After years of refining our venture-building process through our Innov@te™ methodology, LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory, powered by Innov@te, is available to external ventures. We already have an impressive track record of success and measurable results we've achieved for startups in our ecosystem.
The AI VentureFactory represents the culmination of our venture-building expertise, refined across 3 versions of our Innov@te venture building process and used by 15 sector defining tech ventures:
Our initial version helped launch and scale groundbreaking ventures, including:
Our second version powered several innovative companies:
Over the last few years we've been developing our next-generation platform, the AI VentureFactory. The results to date have been quite remarkable:
Our AI VentureFactory has demonstrated exceptional performance across several key metrics:
Our five branded ventures showcase the power of our methodology:
A No-Code AI Software Company for the Art World
A Pioneering Nature-Tech Platform
Additional Innovative Ventures
LettsGroup's senior team brings unparalleled expertise to the table:
What makes the AI VentureFactory yet more powerful is our comprehensive support system:
We offer a number of additional benefits to our community of entrepeneurs and investors including:
The true value of the AI VentureFactory lies in its ability to navigate the hundreds of key decision points and challenges that tech startups face. Our platform provides the process, structure, tools, automations, and insights to optimise your journey at every stage, ensuring you're never blindsided by "what you don't know you don't know."
With a track record of 15 companies and dozens of tech entrepreneurs successfully using the Innov@te methodology, and a growing number of new startups already scaling with the AI VentureFactory, we're confident you can accelerate your startup's success.
To find out more about the AI VentureFactory platform and our wider programme go to Letts.Group. Alternatively, sign up today at pricing.Letts.Group.
Transform your startup journey with LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory – where innovation meets execution.
The European innovation ecosystem is fundamentally broken. Despite commanding 19% of global R&D investment and housing 43% of the world's premier life sciences universities, Europe has systematically failed to produce technology companies of global significance. This failure is not accidental but structural. It is rooted in a crippling risk aversion that permeates the entire European startup ecosystem. As pre-seed founders, you aren't merely operating within this flawed system; you are actively perpetuating it. Your inability to embrace transformative risk isn't just limiting your company's potential, it's ensuring Europe remains technologically subservient to American innovation for generations to come.#
European startups don't fail because of insufficient technical expertise or inadequate funding ecosystems. They fail because European founders categorically refuse to think beyond incremental improvements and modest market ambitions. It started when Beenz, London’s first fintech sensation and the first global cryptocurrency, moved to New York to scale. When Stripe's Collison brothers needed to build a truly transformative payment infrastructure, they abandoned Europe for Silicon Valley. When Spotify faced the critical scale-up phase, it required American capital and market access to achieve platform status. The pattern is unmistakable and damning.
The market data confirms this systemic deficiency. While American startups routinely target total addressable markets measured in billions, European founders celebrate securing dominance in fragmentary regional markets. Palantir, OpenAI, and SpaceX didn’t emerge from ecosystems that reward cautious, stepwise growth and profit-before-platform - they emerged from systems that demand founders shoot for market transformation or perish trying. Compare this with European "success stories" like Klarna, which spent years building modest payment solutions before finally embracing the high-risk, high-reward buy-now-pay-later model that American competitors had already pioneered.
This pathological timidity manifests in European founders’ obsession with early revenue and premature profitability. Uber sustained billions in losses to establish market dominance; Amazon reinvested profits for over two decades to build an unassailable market position. Meanwhile, European founders proudly showcase "capital efficient" growth models that virtually guarantee they’ll remain subscale relative to American competitors. Monzo and N26 initially celebrated their "responsible growth," only to watch as American fintech companies secured valuations five to ten times higher by aggressively pursuing market share over immediate profitability.
The consequences of this mindset are not theoretical but devastatingly practical. Europe has become the world’s innovation farm team - developing promising technologies only to see them acquired and scaled by American companies when they show signs of genuine breakthrough potential. DeepMind’s acquisition by Google stands as perhaps the most damning example of a world-leading AI research outfit that could have become Europe’s foundational AI champion now serving American strategic interests. This pattern repeats across sectors: Kustomer’s sale to Meta, Skype’s acquisition by Microsoft, and ARM’s sale to SoftBank all represent European innovations ultimately captured and monetised elsewhere.
The Draghi report’s identification of Europe’s "middle technology trap" isn't merely an academic observation. It's an indictment of the founder psychology that pervades the ecosystem. European founders have internalised the region’s regulatory caution and cultural risk aversion, creating companies designed to survive rather than transform. Tesla didn't emerge from a mindset of balanced risk management and incremental market capture; it resulted from Musk's willingness to repeatedly risk bankruptcy to force a transition to electric vehicles. No European automotive startup has shown comparable ambition, despite the continent’s renowned automotive engineering expertise.
This failure of entrepreneurial courage has produced a devastating leadership vacuum. While America has generated multiple generations of visionary founder-leaders from Jobs and Gates to Bezos and Zuckerberg to contemporary figures like Chesky and Altman, Europe has produced precious few comparable figures. This isn’t coincidental but causal. European venture ecosystems systematically select against the psychological profile that produces transformative leaders. Even Stripe’s Patrick Collison has acknowledged that his company could never have achieved its current position had it remained in Europe’s more risk-averse ecosystem.
