Tuesday 15th September | 6:00pm - 8:30pm | The Standard Hotel, King's Cross, London

Fundraising & Team-Building: What It Takes to Raise and Scale

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Sean Mullaney, founder of Seapoint and former European CIO at Stripe, sits down with Yara Alenazi, investor at Crane Venture Partners, for a candid conversation on the mechanics of raising capital and building a high-performing team. They'll cover how to run a tight fundraising process, what's really being evaluated in the room, and how the best founders think about hiring at every stage of growth — from identifying your bottleneck hire to maintaining your bar as you scale. Whether you're preparing for your next round or focused on building the team to get you there, this session goes beyond theory into the practical decisions that compound over time.

Speaker

Sean Mullaney,

Founder & CEO of Seapoint

Founder & CEO of Seapoint. Former European CIO at Stripe, CTO at Algolia, VP Engineering at Zalando and founding team member at Google X. Seapoint has raised €10M (€2.5M pre-seed, €7.5M seed), serves 80+ customers and is building an AI-native finance platform for startups.

Yara Alenazi,

Investor at Crane Venture Partners

Yara is an investor at Crane Venture Partners, based in London. She brings experience from MassMutual Ventures Europe & APAC, where she led healthtech and biotech investments, and from Oxford Investment Consultants, backing early-stage UK companies. Yara is a trained Biomedical Scientist and holds a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine from the University of Oxford, with research that resulted in multiple publications, press coverage, and patents.

Running a Fundraising Process in Europe

- How Sean raised €10M across pre-seed and seed in under two years.
- Why fundraising is a process, not a pitch.
- Creating urgency and momentum.
- When to engage investors and why international networks matter.

What Investors Actually Look For

- Founder-market fit.
- Execution over ideas.
- What changes between pre-seed and seed.
- How traction changes the conversation.

Hiring Your
First 10

- Founding hires vs scaling hires.
- Hiring for bottlenecks.
- Building through trusted networks.
- Hiring AI-native talent.
- Attributes Sean looks for in every hire.

Scaling Towards Series A

- Transitioning from 0→1 to 1→10 leadership.
- Knowing when to professionalise functions.
- Building repeatable execution.
- Capital efficiency and product-market fit.