to use technology to make a big impact. If you have an idea but haven't yet built the product or MVP, now's the right time.
If you don't have an existing idea, but are keen to become a founder, take a look at our careers page to run a concept we're already working on.
If you're a founder and you already have a product in market, take a look at our startup accelerator.
Each new venture will be supported by a studio team . Our skill sets include product, design, talent, data science, engineering and growth.
You will also receive capital to build your product, plus £200k to help you launch and a 6-month accelerator program.
Until the business is incorporated, we'll give you an employment contract with Founders Factory.
They don't. If a partnership forms with one of our corporate partners, it will be governed by the usual pilot or contract agreements between you and them all of which we can help with.