The path forward requires a fundamental rejection of Europe’s entrepreneurial orthodoxy. Founders must:
Target global market dominance from inception. Revolut distinguished itself precisely by rejecting the regional focus that hamstrung other European fintech startups, immediately building infrastructure for global operations rather than optimising for European regulatory environments.
Embrace extended unprofitability as a strategic weapon. Delivery Hero’s willingness to sustain years of losses to establish market position stands as a rare European example of the approach American startups take for granted.
Design technology platforms with capabilities far beyond current market demands. Adyen’s decision to build payment infrastructure capable of handling transaction volumes 100x their initial market need exemplifies the architectural ambition European startups typically avoid.
Select investors based on risk tolerance rather than operational expertise. Spotify’s decision to partner with American growth investors rather than European venture funds with "sector expertise" proved critical to its survival against Apple Music’s competitive threat.
But even these steps are insufficient unless Europe builds institutions that actively enable and expect this level of ambition from day one. That’s where new models like the AI VentureFactory at LettsGroup point the way forward. Rather than hoping founders will self-correct in a system that punishes risk, the AI VentureFactory is engineered to do what traditional incubators and accelerators will not: build ventures around transformative potential, not incremental feasibility. It systematically removes friction, compresses time to scale, and injects AI-powered ambition into the DNA of every startup it helps create.
The AI VentureFactory doesn’t simply support bold founders - it manufactures them. It challenges conventional European startup thinking by designing ventures for global scale from day one, deploying AI not just as a tool but as a co-founder, and focusing capital and talent on ventures that reimagine entire industries, not just marginally improve them.
The European innovation ecosystem isn’t failing despite its caution - it’s failing because of it. The region’s risk aversion doesn’t protect founders from failure; it guarantees they’ll never achieve transformative success. The existential question for European founders isn’t whether you can create modestly successful companies - the ecosystem already proves this possible. The question is whether you possess the courage and risk-taking conviction to build companies capable of defining technological paradigms rather than merely participating in them.
As Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley observed during his European investment tour, “European founders ask how to minimise downside risk; American founders ask how to maximise upside potential.” Until this fundamental psychology shifts - and until new structures like the AI VentureFactory become the norm, not the exception Europe will remain a technological colony: developing innovations for exploitation by American platforms rather than building platforms of its own.
The uncomfortable truth is that Europe doesn’t lack capital, talent, or technical capability. It lacks founders with the audacity to deploy these resources with the singular focus on transformative outcomes that characterise America’s most successful technology companies. This isn’t merely a difference in approach - it represents an existential threat to Europe’s technological sovereignty and economic future. The most patriotic act a European founder can undertake isn’t building a "sustainable" business that creates modest employment - it’s building companies of such ambition and scale that they reshape global markets in Europe’s image.
And if that’s your mission, you don’t need another accelerator - you need a factory for ambition. You need a launchpad built for paradigm shifts. You need to think bigger, risk more, and build what the world doesn't yet know it needs. The next global platform doesn’t have to come from Silicon Valley. It could come from here. But only if you start building like it.
Early stage tech-focused founders can sign up to LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory today. Go to www.Letts.Group.
Today, we sit down to discuss a critical question for the future of European innovation: can Europe do what's necessary to create genuine, successful tech leaders and achieve digital sovereignty? Europe faces a paradox of strong research but lagging high-tech productivity , caught in a "middle technology trap" and hindered by a significant cultural risk aversion that impacts entrepreneurship, investment, and acceptance of failure. How is LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory providing the solution? See more in their recent analysis.
LettsGroup HQ
In April, LettsGroup expanded the VentureFactory's AI capabilities within its Step-by-Step venture building process, while optimising the new Dashboard specifically for pre-Seed tech and digital startups. The platform now boasts an impressive 3rd Party AI Agent library with a new cutting-edge suite of Design Agents complementing its other function-specific agents, alongside new startup CRM capabilities integrated seamlessly into the stack with project, product and collaboration tools. AI VentureFactory benchmarking stats are highlighting compelling advantages for users leveraging this revolutionary venture building-as-a-platform approach. Listen to the teams podcast on the game-changing impact the AI VentureFactory is having on the startup ecosystem in our latest podcast. Last, LettsGroup has been engaging with prominent tech and startup leaders about joining the group as it expands, developed insightful research comparing European and US startup performance, and is hosting an exclusive Demo Day showcasing its deeper tech ventures on May 8th.
LettsCore
LettsCore's team achieved a breakthrough in April by optimising their content management blockchain through a strategic transfer from onchain to offchain content storage - unlocking strong economics as the solution scales in the market. This architectural evolution maintains seamless transparency with the LettsCore API, highlighting the interface's sophisticated effectiveness between applications and content implementation. The team has revolutionised search capabilities by deploying powerful full-text and AI-driven search functionality (successfully tested with OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0), alongside an innovative Model Control Protocol (MCP) server designed for advanced AI clients like Claude. MCP represents the frontier of AI tool integration, dramatically expanding interaction with LettsCore content across multiple platforms. The team will further expand content distribution by implementing a Mastodon social network server, enabling users to effortlessly auto-promote content through federated social media. This strategic implementation will be able to connect content across multiple other social networks including BlueSky and Threads, positioning LettsCore at the forefront of decentralised content management and sharing.
