Just like at the end of 2017 and 2016, it’s once again time for end of year hiring post featuring all the companies that I have the good fortune to be an investor in.

Just like last year, if any of the roles interest you please contact the relevant company directly, though of course I’m also more than happy to also explain why I think each company is great and worth joining.

  • First and foremost, you should of course check out the jobs page at my company, the OpenCage Geocoder. We have a few remote, freelance projects open. Please get in touch if you’d like to work with me!

Moving on to companies I am an investor in (listed in alphabetical order)

  • Abi Global Health

    Abi is making medical advice from doctors easily available to everyone via messaging. 2018 was a massive year for the business, as several extensive trials with large players in the health insurance space went very well. It has not been quick - health insurance is not a fast moving space, unfortunately. But as we now move out of the trial phase and into major deployments and marketing, I'm more excited than ever about Abi.

    One interesting point is that we are starting to see a backlash against the purely algorithmic players. In my opinion correctly. Having had the chance to see some of the questions people ask, I (and the Abi team) see a massive role for technology to help guide and facilitate the doctor's decision making, but the idea that doctors can be taken out of the process is still in the very distant future (not to mention legal issues and concerns about consumer confidence).

    Abi is growing fast with several major initiatives going forward in 2019. In the short term they are looking to grow the technical team. If you are in Barcelona, have experience in a nodejs, serverless architecture, and want to join a fun, highly-international team looking to a make a contribution to a meaningful project that has all of humanity as a potential beneficiary, please check out this position description immediately.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Abi.

  • AVUXI

    Also based in Barcelona, AVUXI builds products that help consumers understand location context. Their customers are companies large and small in the online travel space. After closing a funding round in late-2017, 2018 was all about improving the product and adding customers (here's one recent example of many). They are doing so well on the product Google has been copying their features.

    This actually highlights an interesting dynamic in the travel industry. Google is the world's leading digital mapping provider, and used heavily by travel services. At the same time, Google is moving deeper and deeper into the travel booking space themselves and becoming a direct competitor. This creates a major challenge for the big players in the travel space. I predict we will see significant activity in the travel mapping space going forward, and AVUXI has a key role to play here. They are currently recruiting for a full-stack developer.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in AVUXI.

  • Cashwave

    My friends at Cashwave have not made a lot of noise publicly this year, but mainly this is due to them being too busy significantly growing their revenues and partner footprint across most of Eastern Europe. In mid-2017 they shifted focus a bit, and that bet has really paid off. There is still a long way to go, but they continue to expand their niche.

    While the European start-up scene has grown by orders of magnitude over the last decade or so, the reality remains that not many investors are looking to Eastern Europe. As a consequence, teams in the region need to find their own path to profitability, which is what Cashwave has done. There are no shortcuts, the path involves a lot of hard work. That is the story of 2018 for the Cashwave team. Congrats to them for all their progress, the many miles logged, the many deals closed. As the saying goes, it takes 10 years to become an overnight success, slowly but steadily building. This is Cashwave's path. If you are in Sofia and interested in the gift card / digital voucher / employee perks space, my friends at Cashwave would love to speak with you, they will have operational roles opening up in Q1.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Cashwave.

  • Flock

    2018 was a big year for Flock. They went live with many different partnerships (example one, two, and three), and are now used by thousands of drone pilots. A key milestone of the year was closing their £2.25M funding-round, in which I was delighted to follow on from my previous angel investment.

    The business is growing fast and they need help. If you're in London and want to be at the front of an exciting new industry, join Flock.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Flock.

  • GetAgent

    GetAgent provide independent, data-driven analysis of which UK estate agent is the best to sell your home. Highlights of 2018 for the GetAgent team include launching their TV ad (see it on youtube) and several very successful distribution partnerships. All of this lead to major growth, and, at times, a scramble to keep up. The team has expanded significantly in the last few months, but they still have a few open positions, especially for developers.

    As 2019 starts the business poised for a major push. Times are changing in the UK property market (a sector I have followed since 2005 when we started work on Nestoria). A generation of consumers that grew up using smart phones and comparison sites like MoneySupermarket are now buying and selling homes. Brexit is causing a lot of economic uncertainty, but many people don't have a choice, they need to sell regardless. The answer is to use the data provided by GetAgent to make sure you are using the best possible agent for your area and type of property.

    2019 will be a very exciting year for GetAgent, and if you are in London and want to be part of a rapidly growing business helping people with the biggest financial transactions of their lives, you should join GetAgent.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in GetAgent.

  • Hubtype

    Another Barcelona company, Hubtype also had a great 2018. The conversational interface market is one that has been on the cusp of breaking through for a few years now. 2019 things will really take off, for a few reasons. Initial trials by big consumer brands (like Hubtype's major customers) have reached maturity and are now being pushed to larger audiences. Secondly, WhatsApp's new API will go live. Lack of an API has been a big barrier to adoption in many markets where WA is the dominant chat platform.

    Hubtype, who this year released Botonic, their open-source chatbot framework that incorporates all their learnings from the last few years, are perfectly positioned to capture the growth in this space. They having been adding major clients and are one of the very few European companies to be named an official WhatsApp integration partner. As a nice validation of their progress this year, in October Hubtype won Best Start-up at the 2018 International Chatbot summit in Berlin, against a huge field of competitors. They just moved into a new, larger office, and are always looking for smart people who want to design the future of messaging.

