We’re proud to announce that Sidekick has raised a £3.33M Pre-Seed equity round led by Octopus Ventures, one of Europe’s largest and most active venture capital investors. Seedcamp, Europe’s leading early-stage fund, and Semantic, a venture fund investing in new rails for data and the digital economy, also participated in the round.

Expertly-managed portfolios for the modern investor

Our aim at Sidekick is to close the generational wealth gap by offering products and services typically reserved for only high-net-worth individuals, including access to alternative investments and the ability to borrow against these investment portfolios. Customers will have access to our investment team who will provide regular updates on portfolio performance and share high quality editorial content to help customers build their investment knowledge along the way.

Sidekick was founded in January 2022 by Matthew Ford (CEO) and Peter Townsend (CTO). Matthew previously founded mobile banking platform Pariti, where Peter was CTO, which was sold to Tandem Bank in 2018. They’re joined here at Sidekick by an experienced wider founding team from traditional asset management, consumer credit and fintech backgrounds.

The £3.33M funding round is being used to further develop our app, expand our in- house asset management team and secure the required regulatory permissions and registrations. We will offer an innovative product mix including both stocks and crypto, and construct a responsible funding line for customers to borrow against their portfolios when needed.

“Most retail investors have two options to build wealth: settle for passive portfolios or they can try to time the market and pick stocks and crypto themselves without access to the training, tools and information needed to do this effectively. This funding will allow us to build a modern app-based investment service that gives customers the same professional expertise that only high-net-worth individuals are used to. We’ve already got a stellar team in place, and we’re now excited to be working towards regulatory approval to launch over the coming months.” Matthew Ford, CEO and Co-Founder of Sidekick

As a number of research studies have shown, millennials are the first post-war generation not to earn more than their parents by the time they reach their 30s, and in fact those born in the 1980s have 20% lower net wealth than those born a decade before (caused by lower home ownership). The path for building wealth for this generation is less clear than before. Sidekick was founded to address this.

“We have seen a surge of interest and capital in public markets from retail investors. But investment products offered to the retail segment still lie at two extremes: higher-risk single stock picking and lower risk index trackers / ETFs. High-Net-Worths can access alternative assets whose higher-risk adjusted return profile can create significant compounding effects on wealth over time but retail investors are largely prohibited from these due to high cheque sizes and the lack of digital tools to power and distribute these services. Sidekick solves this and we’re delighted to support the team as they look to close the disparities in wealth creation between High-Net-Worths and the broader retail investor class.” Nick Sando, Principal at Octopus Ventures

“Matt and Pete have a huge amount of fintech startup experience from their time founding Pariti and working on the exec team at Tandem. Matt’s even experienced the dark side with his time as a Fintech focused VC at Mouro Capital where we had the privilege of co-investing in Uncapped. All this to say, they’re the perfect team to be going after this opportunity. We believe there’s a massive business here to democratise access to financial products and help close the generational wealth gap.” Tom Wilson, Partner at Seedcamp

Angel investors who also participated in the Pre-Seed round include Will Neale, founder of Grabyo, Michael Pennington, co-founder of Gumtree, Ricky Knox, co-founder of Tandem, Michael Kent, co-founder of Azimo, Freddy Kelly, co-founder of Credit Kudos, and Mark Ransford, a serial FinTech investor.

‍Please remember, investing should be viewed as longer term. Your capital is at risk — the value of investments can go up and down, and you may get back less than you put in. Cryptoassets are only regulated in the UK for money laundering purposes. If you invest in these type of assets, you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong.

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