LettsNews
LettsNews has supercharged its AI-powered 'newsroom tech for everyone' with a number of exciting enhancements. The platform now features sophisticated Advanced Search + AI capabilities, dramatically improving search efficiency through intelligent filters and automated content discovery. The standout addition - an AI-powered Title and Description generator - has garnered enthusiastic user response by functioning as a personalised newsroom editor with customisable tone-of-voice options. The highly anticipated 'Promote' feature is about to launch, set to revolutionise content distribution with frictionless automation to BlueSky initially, with intelligent linking to distributed stories. In an ambitious roadmap, LettsNews is aggressively expanding its AI features and tools to include sophisticated automated content generation for image-specific titles and descriptions, alongside AI-generated Notes and Story drafts - positioning the platform to redefine how digital news is created, optimised, and distributed.
LettsArt
LettsArt is close to reaching 1,000 art galleries using its platform to better manage, distribute and sell art online - which is a major milestone. Its AI, no-code capabilities is initially attracting a wide array of artist galleries showing thousands of artworks with over 3,000 users on its platform. The art-tech startup supports the industry's various fragmented constituents with a new model, semi-private platform that makes buying, selling and managing art and art businesses safe, simple and fast - while flowing more revenues back to the creators. It is building considerable momentum in its early adopter segment of emerging artists while beginning to make inroads into professional studios and with collectors. LettsArt plans to add auto-distribution to leading art marketplaces in the coming months as well as auto-promotion to leading social networks and an exciting clutch of new AI capabilities.
LettsSafari
LettsSafari has seen a strong increase in numbers over the last 90 days, now with approaching 650 subscribers that demonstrate above norm engagement rates - and with wider visitor numbers expanding. The digital platform for mass market rewilding has a focused and loyal base to grow from - with a high percentage of nature restoration leaders and influencers at its core. AI effectiveness within the nature-tech startup is growing behind the scenes. LettsSafari has adopted LettsNews' platform in the field and in-office to optimise the digital platform's content operations and news distribution. LettsSafari is excited about its journey as a digital-first operator with a growing brand in such a physical, lower-tech universe.
Other LettsGroup Ventures
We highlight just a few of our ventures in each monthly edition of The LettsGroup NewsFlash. To explore other LettsGroup ventures go to LettsGroup/ventures.
It's Easter, so here's one that's a little more light-hearted! The giant green egg-planet (below) isn't just LettsSafari's artistic whimsy - it's a perfect symbol for Easter's surprising connections to our planet's biodiversity! And no, we're not just yolking around. Ouch... While most people associate Easter with chocolate bunnies and pastel decorations, environmentally-minded celebrants are hatching a revolution that would make Mother Earth proud. You could call it "Operation Resurrection" for our ecosystems.
Did you know that the European hare - often confused with the "Easter bunny" - is actually a keystone species in rewilding projects across Europe? These "Easter hares" aren't delivering candy; they're delivering ecosystem services through their natural grazing patterns that maintain grassland habitats. Talk about multitasking! They're basically the unpaid landscapers of the natural world. No wonder they need a holiday.
"The irony isn't lost on us," says conservation biologist Dr. Emma Thorne. "The very animal we've turned into a chocolate novelty is critical for restoring biodiversity in certain European landscapes. It's like discovering Santa Claus is actually essential for arctic ice formation."
Easter's spring timing coincidentally aligns with critical breeding periods for countless species. This has inspired a movement of "quiet zone" Easter celebrations, where communities and church groups time their festivities to minimise disruption to wildlife. Because nothing says "Happy Easter" like respecting a woodcock's mating dance! If you've ever seen a woodcock's dance moves, you'd understand they need all the privacy they can get - those birds have rhythm that would make the Easter Bunny hop with envy.
The traditional Easter egg hunt is getting an eco-makeover through "seed eggs" - biodegradable egg-shaped containers filled with native wildflower seeds. Plant these little miracles and watch as they transform into micro-habitats for pollinators. Finally, an Easter egg that gives you something better than a sugar crash and chocolate-stained fingers!
"We've distributed over 50,000 seed eggs across urban areas," reports community organiser Wei Chen. "Children love watching their Easter eggs grow into wildflower patches that attract bees and butterflies. It's Easter magic that lasts well beyond Sunday brunch! And unlike chocolate eggs, these don't mysteriously disappear when parents get late-night munchies."
In the UK, conservation organisations have brilliantly repurposed Easter as an educational platform about ground-nesting birds whose populations have plummeted due to habitat loss. "Wild egg hunts" teach participants to identify and protect bird nests while connecting ancient fertility symbols to modern conservation needs. It's the only Easter egg hunt where finding nothing is actually a win for conservation.
So this Easter, as you admire that chocolate globe or colourful egg, remember you're holding more than a treat - you're holding a symbol of Earth's remarkable biodiversity and our opportunity to help it thrive. Now that's something worth celebrating.
