Bradley Jones

Founder, ThatRound

Bradley Jones is the founder of ThatRound, the marketplace built to make early-stage fundraising faster and more transparent for UK startup founders. ThatRound helps founders cut through a fragmented fundraising landscape using AI-assisted onboarding and smart matching to route startups to the right investors and funding partners, reducing noise and accelerating the conversations that actually move a round forward.

After graduating from Imperial College Mathematics department, Bradley founded and later exited his first business, Dynamic Simulations, a trading simulation platform. The experience gave him first-hand insight into the operational and emotional realities of building under pressure, and was his first stint into the UK startup scene.

After his exit in 2016, Bradley founded Sowing Capital, an angel syndicate backing early-stage UK companies at pre-seed and seed (now named Aligned Syndicate) and has invested in over 40 startups. He focuses on improving access to capital, increasing transparency in how fundraising services operate, and helping founders understand what data and signals really matter from pre-seed to Series A.

In 2020, Bradley Co-Founded a non-alcoholic spirits brand, CROSSIP. Fresh of the heels of Diageo’s £100 million acquisition of Seedlip, Bradley felt there was an opportunity in a new and growing market and theme. CROSSIP’s UK-manufactured products are now selling in over 20 countries, however it was the frustration of raising capital in the UK early stage environment that inspired Bradley to build ThatRound.

Why is the UK an attractive place to grow a business?

The UK remains one of the strongest places in Europe to start and scale a company because of the depth of its innovation ecosystem. It has a world-leading financial services sector and well-established early-stage investment incentives, world-class universities and research institutions that are destinations for international talent and consistently produce IP with commercial potential, and a growing network of regional hubs with specialist talent and facilities.

Why do you support the work of The Entrepreneurs Network?

The last five years have shown that founders need a stronger voice in policy if the UK is to address ecosystem challenges and build on its position as a leading place to start and grow a business. Entrepreneurs on the front line should help shape the rules of the game, particularly where policy enables more capital to flow into startups and scaleups, and unlocks entrepreneurship as a driver of regional and national growth.

Just as importantly, many of the biggest constraints on startups come from second-order effects of policy that isn’t designed with entrepreneurship in mind, from tax and immigration to regulation, procurement, and capital markets. Those knock-on impacts are often under-discussed, even though the startup ecosystem is both undervalued in its current contribution and underestimated in its enormous untapped potential.

The Entrepreneurs Network does this well: it listens to what founders are experiencing on the ground, turns that into clear, credible research, and uses it to push for practical change.

What research should more people be reading?

Alongside The Entrepreneurs Network’s work, Beauhurst and the British Business Bank publish some of the most useful, regular reporting on the state of UK fundraising, including breakdowns by stage, region and sector. For those interested in the growth and prosperity of the UK, these reports are valuable because they surface how capital is actually moving, where momentum is building (or fading), and what macro shifts are likely to affect startup survival and growth.