Alex Mayall | Anthemis
Venture Wishlist shares ideas and themes VCs want to fund. Brought to you by Purpose Built venture studio.
Alex Mayall is an Investment Principal at Anthemis Group, an early stage investment platform with over 15 years’ experience. Anthemis manages ~$1billion in assets and typically leads seed rounds ( $1-2 million first checks) across the US and Europe. Its portfolio includes early investments in Carta, Betterment, eToro and Tide.
Alex’s venture wishlist
🤖 AI-Native Vertical Integration: Re-building conventional businesses from scratch with AI at the core (e.g., insurance brokerages) to capture both margin expansion and faster growth.
🛍️ Agentic E-Commerce Rails: Infrastructure that lets LLM agents query live stock & dynamic prices, then transact on behalf of users, effectively “rebundling” online retail.
🏠 Full-Stack Home-Buying Concierge: A vertically-integrated service that combines buyer’s agent, mortgage broking, conveyancing, surveys, moving logistics and utility switch-over in one flow.
💸 Autonomous Personal Finance: Hands-off AI that optimises day-to-day money (cards, cash-management, savings, investments) and executes money moves automatically.
🔓 Agent-to-Bank Open Finance: Interfaces that welcome browser-automation agents (think MCP/A2A endpoints or AI-friendly front-ends) so institutions stay discoverable and transactable without waiting for new Open Finance regulation.
🍛 Fast-Casual Indian Chain (fun one): A UK-wide grab-and-go curry brand, Leon-style, aimed at office workers who want reliable chicken tikka for £8.50 at lunch.
Other insights
🎯 Lead at Seed Still Differentiates: Many micro-funds can only “participate”; writing the term sheet at seed wins allocation and goodwill.
📍 UK Remains Fintech’s Best Launchpad: Despite some recent grumbles, the FCA sandbox, unified regulation and deep talent pool keep London the go-to jurisdiction.
🪄 Deep, “Boring” Fintech Pays Off: Wonky infra plays like treasury management looked dull…until rising rates & SVB’s collapse turned TreasurySpring into a hot commodity.
🦾 Quiet AI > Loud AI: Sometimes the non-consensus move is using AI without pitching it; let enterprise value, not buzzwords, do the talking.
🚧 Sceptical on Top-Down Open Finance: A decade on, mandated APIs still drag; permissionless agent automation may leapfrog regulatory efforts and reach true “open finance” faster.
Full Interview
So we usually start with an overview of the fund and the strategy.
Anthemis Group was founded in 2010 by Amy Nauiokas and Sean Park, originally investing the founders' own money from balance sheet capital into companies that would later be known as fintech companies, but that term didn’t exist yet.
Some of the early investments include Carta, The Climate Corporation, eToro, and Currency Cloud - early examples of familiar fintech products. We also invested in Betterment, which was the first robo-advisor, and Simple Bank, the first mobile banking app.
As of today, we're on our third early-stage fund. In 2016, we launched as a venture capital firm, investing third party capital, guided by a thesis closely aligned with our original focus: transforming financial services. Like most fintech investors, that space has expanded into many verticals through embedding, APIs, and so on.
Nowadays, we take a generalist approach, but make investments where we can be informed by our experience in regulated markets, with a focus around reshaping our global economy.
Geographically and stage-wise, we’re about 50/50 US and Europe. Within Europe, there's more of a focus on the UK, but we do invest outside the UK as well. Our third fund is seed-focused – very much investing at the seed stage. We like to lead and sit on boards. So we’re lead investors, which I think a lot of people are happy to hear when they pick up the phone. And yeah, we get good reviews from our founders on that.
So why do you think being a lead is important at that stage?
When you're a lead investor and you're talking with a company about how their round is going, a common refrain is, "Well, we have all the capital circled from participants, but we're just waiting for a lead."
