Funds of Focal: Jake Christoforou, Venture Manager at Wayra
Jake previously worked as an Investment Associate at Mercia Asset Management, but eager to try his hand at corporate venture capital, he joined Wayra.
What makes Wayra stand out is that they help start ups scale by securing commercial partnerships within Telefonica.
Wayra’s investment strategy?
Strategic investments into companies at Series A in Enterprise, SaaS, 5G private Network Applications, Connectivity, IoT, and emerging technologies in Telecom.
A recent investment Jake is excited about
Honest Mobile — a Focal portfolio company — which aims to revolutionize the mobile industry by adopting a customer-centric approach. Essentially, what Monzo did to the banking industry.
Why partner with Focal?
An ‘excellent initiative and an efficient process to help founders accelerate their funding round more so than any other in the UK ecosystem.’
Jake has developed a great relationship with everyone at Focal. He has witnessed the ‘visibility founders get to VCs’ and some of the ‘success stories’ that have continued in ‘such a short period of time.’
The entrepreneur Jake most admires?
Alex Algard, a founder from one of Wayra’s portfolios, Hiya. He admires ‘his background having already had success founding two companies (Whitepages and Ekata) and at Wayra we are very excited to be supporting him at Hiya.’
Favourite member of the Focal team, and why?
‘Jack Richardson because if I didn’t put him there he wouldn’t be very happy.’
It seems that Jake is trying to appease our new Principal Jack, or maybe there was some pressure placed to get Jack’s name on the leadership board!
Jake and Jack have developed a great friendship, with Jake admiring Jack’s work ethic, and ‘is very happy to see his recent move to Focal.’
