Fred Destin

Founder at Stride.VC. Mind: Blown. Heart: Open. Venture capital should run on: truth and trust.

📍 London, England, United Kingdom🔄 Updated September 2026💼 35 investments📅 21 years investing🗓 Last invested Mar 2024𝕏 @upgrade_to_unlock
VC🌍 United Kingdom20+ investments
35
Total investments
20
Early stage
7
Mid stage
1
Late stage
21y
Years active

Portfolio

32 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Board Member and Lead Investor
Mar 2024
The global energy sector is at a turning point. Rising demand will outpace supply, and rising political, legislative and cultural pressures have made it harder to deliver efficient and safe production. New energy sources will not meet the shortfall, bringing further pressure to downstream environments. Now is the time to bring Industrial AI into production environments to deliver higher output, more efficiency, and less carbon intensity. Cloud-based approaches deliver high performing AI in software industries, but this data science approaches were not designed for the dynamic, real-world, unstructured data sets of the energy industry. The result is underperforming models, high computing costs, and unnecessary security risks for oil and gas companies. The energy industry requires solutions that deliver market leading predictive intelligence on-location, using all available data, without requiring data processing, and without spending millions of dollars on compute costs. This is the mission that’s driven the past 3 years of research and testing at Kashmir Intelligence and has resulted in an infrastructure layer built specifically for the energy industry, on-site, using 100% of data, with no need for data processing in a completely secure architecture at 1/10th of the cost and complexity of cloud and centralised approaches. Kashmir Intelligence exists to build better worlds through machine intelligence.
Board Member and Lead Investor
May 2023
Buena cares for your apartments, tenants, and every task that comes with being a landlord. That’s more time for you. www.buena.com
late stageReal Estate
Board Member
Dec 2022
TRIVER provides small businesses with instant capital in a click. Using Open Banking data and AI models, we are revolutionising how small businesses can access finance.​ Our API-first platform is designed to be embedded with the digital service providers of the real economy (accounting software, digital banks, procurement software, etc.). We serve small businesses from any industry, enabling a broad range of partners to offer a flexible capital solution to their small business clients without complexity. ​
Lead Investor, Seed
Nov 2022
Reimagining the IVF lab to increase by 10X the number of families who can be helped.
Board Member and Lead Investor
May 2022
TechWolf is the #1 AI and data layer for workforce transformation. Use accurate, AI-driven skill data for strategic workforce planning, internal mobility and skills-based hiring and learning. ------- Large enterprises are in the middle of a massive workforce shift. Big transformations are complex and impact your talent strategy: workforce planning feels like a gamble, internal mobility needs fixing, and hiring and learning have to become more skills-based. Its never been more urgent to gain insight into the skills you have, the skills you need, and how to manage the gap in between. Thats where we come in. TechWolf is an AI-driven solution focused on one mission: delivering deep insights and reliable skills data for big companies like yours. We’re a data layer that integrates perfectly into your existing HR tech stack. Were invisible and interfaceless. We tap into numerous data sources and live in the background to unlock and activate skill data where they matter the most. With smarter, data-backed business decisions, TechWolf helps you revolutionize how you manage your most valuable asset—people. Lets talk skills.
Board Member
Aug 2021
The idea of the workplace is expanding beyond the office walls. Which means, for the first time, the world’s talent is liberated from the limits of location. So companies can explore further afield to find the right people. And people can discover the right place to work, wherever they may be. There’s a new land of opportunity, and it’s anywhere. But if virtually anyone can work from virtually anywhere, then competition for the best and brightest becomes fiercer than ever. Attracting and retaining world-class talent requires organisations to offer a world-class experience that will meet them exactly where they are. From day one. And that can be hard to deliver. Welcome to Hofy. We exist to equip the world’s talent with the means to do their best work. That’s why we’ve built a platform from scratch that does exactly that. Enabling any organisation to deliver the tools and experience their people need, straight to their doorstep, desktop or next destination. Our curated storefront enables your people to browse, select and order the dream kit for their dream role. In minutes, not hours. Whether it’s a specced up Mac, a supersized monitor or a slick new chair. It’ll be signed, sealed and delivered. In days, not weeks. So they’ll be set up for success in no time at all. With always-on support, onsite warranty and anywhere collection. Hofy cuts the clicks, kills the complexity and brings clarity to the chaos. Whether you’re building remotely or growing globally; Setting up a new team, spinning up an outpost or onboarding overseas. Hofy delivers the convenience you want, the compliance you need and the experience your people deserve.