We know that when we step into a room as a lead, you're automatically wanted – unless it's a very competitive deal. It's surprising, at the seed stage, when there are a tremendous number of emerging managers and smaller AUM funds who, through no fault of their own – it's just a function of fund size – can only participate and not lead.
To step in and be able to say, "Okay, we can lead this round and give you a term sheet," it's a nice position to be in. And it's oddly differentiating.
What's the last investment that you made that you can talk about?
We invested in a company called Cariqa. It's a German company involved in electric car charging payments.
Despite it being a relatively novel industry – charging for electric cars sounds modern and up to date – it has all the characteristics of an old-school industry. There are middlemen that need cutting out, older processes, and things that aren’t running as digitally as you'd imagine. Everything digital feels previous-generation – slow and outdated.
What Cariqa is doing is selling a payments experience to consumers. When they roll up to an EV charging terminal, if it's Cariqa-managed, they can use Cariqa to make the payment directly to the charging provider.
On the charge provider end, Carica enables dynamic pricing – adjusting charges based on energy cost, demand, and other factors. On the consumer end, it can surface the best price pumps in their area.
That’s an example of the applied fintech we're doing out of that fund – payments meets another vertical, in this case, electric cars.
Any non-consensus beliefs that you think drive your investing?
As a fund, there are a number of places where, because we know a lot about financial services, we can get involved in really nerdy, boring, and intricate things that I think aren't as flashy to other VCs.
For example, in our second fund, we invested in a company called TreasurySpring that does very interesting things with treasury management. We made that investment prior to the rise in interest rates and prior to the Silicon Valley Bank crisis.
So when all of that happened in that time window, the importance of good treasury management – specifically, treasury management not directly exposed to banks – became super important. We had made that investment as a very wonkish fintech play, and then suddenly:
A) the product became totally in demand, and
B) a lot of other VCs woke up to the idea of that being an interesting, investable area.
It did very well and raised a strong late Series A-type round from Balderton, a leading investor here in Europe.
They do treasury, but not with banks?
Yeah, they have a bunch of different money market products. We encourage our portfolio companies to use it immediately. They let you ladder tenors in a way that releases capital over time. So you put a chunk in, and then it comes out as you need it.
Oh, you put your startups on an allowance.
Sure. And in return, they get market-beating rates and a great product that’s robust against wacky things going on.
I think what you’re saying is that if you understand how things work and go deep, you can uncover opportunities.
Opportunity areas that might otherwise not be served or recognized by generalists.
Well, here’s a wonky question. I don’t know if you study this, but where do you think is the best jurisdiction for fintech, since you invest across a lot of different jurisdictions?
Firstly, it depends on what type of thing you're doing. There's a lot of interesting insurance stuff where the jurisdiction is Bermuda.
But I would say – and this is self-tooting or possibly patriotic, borderline nationalist – but if you look at Nikolai from Revolut, he had his pick of jurisdictions, and when Revolut was founded, he chose London. A lot of that was due to the FCA, which is our equivalent of the SEC – or maybe the other one, but you know what I mean.
Well, that's actually why it's better – fewer regulators, I think.
Sure. Or they’re unified into one. We also have the PRA – the Prudential Regulation Authority, though.
But still fewer.
Sure. But it’s not just the number – it’s also that, at the time, they had what they called the innovation sandbox.
It was a very collaborative place where small companies could play around with the limits of financial regulation before becoming too large for a misstep to be incredibly damaging. Then, once the regulator was comfortable, they could scale.
At the time, the FCA had a world-leading quality. It has slipped recently, and some people have concerns about its performance now. Everyone has concerns about their own regulator. But one thing that gets pointed out is that it used to be fantastic and now it's slightly less fantastic.
Still, I think the UK is – at least in Europe – the best place to set up a fintech company. Not least because of the talent and the concentration.
We have offices in New York, and I’d say if you’re picking East Coast vs. West Coast for fintech, it’s still consensus – but correct – to choose the place with the giant finance hub. Usually, that’s the right way to go.