And if anyone asks why you're planting your Easter eggs instead of eating them, just tell them you're expecting a different kind of miracle this year - the kind that doesn't require explaining to your dentist!
Become a member of LettsSafari this Easter and build rewilding safari parks and gardens with us. Some might even house Easter bunnies! Subscribe at LettsSafari.com.
The European Union finds itself in a paradoxical position. The region accounts for 19% of global R&D investment, produces 20% of global scientific publications, and houses 43% of the world's leading life sciences universities. Yet as an ING analysis reveals, from 2000-2019, productivity growth in Europe's high-tech sectors lagged significantly behind the US, with a negative gap of approximately 0.1 percentage points annually in manufacturing of computers and electronics.
This productivity chasm has profound consequences. While high-tech manufacturing has increased production by an impressive 60% over the past decade, competing sectors in the US have grown faster, widening the transatlantic technology gap. The stark reality, as detailed in the Draghi report, is that Europe's most innovative sectors remain caught in what economists term a "middle technology trap", excelling at incremental improvements while failing to pioneer breakthrough innovations that create market-defining platforms.
"The road ahead is not without challenges," notes Lukas Leitner, a deep tech investor at Lakestar. "The U.S. has a 'flywheel effect' in deep tech while Europe's ecosystem is still immature."
At the heart of Europe's tech leadership deficit lies a profound cultural distinction: risk aversion. As Bloomberg columnist Allison Schrager observes in a recent Japan Times piece, "European culture is just more risk-averse than America's. There is a reason stock ownership is lower and welfare states are bigger in Europe."
This risk aversion manifests in multiple dimensions:
This cultural orientation toward security over opportunity creates a systemic handicap for European tech development. As Leitner observes, "Europe has strong research institutions, engineering talent, and supportive public sentiment for deep tech, but there need to be policy changes to foster a culture that supports taking risks."
Perhaps most critically, Europe suffers from a pronounced leadership gap in its tech ecosystem. While the US has produced daring tech leaders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg - figures willing to pursue massively ambitious, high-risk ventures - Europe has generated comparatively few equivalent entrepreneurial icons.
This leadership deficit has several dimensions:
The leadership gap creates a vicious cycle. Without visible examples of audacious tech leaders achieving massive success, the next generation of European entrepreneurs calibrates their ambitions and risk appetites accordingly, perpetuating the pattern of more modest ventures.
Europe's venture capital landscape, while growing, remains fundamentally different from its American counterpart. According to data cited in the ING report, venture capital as a percentage of GDP in the EU is approximately one-fifth of US levels. More troubling, the concentration of late-stage funding is even more pronounced, with European tech companies raising on average just half the capital of their American counterparts at equivalent funding stages.
The funding gap results in a systematic disadvantage for European startups. A recent TechCrunch piece reveals that 50% of the growth capital raised by European deep tech startups comes from outside the continent. The finance issue isn't merely quantitative - it's structural. The EU has been bluntly criticised for a financial infrastructure that is not in place, a struggling market for investing in tech; all ultimately increasing its risk aversion compared to the US.
Europe faces an alarming talent deficit. A Euractiv Advocacy Lab piece documents that against EU targets of 20 million ICT specialists by 2030, current projections suggest only 12 million skilled professionals may be available. This 8-million-person gap represents perhaps the single largest constraint on Europe's digital ambitions.
While Europe has increased its AI professional base tenfold over the past decade, China leads in sheer numbers of AI practitioners. The World Economic Forum forecasts that 70% of the next decade's economic value will stem from digitalisation, making this skills shortage potentially devastating to Europe's competitive position.
Despite decades of integration efforts, Europe's digital landscape remains fragmented. As the ING analysis states, "Cross-border consolidation for economies of scale has proven more difficult in Europe due to fragmented and stricter regulation and competition policies for consumer protection."
This fragmentation creates profound scaling disadvantages. European tech companies must navigate 27 different regulatory regimes, language markets, and consumer preferences - diluting resources and complicating growth strategies. By contrast, American tech companies can achieve massive scale in a single, homogeneous market before approaching international expansion.
Perhaps most alarmingly, Europe has developed critical dependencies on foreign technologies in infrastructure domains. In a 'The Rest is Politics' question time podcast, Campbell and Stewart identify cloud computing as "entirely American" and notes Europe's reliance on US companies for defence resources marked by US-owned data gathering mechanisms.
These dependencies extend into security domains, with specific mention of companies like "SpaceX and Palantir" representing areas where Europe lacks sovereign alternatives. The podcast suggests that the EU is completely reliant on US tech.
Against this challenging backdrop, deep tech may represent Europe's most promising path toward technological sovereignty. According to a 184-page report by venture firms Lakestar, Walden Catalyst, Dealroom, and Hello Tomorrow, deep tech attracted €15 billion ($16.3 billion) in venture investments in Europe in 2024, with nearly one-third of all European venture capital now directed toward deep tech companies.
European strengths in deep tech are substantial:
As Arnaud de la Tour, CEO of Hello Tomorrow, notes: "The National Science Foundation, which is the biggest supporter of founder-applied research in the U.S. has had its budget cut by half. A lot of those great scientists don't have a job anymore, and many could come to Europe."