Board Member
Dec 2020
Everything you need to make your product multiplayer 🤝🏽 Add rich, real-time collaboration to your product in minutes with Cords UI Components, APIs, and SDK.
Board Member
Feb 2020
Serious business needs a serious email solution. Sedna is a data-driven communication platform for the global Supply Chain industry, designed to lighten the manual work of managing email and presenting data so teams can drive commercial success. Sedna provides businesses with a competitive edge by seamlessly connecting an organisation's ecosystem with their communication, leveraging data and messages to empower teams with vital context and faster ways to manage email. Purpose built to serve any type of business and any department in the Supply Chain, Sedna provides enterprise-grade security and compliance, while a team of Maritime experts are available to ensure smooth implementation and support your teams around the world.
Board Member
Jan 2020
Onsi provides an easy way for businesses to reward their workers. Offering competitive benefits across a complex worker group is tricky. People in different demographics and different locations don't want the same benefits - and as a business, trying to meet everyone's needs becomes expensive, time-consuming and complicated. Our platform is designed to help businesses build programmes that drive loyalty and engagement, delivering a wide range of benefits to workers via their Onsi Card. For businesses, it’s all about getting the right results through tiering and gamification. For workers, it’s all about meaningful benefits they can use every day to improve their financial lives. www.onsi.com
Board Observer
Sep 2019
Our mission is to ensure corporates & SMEs aren’t wasting money & time on their business travel. Most companies are overspending on travel by 20-40% - we help them to save that, without having to change any of their existing travel tools. This is typically achieved through complimenting your travel tool with discounted corporate travel programs & adding a specialised group booking service. The outcome? Significant savings, less time wasted & no change of tooling. We’re backed by Lakestar, Kima Ventures, Stride.VC and Latitude who’ve also backed Airbnb, Spotify, Trivago, Travelperk, Zoopla, Monzo, and Deliveroo.
Board Observer
Aug 2019
🚀 Strapi (strapi.io) is the leading open-source Headless CMS. It gives developers the freedom to use their favorite tools and frameworks while allowing editors to easily manage their content and distribute it anywhere. Based on Node.JS, it saves days of development time through a beautiful admin panel anyone can use. Key features: - Open source: the entire codebase is available on GitHub and is maintained by hundreds of contributors. - Self-hosted: security is crucial for companies. Host your data safely, on your own servers. GDPR compliant. - Customizable: each project requires specific requirements. Easily customize the admin panel as well as the API. - RESTful or GraphQL: Consume the API from any client (React, Vue, Angular), mobile apps or even IoT, using REST or GraphQL. - 100% JavaScript​: One language to rule them all. Use JavaScript everywhere: both for your front-end and your Headless CMS. - Extensible by design: Plugins system included. Install auth system, content management, custom plugins and more in seconds.
Board Observer
Aug 2019
Jow is the leading meal planning and grocery app in France and is growing quickly in North America. Partnering with the retailers and brands, the Jow platform mixes retail media, consumer data, and cutting-edge algorithms to help users meal plan and grocery shop in record time. With over 5 million users globally and 150 million meals served, Jow’s technology was built to help users reclaim their time, waste less food, and feed their families delicious, homemade meals every single week. Whats for dinner for your household? Find out at www.jow.com “We believe in a world where a love of delicious meals, a small budget, and a busy schedule meet. A world where we spend more time eating a good meal with our loved ones and less time looking for things in the grocery store. We are what we eat it defines our place in the world, our health, and our impact on the environment. Let’s make each of our worlds our favorite place to be.” - Jacques Sabatier, CEO and Co-Founder of Jow
early stageRetail
Board Member
May 2019
Experiences shared. Decisions made. Build communities, confidence, and empower life-changing decisions. We connect university student ambassadors and future students digitally around the world to make more informed decisions about higher education. Prospective students get information, reassurance and a greater shot at success. Student ambassadors create connections, gain confidence and get to pay it forward. And universities attract, engage and retain a diverse student population. Because shared experience is the most powerful tool for choosing the right path.