There are people who’ll tell you there are interesting things happening in Dubai, and it’s great there’s a burgeoning community there. I know a lot of Sub-Saharan African deals have a Dubai topco.
But if you have your pick of the globe, base case: I’d go for the UK. If you need a market as large as the US, go for the US. Elsewhere – if you're doing credit cards, go to Brazil or somewhere with the right opportunity. If you're doing insurance, do Bermuda.
But all else being equal, I'm still a UK supporter on this.
Any themes you're excited about these days?
Our inbox is swamped with AI use cases, and that's going to come up in a lot of my wishlist. Enterprise use cases like AI compliance and AI workflows are very common and interesting.
The difficult part is picking the winner. It's easy for our LPs – many of whom are financial institutions – to come to us and say, "Hey, can you tell us about the AI onboarding companies out there at the moment?" And we're very happy to tell them all about those. But there's a difference between a client-vendor relationship and an investor-startup relationship. Trying to pick which one out of the ten doing that is going to win is much harder than onboarding one as a vendor.
Still, a very interesting theme, and it's going to create a lot of change in the financial industry. I’ve found it’s almost like the negative space of a theme. My wish list is filled with AI, but some of the most interesting conversations with founders right now are almost the anti-theme.
If you're starting a non-AI startup in 2025, you've probably got a fantastic reason for doing that. Or it's very binary – it either means you haven’t thought about it at all or you really, really have. Some of the best conversations we've had have been pretty non-AI focused because there's something very interesting going on elsewhere that not many people are paying attention to. I like the sort of inherent alpha to the non-AI stuff at the moment, even though there's a huge tidal wave of lucrative innovation happening in AI of course.
You're saying that you’re interested if people really have thought about a problem, understand a problem, and aren't just going where they think the current trend is or what everyone else is talking about?
Yeah, there's a selection effect to it. It almost means you can kind of switch your brain off. There are people who are very good at identifying well-thought-through innovation in a normal year – but in 2025, you can identify it with a pretty strong hit rate if all you have to do is go, are they doing something in AI or not? And if it's not in AI, then you can rely on that maxim.
That's interesting. To some extent, it feels like AI should be used in almost every startup, but that doesn't make it an AI startup.
Sure.
Sometimes there's this impulse – founders wanting to follow the money, seeing that AI is getting a lot of VC – thinking, "Oh, I have to position my thing as being AI," even if it's mostly not. Just throwing AI on top as a way of dressing it up.
Yeah, but don't you think it's such a baller move in the face of that trend to just say it's not even going to be on the deck? Yeah, we're going to use it – whatever, no big deal – we'll use it. It's just the next generation of software. We're a software company. But here's our problem, what we're going after, and here's the solution. Now, it's not to say there isn't actually a good opportunity in the whole next-generation thing – where you're using the technology. That’s kind of a different thing. But if you're just going after something that happens to use AI, then yeah, maybe it's non-consensus not to frame it with AI at all – not even to have the slide. But you've got to be able to pull it off.
So you said you have a wishlist – I want to hear about it.
Yeah. Okay. So I do have five – and then I have a fun one.
A fun one that’s kind of not in tech, and really not venture fundable, but I think it’s a massive market gap.
Okay, the first one touches on what we just said. I’ve completely bought the Slow Ventures Kool-Aid on AI-native versions of normal companies.
There was a lot of chatter about this last summer on the West Coast – like, is this the time to start conventional businesses from scratch, but in an AI-native way?
We’ve seen a couple of examples in the financial services ecosystem – some here in London, some in New York – and I do think there’s something to that.
In the face of insourcing, where people are developing their own software, and with software development in general being cheaper and faster to outsource, maybe the place to capture value is not in selling software to the people doing the thing, but in doing the thing better and faster because you’re using AI.
Can you give an example that you think is successful – or at least one you're excited about?
There's a company in the UK right now called Meshed, and they are trying to be the best insurance broker in the world.
