LONDON — Compassion and capitalism can be prickly partners, but investor Nell Daly, who’s been speaking and mentoring at SXSW London this week, is working to reconcile the two with a global impact fund that focuses on “overlooked founders” and entrepreneurs working outside the mainstream.
She is the cofounder of Revenge Capital, which describes itself as an evergreen, nonpartisan, sector-agnostic fund, and looks at companies with the eyes of an outsider. Her cofounder and co-managing partner is Andrew Antonio, founder of the financial advisory Mayfair Associates, record label Method Music and fintech asset management firm The Openwork Partnership.
A former journalist, clinical psychotherapist and mother of three, Daly believes that innovation often happens on the verges of society and that women, minority groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged founders deserve just as much attention and support as men with money, MBAs or finance-bro connections.
During an interview at SXSW London, Daly said she favors founders “with an axe to grind, because they are incredibly motivated.” Her own axe is “to speak up for people,” who traditionally haven’t had a voice. “I’m outside the industry, and I’m investing in outliers,” she said.
Revenge’s investments include female-founded companies Mother Made, which offers functional mushrooms; Pimentae, which plies top-quality tequila into margaritas packaged in plastic-free, recyclable bottles and cans, and Riser, a career-matching app that aims to leapfrog AI, and connect job applicants with employers via personalized video pitching.
Daly said she found Riser compelling because of its human dimension. She said the two female founders, Lamees Butt and Suzanne Bannister, were frustrated by the fact that almost every professional job application today has been doctored and flattened by AI. Even more annoyingly, companies are using AI to sift through the avalanche of requests from applicants.
Nell Daly was an official speaker and mentor at SXSW London, which runs from June 1 to 6 in Shoreditch.
Getty Images for SXSW London
“AI agents are now screening AI applications, so what kind of language do you have to use to cut through and reach a potential employer? How do you return to human-to-human contact, and make it easier for employers who are trying to hire?” Daly said.
She added that employers need to see applicants and hear their voices in order to get an idea of their personalities, and what skill sets they offer. “I was facing this [hiring] issue inside Revenge, and we invested because our values aligned,” Daly said.
Future investments, Daly said, will go beyond consumer and well-being and stretch into the medical space. She’s interested in “solutions that will impact people’s lives and improve their physical health: healing, surgery, treatment and deep biohacking.”
She’s looking at female health in particular, and talking to one company that has created a device to help women with bladder control. It’s an alternative to a sling. “Slings don’t always have great outcomes. We’re working with an entrepreneur from Canada who’s developed a device that restrengthens the entire pelvic floor,” she said.
Daly is also interested in subcutaneous monitors that can measure a person’s hormones or glucose levels during the day, or tests that can analyze menstrual blood and deliver deeper data on women’s bodies beyond the usual heart rate, blood pressure and calorie burn.
She’s a proponent of biohacking, and feels the U.K. is lagging behind the U.S. in embracing it. “They’re a bit more skeptical of it, and slower to adopt, which means that there’s going to be a market for biohacking in the U.K. in the future,” said Daly, an American who is based between the U.S. and the U.K.
Revenge has invested in the female-founded Pimentae, which specializes in bar-quality margaritas.
Daly broke into finance during COVID-19, raising money for Together Group, the London-based collective that aims to blend creativity, culture and immersive technology. Today, Together owns agencies including The Future Laboratory, Construct, King & Partners, OBO and Purple, which operate independently and leverage each other’s expertise. Clients include luxury brands and high-end hotels and destinations worldwide.
Daly raised the funding alongside Together’s founders Brad Fry and Paul Sheehy and chief executive officer Christian Kurtzke and described the experience as “a very intense MBA. I cut my teeth there. We looked at agencies to acquire, and then I helped facilitate those agencies coming together culturally. We also looked at potential deal flow within the organization to increase EBITDA.”
She added: “It was a great chapter in my life, but I really wanted to go back to my initial impulse,” and speak up for people living and working outside the mainstream, especially those who were struggling financially.
Daly said that when she was working as a psychotherapist, she met so many people who were financially marginalized.
“The through line for me is really financial justice. We don’t talk about it enough, but your mental health is directly correlated — in so many ways — to your financial health. I know how soul-sucking it is to be underemployed, or not doing what you really feel like you’re meant to be doing. I saw, over 13 years of practice, how [financial injustice] really eats away at the souls of people, and I ended up caring about it quite a bit,” she said.
The Mother Made functional mushrooms brand is part of the Revenge Capital portfolio.
Earlier in her career, when she was working at The Female Quotient, the media and advisory company that aims to advance gender equality and diversity in the workplace, Daly said she saw more financial struggles and discrimination against women and people of color, in particular.
“I wanted to do something beyond being a clinical psychotherapist, something that could have a bigger impact on the world, or even on my own small corner of it,” said Daly, who went on to cofound Revenge and announce her aim of raising $1 billion. She’s still working toward that goal.
Daly said she designed Revenge Capital “to be provocative, tell a story, make some noise and invest in outliers. Our branding is innovative, and it set us on the map, very quickly, as being different. I want everyone to be able to achieve their dreams in as much of an equal playing field as we can create,” she said.
Change is already on the way, for women in particular. Daly believes that Gen X women, those born between 1965 and 1980, will be great change-makers and pass down wealth, knowledge and a great sense of independence to their daughters.
“You go to any Taylor Swift concert, and you see a lot of women spending a lot of money on their daughters. I also think the Kardashians were a bit of a beacon, because they ‘clan,’” and have proven that women don’t need to be married to be successful or financially independent.”
It’s fighting talk, and Daly has only just begun.
