About Us
Horseplay Ventures
We set up Horseplay Ventures because, to put it bluntly - we love the startup world, and we love founding companies.
We want to elevate the startup community to come up with the next best thing, all while bringing together the brightest new businesses and founders with the biggest and best network of vetted Angel Investors in the UK and beyond.
But we also want to have some fun while we do it. Our own startup journey was a rollercoaster, and born from a tonne of hard work, tears and a dash of luck here and there, eventually growing our simple idea into a multi-million pound exit. We want to be there on the next rollercoaster rides alongside all our founders, helping them, and our investors, achieve life-changing exits.
We are Horseplay Ventures.
DesignMyNight
Started in December 2010, we set out to disrupt the bar and restaurant online discovery scene in London.
After a few years organically growing the site, we took on £500K of angel investment and pivoted to become a B2B software company too.
We built a reservations platform, Collins; an event ticketing platform, Tonic; and an e-vouchering platform, Soda.
Over the next 5 years we grew all arms of the business, attracting over 250 million page views on DesignMyNight, over £6m worth of ARR for the software arm and £200m transactional revenue.
We grew the business to 65 employees without further investment and had a successful exit in November 2017 for over £25 million to a leading UK software company.
Nick has a passion for languages, brand building, sales and marketing…and Tottenham Hotspur. He was one half of the DesignMyNight founding team and led the software sales and marketing effort.
Andrew loves building brand strategies and getting underneath the figures. You’ll find him either on Excel or at Fratton Park. The other half of the DesignMyNight founding team, he led the product, strategy and finance effort.
All Rights Reserved Horseplay Ventures