One of the founders had previously started an insurance brokerage – which is great experience to apply here – and another was working at a company developing software in the insurance space.
I had a conversation with them, and they really evangelized this idea to me. I think I was already on the edge of buying into it, and then I totally did.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff to be done – without giving away too much of their secret sauce – but brokers have a lot of leads coming in. Being able to convert leads quickly, move on to the next one, and take the commission – there’s a lot of interesting opportunity there.
It’s all done by email as well, so there’s a lot of interesting software you could build and use – or build and sell – because there’s someone doing the selling too. There are both players in the space right now.
There’s a lot of advantage that can be driven directly to the top line – not just cost reduction – by being able to quickly respond to emails, scan large PDFs, respond with quotes, and generate relevant text.
So yeah, very interesting in the insurance space – that type of thing. Slow Ventures will also tell you that you should do it with parking lots.
They call it a Growth Buyout?
I think that’s where you write software and you buy the customer. And actually, this is a bit of the thesis I think applied when people were doing the Amazon e-commerce roll-up companies.
It was almost like – you couldn’t sell software to e-commerce vendors because they were too small, too disparate, or too hard to sell into. So, just buy them and force them to use the software by owning them.
That’s kind of the same. Really, it’s the philosophy of rollups in general. But I think maybe the power of software has reached such a point that there’s a tipping point where it becomes the natural thing to do.
I think a lot of rollups traditionally use cost savings, but mainly were about multiple expansion by scale. The difference now from what Slow and others are arguing is that not only are you increasing margins, but as you said, you can grow faster if you identify ways to serve customers better.
And it’s also not just the traditional approach of borrowing money and relying on financial leverage to make equity returns – if it all works out.
Yeah.
So what’s next on the list?
Thinking a lot about – this is very buzzword-y – but agentic e-commerce.
If I break this down, it’s like: I want to be able to buy something through ChatGPT, but I kind of don’t want OpenAI to become Amazon.
There needs to be infrastructure that allows purchases within LLM interactions once they can access the internet.
So you kind of want it to be yours. You’re saying, like, it’s your agent that goes shopping for you, right?
Well, there are two sides to it. You can have your agent go shopping for you, but I actually think OpenAI and the labs are probably going to provide the best personal agents.
I think a lot of the issue is actually on the vendor side. We've been looking at companies in this space, so some of this is straight from their playbook.
If you're an e-commerce store online, you need to have your website optimized for not rejecting crawler bots, and you also need to make sure your MCP is built – or whatever your interface is – for AIs to access up-to-date stock information and pricing.
This is a much harder problem than you might think. There are whole companies, like Farfetch, that have been built around aggregating stock information and sitting on top of e-commerce providers.
It's more than just a new generation of Shopify that makes you AI-compatible. Aggregating all this data – and if you're the infrastructure provider – puts you in a really interesting place. You can start doing rankings, and you become a semi-publisher.
If I go out and say, “I'm looking for blue shoes,” and the AI hits the platform that has everything aggregated, it says, “This guy wants blue shoes, what have you got?” That first set of results becomes almost like Google’s splash page. You’re in a powerful position.
I've been waiting for someone to rebundle e-commerce. First, there was the bundle – Amazon. Then came unbundling with Shopify. Who’s going to bring it all back together again?
I think you need a platform shift for that to happen. It’s probably going to come from some kind of infrastructure provider in the agentic e-commerce space. But it’s really, really hard, because it’s a lot of data to handle and get right.
The thing I’ve been looking for is someone to aggregate local inventory. If I want to buy something locally, how do I know what’s there without having to call around or go there physically?
One of my main hobbies is cocktails, and I have a hit list in my head. If I’m looking for a specific spirit, I’ll think: is it at my local corner store? No, because they’ve only got really basic stuff.
Okay, then is it at this independent provider? I’ll check there. If it’s not, I’ll go to the slightly larger specialist. And if they don’t have it, then I’ll buy online.