Alongside the deep tech opportunity, innovative approaches to venture creation deserve careful examination. LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory represents one of the most systematic attempts to address Europe's venture-building challenges. The company's approach is based on a fundamental insight: the traditional venture-building process remains remarkably artisanal despite technology transforming nearly every other industry.
LettsGroup has developed what it calls the Innov@te methodology - a comprehensive venture-building framework with seven stages, 49 distinct steps, and hundreds of sub-steps developed over 15 years. This approach transforms what has historically been tacit, founder-dependent knowledge into explicit, transferable systems, potentially offering a solution Europe's crippling risk-averse landscape.
The potential impact is significant. LettsGroup claims its systematic approach can double conventional venture success rates from one successful venture in ten to one in five. If accurate, this would represent a dramatic improvement in capital efficiency - a critical advantage in Europe's more constrained funding environment. The AI VentureFactory also claims it's approach can reduce the cost of venture building by up to 90%.
The AI VentureFactory addresses several European structural challenges:
What makes this approach particularly relevant to Europe's challenges is its systematic nature. Rather than attempting to copy Silicon Valley's high-risk, founder-genius model, LettsGroup has created a structured methodology and AI-powered software platform that potentially fits better with Europe's more process-oriented business culture while still delivering improved outcomes.
For Europe to create genuine tech leaders capable of ensuring digital sovereignty, four essential transformations must occur:
Europe must undertake the difficult but necessary cultural shift toward embracing calculated risk-taking in technology ventures. This doesn't mean abandoning European values of stability and security, but rather recognising, as Schrager puts it, that "technology-driven growth is inherently unpredictable and creates winners and losers."
This shift requires several elements:
The LettsGroup model potentially offers a bridge by creating more systematic approaches to risk management without reducing the inherently risky nature of technological innovation.
The evidence is clear: Europe's capital markets must undergo fundamental transformation. As the ING report states, "European capital markets, fragmented and risk-averse, fail to provide the financing needed for global competitiveness."
This transformation would require regulatory changes to facilitate cross-border investment, institutional shifts in risk appetite, and dedicated mechanisms to bridge the "valley of death" between early-stage funding and growth capital.
Addressing the 8-million-person ICT skills gap requires a comprehensive strategy across education, immigration, and remote work policies. The Euractiv piece highlights one small-scale initiative - Huawei's partnership with UNESCO on ICT competitions - but systemic solutions demand coordinated action at the European level.
Universities must expand technical programs, mid-career retraining initiatives need significant scaling, and Europe must develop compelling value propositions to retain and attract global tech talent.
Europe cannot achieve technological sovereignty across all domains simultaneously.
Such focus might concentrate on deep tech areas where Europe has natural advantages, like photonics computing, which offers "major advantages in speed and efficiency" according to Leitner. By leveraging specific domains of excellence, Europe could develop distinctive technological capabilities that provide strategic independence.
Can Europe create genuine tech leaders capable of ensuring digital sovereignty? The evidence suggests qualified optimism, but only if Europe embraces transformative approaches rather than incremental adjustments.
The deep tech sector's growth, now attracting nearly a third of all European venture capital, indicates investors recognise this potential path to technological sovereignty. Meanwhile, the AI VentureFactory approach developed by LettsGroup offers a systematic methodology that could help Europe maximise returns from its more limited capital resources while addressing the risk aversion challenge.
The current geopolitical environment may also create unexpected opportunities. As de la Tour notes, science defunding in the US could drive talent toward Europe, while photonics computing represents a domain where Europe can lead rather than follow.
As Schrager concludes in her analysis of European risk aversion, "finding the right balance between reducing risk and encouraging growth is as much about values as about economics." Europe possesses the fundamental assets needed for tech leadership: world-class research, substantial financial resources, regulatory sophistication, and democratic legitimacy. What it has historically lacked is the cultural comfort with risk, the leadership examples, and the institutional coordination necessary to translate these assets into global tech leadership positions.
By combining deep tech investment with systematic venture-building methodologies like LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory, while simultaneously undertaking the harder cultural shift toward embracing smart risk-taking and developing more risk-tolerant leaders, Europe might just find its path to genuine technological sovereignty. The stakes couldn't be higher, particularly in the "Trumpocene" era where, as William Burns argues, "Europe urgently needs to rethink technological sovereignty."
LettsGroup HQ
LettsGroup is excited to launch its AI VentureFactory to the UK startup market from April, following an extensive private beta. Automation within the platform has reached an inflexion point with all the stages, steps and sub-steps in Innov@te's venture building process fully AI-enabled. Thorough prompt engineering has genuinely elevated the platform. With it, we believe that startups using the AI VentureFactory can accelerate their growth and automate their operations more than previously possible, and at a systemically lower cost-to-build. Indeed, early benchmarking has measured up to 90% lower cost to build tech-driven startups. Its go-to-market plans and pricing for the UK market are live, so early stage founders and investors can sign up and get going at www.Letts.Group.
