profitability
(3)
The Marketplace That Grew on Commissions, Not Cash
Tagvenue, the London-born venue-hire marketplace founded in March 2015 by Lancaster University friends Artur Stepaniak and Maksim Kondratjuks, grew into a platform spanning six countries, 22,000+ venues and a million monthly visitors — without ever raising a funding round. This is the story of how a business built on commissions, word-of-mouth demand and disciplined hiring reached global scale on its own revenue instead of venture capital.
Nory
Nory is an AI-native restaurant operating system that unifies business intelligence, inventory, workforce management and payroll into a single control centre for hospitality operators. Founded by restaurateur Conor Sheridan, it plugs into a restaurant's existing tech stack and uses real-time data plus predictive analytics - and a crew of 'agentic' AI assistants - to forecast demand, plan staffing, manage ordering and keep the P&L on track. Operators report cutting operating costs by nearly 20 percent and reducing food waste by up to 50 percent. Backed by $62.6M in funding, Nory serves multi-site groups from Black Sheep Coffee to the Jamie Oliver Group and is expanding into the United States.
COR
COR is an AI-powered management platform built for creative and professional services firms — advertising agencies, consulting companies, law firms, and IT shops — that need to understand where their time actually goes and whether their projects are making money. By automating time tracking and layering on predictive analytics, COR gives agency leaders real-time visibility into project profitability, team capacity, and billing gaps before they become losses. Founded in 2017 in Silicon Valley by former agency operator Santi Bibiloni and co-founders Jose Gettas and Gabriel Marin, COR serves clients including Havas, Publicis, Ogilvy, Dentsu, and DDB across 35+ countries, with a reported $6.6M ARR and backing from investors including the founders of DoubleClick, Anaplan, MercadoLibre, and Krux.