    Final point: if you are at all interested in the messaging space you should sign up for their monthly Messaging Business Trends newsletter.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Hubtype.

  • Localistico

    I unfortunately can't reveal any numbers, but it is fair to say this was the break out year for my friends at Localistico. Again, a great case of doing the hard work to build the tools and partnerships to be in the right place at the right time. Managing location data across more and more platforms is only getting increasingly complex. Major brands need help, and Localistico has the solution. Besides winning many new customers, a key highlight was a new partnership with TripAdvisor, which is a great compliment to the deep relationships they already have with many other local search platforms and services.

    They have open roles in London and Madrid.

  • Nisgo

    Nisgo is my only new investment of 2018. They are working on a location intelligence platform for the out-of-home (OOH) advertising industry. As the business just started they are still very much in product-market-fit discovery mode and not yet hiring. One to keep an eye on for anyone interested in the location space. I am hoping to convince them to make the trip to London (the team is primarily in Madrid) to present at a #geomob at some point this year. I'll have a post up on why I invested in a few weeks.

  • Overleaf

    What a great year Overleaf had. 2018 was all about integrating their competitor Sharelatex, acquired in 2017, and taking the best features of both services to launch Overleaf v2. They did that not slowing down at all on usage growth (now used by over three MILLION authors, integrations with scientific journals, and continuing to add partnerships with great universities around the world. They have become the absolute leader in their space.

    If you believe - as I do - that science can help the world, go join Overleaf and help science move more quickly.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Overleaf (then known as writeLaTeX).

  • Perkbox

    At this point we have to move Perkbox out of the start-up category. They have made it. The business is absolutely massive, I think well over 200 employees now, who this year moved into a great new headquarters on Finsbury Square (after outgrowing the old office).

    The UK continues to grow massively, not least as companies need to find ways to keep the best talent in a time of record low-unemployment, but Perkbox is now also turning the focus to other markets, first up is France, Australia is also on the list, with more to follow.

    My friend and former Yahoo! Europe colleague Paul Schulz joined as CTO, adding to an already very strong team. He's great to work with, so you should, they have openings for all kinds of different roles. Many congrats to Saurav and Chieu for the amazing business they have built.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Perkbox.

  • Printastic

    Again this year at Christmas I sent my parents and parents-in-law calendars with pictures of the kids. Again it took me literally less that 5 minutes to make the calendar using the phenomenally simple Printastic app. The product keeps getting better and better (which is nto easy as it means simpler and more intuitive) and behind the scenes the business has closed some very impressive deals.

    The small team runs lean and mean (well, actually friendly), so they're not hiring right now, but you should grab the app.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Printastic.

  • SplashMaps

    SplashMaps is very different than all the other companies listed here in that they offer a physical product. This makes the explosive growth of a digital-only service unlikely, but 2018 was nevertheless a record year for the business, not least due large custom licensing deals with major retailers. There is just something absolutely beautiful about holding a physical map, that can not be replaced digitally. They now offer many different forms and styles including the popular "Toob" neck warmers. SplashMaps are are not currently hiring, but they are always on the hunt for more partners and retailers.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in SplashMaps (published on the Lokku blog).

  • Storage Made Easy

    My friends at Storage Made Easy kicked off the year with a £3M funding round, using the money to drive expansion, especially in the US. On the product side they continue to add to their already very long list of partners. GDPR and data security have continually been in the news in 2018. Add to that the generally relentless pace of innovation in cloud technologies, and 2019 is again poised to be a very busy year for SME. SME have open engineering roles in London and Ukraine.

  • Teragence

    At Teragence they are crowd-sourcing network analytic data. Not the most easy-to-explain concept, but the data is like gold to mobile operators. Sadly though selling to big enterprises like mobile operators has a very long lead time (think speed of glaciers) This year has been about building the pipeline of deals.

    Not currently hiring, but occasionally have need of freelancers. As I wrote last year, get in touch with them if swimming in big pools of geodata is your thing.

    For some background, here's my post on why I invested in Teragence.

  • What3Words

    in 2018 What3Words added more partnerships than I can possibly list here, but most notable was perhaps that more and more car manufacturers are integrating the three word codes in their navigation systems, most notably Mercedes-Benz. They keep adding more support for many more languages and moved to a new office at filled.count.soap. There are many job openings at that office, but also others a bit farther afield, for example in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Join.them.now

That concludes the list of companies that are hiring (and a few that aren’t, I know). If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope you’re a good match for one of these companies.

I’ll close by mentioning one company in which I invested that unfortunately closed down in 2018 - Showroom (sorry, I can’t link to the actual site, as it is now offline, but I can link to this post on the Lokku blog from when they started). Many thanks to co-founders Chloe and Michelle, and the entire Showroom team for all the hard-work. It’s always hard to know why a company doesn’t make it, a big part can nothing more than bad timing or even just bad luck. In this case we can at least be certain it wasn’t lack of effort by the team.

Forward, to new challenges!