LettsCore
LettsCore's content management blockchain platform is slated to go live at the end of Q2, and is busy getting the last features ready for final testing. Engineering work has centred around automated management of subscriptions, seamlessly moving funding into LettsCore wallets and on to the end users own billing wallets. This is essential to operating its payments, top-ups and subscription plans at-scale. Following this, the team will focus on optimising the management of distributed content meta data. LettsCore's content meta data sits in a cloud database, optimising the operational costs of running the innovative platform tackling fake information, media micro-monetisation and content controls for AI. With this completed, the team will add advanced meta data search, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) functionality, which enables LettsCore to expose its service layer, using this emerging standard, to multiple LLM platforms and AI models such as Anthropic's Claude.
LettsNews
LettsNews newsroom tech has performed well since its Beta launch in late January. As a result, the product team is focused on rolling out a series of new AI features over the coming weeks and months. Next week, Advanced Search + AI will be released, enabling better search filtering for users (with AI to make the filters), optimising the discovery of Content Items to be auto-inserted into news Stories. Following this, LettsNews will launch a new AI Title and Description generator which serves like a private newsroom editor. The team is also finishing its new 'Promote' feature so users can auto-post social media messages (with links to their distributed stories), using AI to streamline the process and improve social SEO by delivering multiple micro-posts targeted for selected social media channels.
Book your weekend or week-long eco-retreat in southwest England at LettsRetreat.com today.
LettsArt
LettsArt continues to grow at an accelerated pace, with a sizeable number of galleries, artists and collectors adopting its platform to manage, distribute and sell art better online. It now boasts over 900 art galleries powered by Its AI no-code software, with over 3,700 artworks loaded and 2,750 collectors signed up. It is adding 3-4 new users a day with 1-2 new online galleries being started a day. The product team will launch more advanced subscription plans in Q2, with an attractive entry price and clearly differentiated tiers for single and multi-user accounts. Following this, they will start building a new, streamlined AI approach to sign up for the platform, optimising higher volume conversion rates.
LettsSafari
In March, LettsSafari's platform for mass-market rewilding released “Smaller-Scale Rewilding: A Practical Guide to Restoring Nature in Your Own Space”. This, extensive, online guide to smaller-scale rewilding is available to paying subscribers of LettsSafari+, in weekly instalments, released section by section. Photos and videos deliver an immersive experience, with references and embeds creating an extended learning tool. It has taken several years to gather the data to produce this work - we recommend subscribing to LettsSafari.com to experience it. LettsSafari also announced its members open day on Saturday 14 June in Exeter City's wilded Capability Brown gardens.
Other LettsGroup Ventures
We highlight just a few of our ventures in each monthly edition of The LettsGroup NewsFlash. To explore other LettsGroup ventures go to LettsGroup/ventures.
Today, we sit down to discuss the turbulent nature of today’s innovation economy, and the company looking to turn it all around using AI. We talk artisanal scaling, the valley of death, and the endless cash wasted everyday on an uncodified scale-up system in the UK innovation economy. Let’s see how LettsGroup is looking to solve that. See more in their recent analysis: https://letts.group/2025/02/27/from-failure-to-fortune-how-ai-could-revolutionise-the-uks-innovation-economy/
In the competitive arena of global innovation, the UK has established itself as Europe's venture capital powerhouse, attracting £8 billion in investment in 2023 alone. Yet beneath this headline figure lies a troubling reality: the venture building process remains fundamentally broken. With 60% of UK startups failing within their first three years and a five-year survival rate hovering at just 42.4%, we must confront an uncomfortable truth – the traditional approach to building and scaling ventures is profoundly inefficient.
This analysis examines two critical systemic failures in the venture ecosystem: unacceptably high failure rates and the persistence of artisanal, ad hoc venture building methods in an era of unprecedented technological capability. Against this backdrop, we assess whether LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory represents a genuine paradigm shift or merely an incremental improvement to a fundamentally flawed model.
The venture capital model has long operated on a portfolio theory approach – invest in ten companies expecting seven or eight to fail, two to return capital, and one to deliver outsized returns that justify the entire portfolio. This approach, while accepted as standard practice, represents a staggering market inefficiency when examined objectively.
Research from Harvard Business School senior lecturer Shikhar Ghosh underscores the severity of this issue. His study of more than 2,000 venture-backed companies that raised at least $1 million from 2004 to 2010 found that:
This aligns with UK-specific data that reveals:
These statistics represent more than just failed businesses – they signify billions in misallocated capital, thousands of unrealised innovations, and profound opportunity costs for the UK economy. Each failure represents knowledge, talent, and resources that could have been deployed more effectively with proper systems and methodologies.
These statistics highlight an extraordinary level of failure that has become normalised in the venture building industry. Such failure rates would be considered unacceptable in most other sectors of the economy and represent a significant opportunity for improvement through more systematic approaches.
The second critical challenge lies in the persistently artisanal, ad hoc nature of venture building. Despite technological advancement transforming nearly every industry, the process of building startups remains largely unchanged from decades past – reliant on founder intuition, trial-and-error methodology, and highly variable approaches to market development.
This artisanal model creates fundamental limitations that perpetuate high failure rates:
Each founding team essentially "reinvents the wheel," learning venture-building lessons through costly firsthand experience rather than systematic knowledge transfer. The typical entrepreneur must personally discover optimal approaches to product development, go-to-market strategy, team building, and capital raising - often through expensive trial and error. This creates an inefficient knowledge ecosystem where lessons learned are rarely codified or transferred between ventures.