I’ve got this process, and you’re right – it would be nice to know. The corner store is probably never going to convert to that kind of system, but the slightly more advanced shops, the ones already using something like WooCommerce to manage their inventory – it would be nice to know what they have.
I thought that would be coming as more physical retail adopts Shopify. They’re making inroads there, so that might expose some of that inventory. So that's two, right? What's next?
So three: I’ve been looking for someone to do what I call an end run on housing.
In the US – you have buyer’s agents who represent you while you’re trying to purchase a home.
In the UK, you’re on your own. Only the wealthy have buyer’s agents. You're interfacing with the seller’s agent – called the estate agent, rather than real estate agent.
You’re dealing with the seller’s estate agent, going through a mortgage broker, who then connects you to a mortgage provider. Conveyancing lawyers are separate. There are all these different providers.
It’s clearly very hard to do, but I want to see somebody have the guts to say:
“We're going to do all of it. We’ll be your buyer’s agent. We’ll interact with the estate agent for you. We’ll find the right home, facilitate viewings, optimize the price negotiation. We’ll connect you with mortgage providers – or maybe we are the mortgage provider. We’ll know the lawyers – or be the lawyers – for conveyancing. And maybe we’ll own a logistics company for moving you in. We’ll automate your utility transfers to the new address.”
The only thing they probably won’t be able to do is change your address on all your subscriptions and cards – but now that I think about it, I’ve got an idea for that too.
It would be great if more of these services were the same company so I’m not getting referred from one to another, with each taking a slice of the pie.
It could be cheaper, smoother, and I wouldn’t have to deal with strangers over email that I have to implicitly trust to handle critical parts of the process.
I'm curious about that. I would think it’s easier to trust someone to be the mortgage broker than to say, “You're my buyer’s agent, and you're also going to be my lender.” I could see wanting to keep the lender separate.
You want to keep the lenders separate, so you're getting bids from multiple lenders?
Yeah, you’d want to see that.
I remember when I went through a mortgage broker, he said, “There’s only one, and it’s these guys.” You never know when mortgage brokers are or aren’t getting a kickback from the provider.
I thought that’s how they made money.
Well, the only alternative is captive agents who only have one provider to talk about anyway. So, yeah, that’s difficult.
I’m still annoyed that there are separate providers who do the survey of the house. That’s a whole other thing. The lawyer says, “Here’s the survey provider.” Why doesn’t the law firm have a surveyor? It’s insane.
More verticalization inside real estate. There are people who try this now and again, but there needs to be someone who’s a very seasoned entrepreneur – someone who can walk into the top firms and pull together £30 million just because of who they are and say, “Here’s what I’m going to do.”
Because I think it requires substantial capital to fund and start five companies at the same time and pull them all together in one go. Obviously, you can start in one place and build out from there – but they never do. They always get comfortable in their niche.
Is this from personal experience?
A little bit. But also from one of our portfolio companies that touches on e-commerce. They bought their fulfillment warehouse, and it added some percentage to their gross margin.
And I was like – you can just do that? You can just verticalize like that and get a better margin? It really set me thinking: what has a massively fragmented supply chain that could be verticalized?
What I landed on – from personal experience buying a house – was: wow, I’ve spoken to seven or eight different entities just to buy this house. Surely that’s one or two too many. Maybe I should only have to deal with one or two at all.
All right. So now we're up to number four.
Four. And I think this is an area where I can speak with some amount of certainty. Out of our fund, we really want to do a fully automated personal finance company this fund cycle, because we think the technology is there to do it.
We've spoken to a couple of firms in the space – really applying an AI brain to optimizing personal finances, to just do the right and smart thing for you.
And this is across the board? So it's not just cash flow – you’re talking about investing as well? What scope are you thinking?
Yeah, so there are certainly things you can do to make transactional products – like credit cards, debit cards, and maybe savings accounts – work properly for you. I think that’s a whole space to conquer on its own.
