What does it take to turn early-stage promise into a company built for serious scale?

Join Will Dufton, Partner at Giant Ventures, for a fireside chat exploring the road from early-stage startup to growth, and what investors expect to see along the way.

With investing experience spanning Atomico, OMERS Ventures and now Giant Ventures, Will has backed companies from early stage through to Series B+ and growth. In this session, we’ll unpack the milestones that matter as companies scale, how investor expectations change at each stage, and what separates promising startups from those that successfully break through to growth.

Key takeaways

  • The leap to growth: what needs to change as a startup moves beyond the early stage

  • What growth investors actually look for: the signals that turn interest into conviction

  • Where promising companies get stuck: the common gaps that become harder to ignore at Series B+

  • Raising at growth stage: how the investor conversation changes as rounds get bigger

  • Building ahead of the round: what founders should have in place before they need growth capital

​Who should attend

This event is designed for:

  • Startup founders and C-suite (pre-seed to growth stage)

  • Early-stage investors and angels

Spaces are limited to keep the conversation and networking high quality.

​​​Agenda

6:30pm: Welcome drinks

7pm: Warm welcome from Novabook

7:10pm: Fireside chat with Will Dufton

8pm: Networking over drinks & canapés

9pm: Event close

​Speaker

Will DuftonPartner, Giant Ventures

Giant Ventures is a venture capital firm backing ambitious founders using frontier technology to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges. Investing from first cheque through to growth, Giant focuses on companies reimagining foundational systems including energy, industry, healthcare, biology, finance and the future of work.

Will also writes Observations, his weekly newsletter sharing the most interesting things he learns through his work and travels as a growth investor in frontier technologies.

​Hosted by

Stephen WilksCo-founder and CEO, Novabook

Novabook is the accountant for startups. We give founders access to the best UK accountants to handle all your payroll, book-keeping, and accounting, and we have a team based in London that you can call anytime. Alongside working with our wonderful team, we have built a software platform to automate all of the admin that we hated as founders. Think automatic invoice ingestion, receipt capture and the like. We aim to save founders time and money whilst providing the best accounting service to UK businesses.

Please note: By registering for this event, you agree to be added to Novabook's mailing list to keep you in the loop with future events. We never spam.