As noted in industry analyses, the venture capital industry "still places the greatest emphasis on financial analysis versus operational capabilities." While financial details are crucial, they "do not contain enough forward-looking information to understand, track, and govern the venture performance of today's ever-changing market brought on by operational challenges and swings." This myopic focus on financial metrics over operational excellence exacerbates the knowledge gaps in venture building.
Without standardised frameworks for venture development, quality control becomes highly variable. Investors must evaluate each startup using bespoke assessment metrics, creating information asymmetries and increasing due diligence costs. This inconsistency extends to operational practices, governance structures, and reporting standards – all contributing to market inefficiencies.
The absence of systematic approaches leads to suboptimal resource allocation. Founding teams typically over-invest in areas of founder expertise while neglecting critical business functions outside their experience. This creates imbalanced organisations that excel in certain dimensions while remaining dangerously underdeveloped in others.
Perhaps most critically, the artisanal model inherently limits scaling potential. With venture knowledge primarily housed in individual founders rather than systems and processes, organisations struggle to scale beyond the direct oversight capabilities of the founding team. This creates growth bottlenecks and governance challenges as ventures attempt to expand.
The UK venture capital market, while sophisticated by global standards, exhibits structural characteristics that exacerbate these challenges. Total venture capital investment in UK startups reached £8 billion in 2023, placing it as Europe's leading venture market with approximately 30% market share. However, this capital remains inefficiently deployed, with several structural factors constraining optimisation:
Investment remains heavily concentrated in London, which accounts for 51% of all venture deals. The concentration of VC firms is even more pronounced, with approximately 80% based in London. This geographic concentration creates resource asymmetries that limit innovation development in other regions while contributing to overheated valuations in prime markets.
The UK venture market shows particular strength in early-stage funding but demonstrates comparative weakness in growth and scale-up capital. This "missing middle" in the funding ecosystem contributes directly to the valley of death phenomenon, where promising ventures secure initial funding but struggle to access follow-on capital required for scale.
This scale-up gap is evidenced by the growing dominance of foreign investors in larger funding rounds:
This reliance on foreign capital creates vulnerability in the UK innovation ecosystem, with intellectual property, strategic decision-making, and ultimately economic benefits frequently flowing overseas rather than remaining in the UK economy.
Investment flows disproportionately to certain sectors – particularly application software (16%), SaaS (8%), cleantech (7%), and data provision (7%) - while other potentially profitable domains remain comparatively underfunded. This creates market inefficiencies where competition drives up valuations in favoured sectors while leaving potential opportunities underdeveloped in others.
Traditional venture capital typically provides financial capital but limited operational expertise. While the UK VC landscape has evolved to include more "value-add" investors, the artisanal nature of venture building means that operational support remains highly variable and often dependent on individual partner bandwidth rather than systematic methodologies.
Against this backdrop of persistent challenges and market inefficiencies, LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory represents a potential paradigm shift in venture development methodology. Rather than accepting the traditional artisanal model of startup building, the AI VentureFactory applies systematic methodology, technology automation, and standardised processes to fundamentally reshape venture creation and scaling.
The core innovation lies in the systematic application of the Innov@te methodology - a comprehensive seven-stage venture-building framework encompassing 49 distinct steps and hundreds of sub-steps. This methodology essentially codifies the venture-building process, transforming what has historically been tacit, founder-dependent knowledge into explicit, transferable systems.
LettsGroup claims that this systematic approach can double conventional success rates, achieving one successful venture (defined as worth $100M+) from every five companies, compared to the industry standard of one in ten and the corporate venture standard of one in fifteen or twenty.
Analysing this approach against the two systemic challenges identified:
LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory tackles the high failure rate problem through several mechanisms:
More fundamentally, the AI VentureFactory represents a shift from artisanal to systematic venture building:
LettsGroup's tiered subscription approach – offering Startup Lite (£1,599/month), Startup Ultra (£3,999/month), and Scale-up (£7,999/month) services - demonstrates a clear commercialisation strategy that aligns with different stages of the venture life cycle. This tiered approach provides accessibility for early-stage ventures while offering enhanced capabilities as ventures mature and their needs become more complex.
The AI VentureFactory also addresses a clear market need for systematic approaches to venture building. With increasing competition for venture funding and growing pressure on capital efficiency, ventures that can demonstrate systematic approaches to growth and risk mitigation are likely to gain advantages in fundraising and execution.
While the AI VentureFactory offers compelling advantages, several considerations warrant examination:
The standardised methodology must maintain sufficient flexibility to accommodate diverse business models and market conditions. Overly rigid frameworks risk constraining innovation or forcing ventures into suboptimal structures for their specific market contexts.
Industry experts have identified several critical operational difficulties that any systematic venture-building approach must address:
Successful implementation requires founder buy-in and discipline. The methodology's effectiveness depends on ventures faithfully executing prescribed processes rather than selectively implementing components while ignoring others. The cultural shift from entrepreneurial intuition to systematic methodology represents a significant adoption barrier.
