Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
Riding Unicorns is a podcast featuring the world's best minds from venture and startups. Hosted by VCs James Pringle and Hector Mason, the show explores what it takes to build and back successful tech unicorns. Each episode features conversations with top founders, operators, and investors unpacking the strategies, challenges, and insights behind scaling category-defining companies. From fundraising and product-market fit to hiring, growth, and beyond, no topic is off-limits. Whether you're a founder, VC, angel investor, or just curious about the world of startups, you’ll find valuable takeaways in every episode.
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Fixing Music Royalties: Ryan Edwards, CEO of Audoo, on Data, Hardware and Building the Industry Standard
<p>What happens when you hear your own hit song playing in public, but never receive the royalty?</p><p>In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James sits down with <b>Ryan Edwards, Founder & CEO of Audoo</b>, the music technology company rebuilding how public performance royalties are measured and distributed.</p><p>The idea for Audoo came from Ryan’s own experience as a musician. After hearing one of his songs playing in a London department store and discovering there was effectively no reliable way to track the royalty, he started investigating how the system actually worked.</p><p>Wh...
Building Sovereign AI: Yang Li, CEO of Cosine on AI Models, Coding Agents and the UK's Frontier AI Future
<p>What does it take to build a frontier AI model lab in a world dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google?</p><p>In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with <b>Yang Li</b>, Co-Founder & CEO of Cosine, one of the UK's leading frontier AI companies building sovereign AI models for enterprise and government.</p><p>Cosine began by fine-tuning foundation models for software engineering before evolving into a full frontier AI lab, training its own models from scratch. Today, the company works with organisations across defence, financial services and critical national infrastructure, deploying AI...
Ashley Montanaro, CEO of Phasecraft on Quantum Advantage, Deep Tech, and the Future of Computing
<p>What happens when computing reaches the limits of classical physics?</p><p>In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Ashley Montanaro, Co-Founder & CEO of Phasecraft, one of Europe's leading quantum computing companies.</p><p>Backed by Episode 1, Phasecraft is building the software and algorithms that will unlock the commercial potential of quantum computers. While much of the industry focuses on hardware, Ashley explains why the real breakthroughs will come from the software layer, and why better algorithms could be worth orders of magnitude more than incremental hardware improvements.</p><p>The conversation explores what...
Kate Jarvis, CEO of Fifth Dimension on PropTech, Vertical AI and Building the Bloomberg Terminal for Real Estate
<p>How do you build AI for one of the world's largest, most valuable, and least digitised industries?</p><p>In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Dr. Kate Jarvis, CEO & Co-Founder of Fifth Dimension, the AI company transforming how institutional real estate investors make decisions.</p><p>With a PhD from Stanford in machine learning and linguistics, Kate has spent her career applying AI to complex industries. Today, Fifth Dimension is building what she describes as the Bloomberg Terminal for real assets, helping some of the world's largest property investors replace spreadsheets, PDFs and...
Laura Modiano, Head of Founder Experience @ OpenAI on Building in the AI Era, and Why Anyone Can Now Create a Company
<p>Laura Modiano leads Founder Experience at OpenAI, a newly created function designed to help startups build, grow, and scale on the world's leading AI platform.</p><p>Having previously worked with startups at AWS and now at OpenAI, Laura sits at the intersection of founders, technology, and the future of company building.</p><p>In this episode, Laura shares how AI is fundamentally changing the startup journey, why founders can now build companies faster than ever before, and what OpenAI is doing to support the next generation of builders from day one.</p><p><b>We discuss:</b></p><...
How Cleo Reached $400M ARR: Barney Hussey-Yeo on AI, Growth, and Building a Consumer Fintech Unicorn
<p>What does it take to build an AI company a decade before the world realises AI is the future?</p><p>In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Barney Hussey-Yeo, Founder & CEO of Cleo, the AI financial assistant helping millions of consumers make smarter money decisions.</p><p>Barney started building Cleo years before ChatGPT brought AI into the mainstream. Today, Cleo has grown into one of the UK's leading fintech success stories, reaching $400M ARR and becoming a category-defining consumer AI company.</p><p>The conversation explores the realities of scaling from zero...
The Future of Finance is AI-Native: Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light, on Organic Software, AI Agents, and Rebuilding Business Finance
<p>What happens when software adapts to humans, rather than humans adapting to software?</p><p>In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Jonathan Sanders, Founder & CEO of Light, the AI-native finance platform redefining how businesses manage money.</p><p>Jonathan's journey spans investment banking, consulting, Pleo, founding Juni, and now building Light. Along the way, he has developed a unique perspective on technology, AI, and what the next generation of business software will look like.</p><p>The conversation explores Jonathan's concept of "organic software" where AI agents learn, adapt, and operate alongside teams...
Steve Domin, Founder & CEO @ Duffel – Rebuilding Travel Infrastructure, Surviving COVID, and the Future of API-First Companies
<p>Steve Domin, Founder & CEO of Duffel, the company rebuilding the infrastructure layer of the global travel industry.</p><p>Duffel is taking on one of the most complex and outdated sectors, creating modern, developer-first APIs for flights, hotels, and more. Backed by investors including Index Ventures and Benchmark, the company has raised over $50M to transform how travel is bought and sold.</p><p>Steve shares the journey of building Duffel from scratch, including:</p> Why the travel industry is fundamentally broken The insight that led to Duffel’s API-first approach Building deep supply-side integrations with airlines and incumbents Navigatin...
Building the backbone of AI with Mahdi Yahya, Co-Founder @ Radiant on Compute, Power and the Future of Infrastructure
<p>Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO of Ori, is now part of Radiant following its partnership with Brookfield.</p><p>Mahdi is building at the centre of one of the most important shifts in technology: the global race to scale AI infrastructure.</p><p>We cover:</p> From telecoms to data centres: lessons from building infrastructure businesses from age 20 Why Ori chose the harder path of building for a future that did not yet exist What “AI infrastructure” actually means, from GPU clusters to orchestration software The Radiant model: combining capital, power, compute and software into a single platform Why AI is becomin...
Charlotte Palmer, VP of Venture Capital at Integra Global Advisors on Backing Emerging Managers, Access, and Venture Fundraising
<p>This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Charlotte Palmer, Vice President of Venture Capital at Integra Global Advisors.</p><p>Charlotte sits on the other side of the table as an LP, backing emerging venture funds globally. In this episode, she lifts the lid on how LPs actually evaluate VCs, what really matters beyond headline performance, and why many GPs still get fundraising wrong.</p><p>We cover:</p><p>• How LPs really underwrite venture funds and why early DPI is often misunderstood<br/> • What matters more than performance in the early years of a fund<br/> • Why acce...