We know from talking to startups working in this area that a lot of people just get that wrong straight up.
And then there’s the broader personal finance world – actually, this touches on the next one – but there’s this whole open finance space, which includes every other financial product. That’s really hard and gnarly because they’re all so different. You've got contracts, different providers, and a lot of complexity to plug into.
Still, I think there’s a baseline of automated management that can be done. People have been trying to do this for a while – things like sweeping accounts, moving money into the right places, salary splitters.
We were invested in a company called Qapital that had a salary splitter product. We think the time is right for that kind of aggressive hands-off automation in this space.
The hard part is incentive alignment. You could sell this software into banks and have them automate everything, but if you sell the same software into another bank, the two might not cooperate. Banks don’t necessarily want to authorize capital outflows to another bank just because the software they’re paying for told them to – especially if they like keeping those deposits for yield.
So maybe it has to be B2C – which is very untrendy at the moment. Then you have to deal with marketing, outbound sales, and all of that.
And if it is B2C, then you run into the issue we talked about with mortgage brokers: how do you ensure the autonomous engine isn’t making biased decisions – like putting your money into a suboptimal savings account because of a hidden kickback?
That’s the issue to solve. But if there’s a way to do that, I think you can unlock this space without having to obsess over incentives.
Or maybe consumers just absorb the misalignment, because they’re already non-optimal. Like, maybe it’s not that bad to be 0.1% off on your savings yield if the system is doing everything else right. Maybe that’s a Pareto-optimal outcome – you eat the misalignment just to get to “good” and miss “perfect.”
You mentioned Betterment earlier – it was an earlier fund investment. That seems like it’s roughly in this neighborhood.
Yeah, it’s getting there. Definitely.
So what do you think you can learn from that case as you think about the next generation?
I think it’s about starting points. Wealth management companies – there’s a reason we haven’t done too many AUM businesses at Anthemis.
Our experience from Betterment is that they’re difficult to pull off because AUM revenues are tough – they’re backloaded.
If the AUM of a consumer increases over time, then you're making most of your revenue at the end of the customer’s lifetime value rather than the beginning. So the payback periods are super long.
That’s why I mentioned transactional products like cards. Wealth is tough because, first, not everyone uses wealth management services.
Yeah, I’m sure you do. I actually don’t at the moment – but I would if I were more on top of things.
Whereas credit and debit cards are relatively universal. Some people work entirely in the cash economy, and that’s a whole separate set of products.
But entry points matter. If you're going to build a vertically integrated personal finance company where you control everything, where you start is really important.
You can get stuck in a niche, or it can be hard to scale your customer count from a particular starting point. Some businesses are also just harder to operate than others.
That said, I’m not that close to the Betterment case, since it was done long before I joined Anthemis.
Fair enough. So you have two more.
Yes. Well, I have one more serious one, and then you can have my fun one.
I actually don’t believe in open finance. This is something I’ll be posting a longer-form blog about.
There was this whole wave of open banking, which meant API access to banks. First it was just read access, then write access – like initiating transactions. Now, at least in Europe, people are trying to do QR code-based bank-to-bank transactions in real life, similar to what Line Pay and WeChat Pay do.
That seems to be semi-functional via the EU’s Payment Services Directive 2, which mandated that banks provide API access to certain functions in their transactional accounts.
Now they're coming out with Payment Services Directive 3 – ten years after PSD2 was first initiated – because there were problems. Banks were being facetious and not providing the full functionality they were supposed to in those open APIs.
So it's already been a 10+ year battle to get open banking off the ground and get everyone bought in.
When people come along – well-meaning fintech speakers or consultants – and say, “The next thing is open finance and everything’s going to be open,” it’s like...
First of all, open banking has been incredibly difficult to build. Now imagine extending that to wealth managers, insurers, lenders – every other part of finance. Private placement agents, capital markets – you name it.