If LettsGroup's claims of doubling venture success rates prove accurate, the aggregate impact on the UK innovation economy could be substantial:
The persistent challenges of high failure rates and artisanal venture-building approaches represent significant inefficiencies in the UK innovation economy. LettsGroup's AI VentureFactory offers a promising systematic alternative that directly addresses these fundamental limitations through structured methodology, technology enablement, and process standardisation.
While not without implementation challenges and requiring further validation at scale, the approach represents a potential step-change in how ventures are built and scaled. By transforming venture creation from an art to a science, the AI VentureFactory may contribute to a more efficient, productive innovation ecosystem with far-reaching economic implications.
For entrepreneurs navigating the challenging startup landscape, particularly those building technology ventures in capital-constrained environments, the systematic approach offers compelling advantages. By reducing unnecessary risks, optimising resource deployment, and providing structured pathways to growth, the AI VentureFactory addresses precisely the factors that cause most ventures to fail.
The true measure of this innovation will be demonstrated through longitudinal performance data. If LettsGroup can indeed double venture success rates while maintaining capital efficiency, it will represent not merely an incremental improvement but a fundamental reimagining of venture development - with implications that extend far beyond individual company outcomes to reshape the broader innovation economy.
As industry observers have noted, "saying, 'But this is how we've always done business' isn't sufficient for today's challenges. That's the old seat-of-the-pants model." In a world where up to 75% of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors, systematic approaches like the AI VentureFactory that establish specific objectives and apply reliable performance indicators may be the key to dramatically improving these dismal statistics and transforming the venture capital landscape.
This market analysis is based on data from the British Venture Capital Association (BVCA), publicly accessible market data and LettsGroup research.
LettsGroup HQ
In February LettsGroup launched its new V3 website designs, as well as further extending its AI VentureFactory capabilities. The team added the Startup Lite plan for pre-Seed and Seed stage ventures and those looking to start their VentureFactory journey. It is a streamlined, go-to-market focused offering. Now all 3 non-Enterprise plans can be purchased online. The team has also been working on a new 'Agents' Dashboard organised by function for release in March, as well as a bundle of pre-built 'Go To Market' auto-processes. The first being an AI-driven pre-Seed and Seed Business Plan process. Work has also started on an AI powered business plan-to-investor-deck system using Innov@te + Advanced-Reasoning-AI with the goal of reducing the lapsed time to build quality, investor-ready business plans and decks from 6 months to just 6 days.
LettsCore
LettsCore's final pre-beta release work continued with the integration of Stripe's payments platform, plus dedicated billing wallets for each registered user on LettsCore - managed centrally. This enables individuals and organisations to purchase subscription plans and top-ups to access the media blockchain and its API's. And it provides the infrastructure to manage subscription payments, including automated transfers for Solana credits used to add, update and amend content in LettsCore. This is the last pre-launch work, enabling users to effectively operate and monetise content atoms in our next generation distributed content management platform. To support this final work, the team also built an admin dashboard for internal users to oversee customers and payment flows. LettsCore's SaaS portal and full payments stack will have gone through final development and testing by the end of Q1 2025, ready for market launch in Q2. This nearly 3 year R&D project is coming to fruition. We believe it will be worth the wait.
LettsNews
Since launching in beta last month, LettsNews has evolved nicely based on user feedback. The team added and extended 'hints' and a guide system to help newcomers navigate features, while also developing an exciting new 'Promotion' tool that will let users share auto-distributed stories directly to their social media channels. This 'newsroom tech for everyone' is seeing good early adoption from both small businesses and independent journalists. Also, its mobile apps have been updated for faster speeds with better sync performance, quicker loading times, and a new "Offline Mode" for journalists on remote field work. The tech team is targeting finalising the "Promotion" feature and preparing its mobile apps for full release in the Apple and Google Play stores at the end of Q1.
LettsArt
LettsArt had an impressive acceleration in users and online galleries started with most of its key numbers doubling in the last 2 weeks. As we head towards 1,000 online art galleries powered by LettsArt, the team can start to look toward the future - developing LettsArt 2.5, and targeting advanced users including professional studios, independent gallerists and leading curators. This no-code AI platform helping sell art online better operates highly efficiently, to date comfortably supporting its rapid growth in artists, art collectors and gallery users without significant effort on support or patches. In February LettsArt also updated back end LLM's for more advanced AI reasoning to auto-generate curator quality artwork descriptions and art posts.
LettsSafari
LettsSafari subscribers continued to grow as its influencer-heavy early adopters began to spread the word more widely, while the team also launched a broad Instagram campaign. Some of the latest updates from its rewilding safari parks included 'A day in the life of a LettsSafari fox' and 'A winter wildlife's photo shoot' thanks to the work of the amazing wildlife photographers at LettsSafari. LettsSafari's team will be hosting a day for influencers and rewilding and wildlife experts in Exeter on Saturday June 14. Subscribe today to get your private, VIP invitation.
Other LettsGroup Ventures
We highlight just a few of our ventures in each monthly edition of The LettsGroup NewsFlash. To explore other LettsGroup ventures go to LettsGroup/ventures.