Board Member
Apr 2019
Runa is pioneering a first-of-its-kind payment rail capable of sending and accepting digital value at scale. With Runa, companies can pay the people they serve in any form of digital value, anywhere, instantly. Legacy payment mechanisms struggle to adapt to low-volume, high-velocity transactions both locally and globally, such as sending payouts to gig workers, creators, or sending rewards to customers or employees wherever they are. Runa’s infrastructure and network facilitates payouts to these recipients, helping businesses expand their reach, retain their users while modernizing the way in which they manage and transfer money: instantly, internationally, and free of charge for the senders and the recipient. Operating in more than 30 countries and 18 currencies, hundreds of leading companies rely on Runa to power instant, flexible global payouts including Sodexo, TopCashback, Perkbox, Vodafone, Coinbase and Globetopper. We are committed to providing a hiring and working experience in which all people feel they are equally respected and valued regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
Board Member
Nov 2018
Cazoo. Right for You. Search over 230,000 used cars from 6,000 dealers nationwide.
Show all 32 investments ↓
Experience · 42 entries
All (42)
Investments (35)
Founder (1)
Board (34)
2024
Board Member and Lead Investor
Mar 2024
The global energy sector is at a turning point. Rising demand will outpace supply, and rising political, legislative and cultural pressures have made it harder to deliver efficient and safe production. New energy sources will not meet the shortfall, bringing further pressure to downstream environments. Now is the time to bring Industrial AI into production environments to deliver higher output, more efficiency, and less carbon intensity. Cloud-based approaches deliver high performing AI in software industries, but this data science approaches were not designed for the dynamic, real-world, unstructured data sets of the energy industry. The result is underperforming models, high computing costs, and unnecessary security risks for oil and gas companies. The energy industry requires solutions that deliver market leading predictive intelligence on-location, using all available data, without requiring data processing, and without spending millions of dollars on compute costs. This is the mission that’s driven the past 3 years of research and testing at Kashmir Intelligence and has resulted in an infrastructure layer built specifically for the energy industry, on-site, using 100% of data, with no need for data processing in a completely secure architecture at 1/10th of the cost and complexity of cloud and centralised approaches. Kashmir Intelligence exists to build better worlds through machine intelligence.
2023
Board Member and Lead Investor
May 2023
Buena cares for your apartments, tenants, and every task that comes with being a landlord. That’s more time for you. www.buena.com
late stageReal Estate
2022
Board Member
Dec 2022
TRIVER provides small businesses with instant capital in a click. Using Open Banking data and AI models, we are revolutionising how small businesses can access finance.​ Our API-first platform is designed to be embedded with the digital service providers of the real economy (accounting software, digital banks, procurement software, etc.). We serve small businesses from any industry, enabling a broad range of partners to offer a flexible capital solution to their small business clients without complexity. ​
Lead Investor, Seed
Nov 2022
Reimagining the IVF lab to increase by 10X the number of families who can be helped.
Board Member and Lead Investor
May 2022
TechWolf is the #1 AI and data layer for workforce transformation. Use accurate, AI-driven skill data for strategic workforce planning, internal mobility and skills-based hiring and learning. ------- Large enterprises are in the middle of a massive workforce shift. Big transformations are complex and impact your talent strategy: workforce planning feels like a gamble, internal mobility needs fixing, and hiring and learning have to become more skills-based. Its never been more urgent to gain insight into the skills you have, the skills you need, and how to manage the gap in between. Thats where we come in. TechWolf is an AI-driven solution focused on one mission: delivering deep insights and reliable skills data for big companies like yours. We’re a data layer that integrates perfectly into your existing HR tech stack. Were invisible and interfaceless. We tap into numerous data sources and live in the background to unlock and activate skill data where they matter the most. With smarter, data-backed business decisions, TechWolf helps you revolutionize how you manage your most valuable asset—people. Lets talk skills.
Show all 42 entries ↓
Investment activity
2005–2024 · 35 investments
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