To expose all of that, and to mandate open functionality for each of those buckets, means multiplying the difficulty of open banking across all of them. So conservatively, it's five times harder than something that has already taken 10 to 15 years to even partly accomplish.
Now, I’m going somewhere with this.
Along comes agentic technology – web crawling, browser automation, and current AI use cases.
Suddenly, if I can automate a browser, I can theoretically navigate through the existing websites of banks and other financial institutions.
You don’t need them to put up an API – as long as they have a website.
You can hit the private APIs via their web UI. Of course, you need the right consents and passwords. But if you can handle password management at the LLM management layer, that becomes very interesting.
Then you’ve got people permissionlessly doing the open finance thing. What banks are going to have to get their heads around – and this is the same with the agentic e-commerce stuff – is that it's going to be very hard to resist this.
Either other people are going to get the business if you don’t buy into it and make it more frictionless, or you do buy into it and make it easier for these types of agents to interact with you.
What I’m interested in is – either via MCP or A2A – agent-to-bank front ends for banking services. So when these pseudo-open finance interactions happen, you can actually allow for the opening of accounts and other actions via an agent, rather than things breaking or defaulting to just a static product overview that requires the user to go to the website themselves.
There are various levels of autonomy here.
Level one is: when an agent hits your website, do you instantly flip – based on browser headers – into a more technical version that strips out images and difficult UI? A version that an AI can simply read and parse?
Because you can give a huge list – maybe not a thousand pages, but close – to an AI, and it can ingest it. For a human, scrolling forever through every product and option is difficult.
Level two is: you have proper structured services that AIs can hit via new protocols – MCP, A2A, or whatever else comes along – and actually build around that.
So, stuff in the agent-to-bank open finance space, outside of just transactional banking, would be super interesting.
It’s probably a very difficult enterprise sell, but I think there are inroads here.
And the benefit to the financial institution for buying this software is, that over time it’ll be demanded by current customers and potential ones.
It’s going to be happening anyway. If your competition does it, they’re more likely to be discovered by the AI, and those customers are more likely to convert via the AI.
The theory is that it’s the next interface. If you didn’t have a website, or didn’t have a mobile experience, now if you don’t have an agent experience, you’re going to miss out on customers.
Yeah. They just won’t be surfaced through the channel people are looking in. Or they will – but the experience will suck.
I can’t wait to hear what this fun one is.
I've been picking up on this a lot – there’s no fast casual Indian place. No private equity-backed, reliable, office-worker-slop food that’s Indian-themed in the UK.
You’ve got Coco di Mama, which is Italian – you go in, there's a screen, you tap your name in, someone calls “Alexander,” and you grab your pasta and go.
You've got Itsu, which is Pan Asian – Japanese. Leon, another good chain. These are all reliable lunch spots in the UK.
You’d think, with our cultural heritage and with who lives in London, there’d be a unified Indian brand where I can get a reliable chicken tikka masala for £8.50, ordered off a touchscreen, from a recognizable, private equity-backed brand – optimized specifically for office workers to get their food at lunchtime.
How does that not exist? I agree with you.
I'm completely out of my mind that this doesn’t exist. And it’s fine – I can go to independent Indian places – but usually they’re optimized for you to sit down.
This is a problem I have with a lot of so-called street food restaurants: they’re optimized for dine-in, but you're supposed to be street food. “Street food restaurant” is an oxymoron.
Or you’ve got to discover them – there’s a discoverability problem.
Whereas I can be anywhere, walk into Leon, and I know exactly what the food’s going to be like. It’s about having the overarching brand. There is no overarching Indian fast-casual brand in the UK.
I would have thought – because it’s London – it would exist. But it doesn’t, and it drives me crazy. So somebody, please, start the fast casual Indian.
Because everyone loves their local place that they already found, or –
No, no. Nobody goes to the local Indian place for an office lunch. There needs to be a unified office lunch option.
The traditional Indian place is optimized for evening service and delivery – not for square, folded bags and self-service checkouts.