Company: Techster
Location: London
Posted: May 1st, 2026
Co-Founder | Pre-Seed Fintech | Equity Only | Manchester / Remote
I'm building Techster. The simple version: independent electronics retailers sell a device, then lose the customer at upgrade to Amazon, Currys, or a carrier. Every time. Structurally, inevitably, by design — because the upgrade infrastructure was built by the people who benefit from that leak. Techster closes it. Not with loyalty points or a better app. With infrastructure that makes switching away from your retailer genuinely costly from the moment you buy. The kind of switching cost that carriers and manufacturers have enjoyed for years, finally available to the independents. We're the good guys in this story. That matters to me.
I've spent 17 years in fintech and quantitative risk. I've built the model from first principles — capital structure, cycle economics, network effects, the moat. It holds up. What I haven't done is raise a round, and I don't have a room full of investor relationships to call on. I know what I am. That's the gap.
Someone who has exited. You've built something real, raised money for it, and seen it through. You want to do it again, work hard, and get to an exit. That's the plan.
This is a fintech business, not a software company. The product is a financial structure — leasing, capital recycling, device economics across a 24 month cycle. You need to be comfortable in that world. Ex-investment banking, capital markets, fintech — somewhere in that space. You understand how money moves, how facilities get structured, and what investors in this category are actually looking for.
The practicalities matter as much as the vision. Unit economics, capital structure, GTM sequencing — these aren't slides we hand to an analyst. They're things we both need to have completely down, and be able to defend in a room. I can handle serious spreadsheets. I need a partner who can too — someone who is as comfortable stress testing assumptions as they are opening doors. If your eyes glaze over at a detailed financial model, this isn't the right fit.
The ambition is category level. Stripe owns payment infrastructure. Klarna owns checkout credit. Visa owns the network. Nobody owns device upgrade infrastructure for independent retail. That's the space Techster is building into. If that framing makes immediate sense to you, good. If it needs explaining, this probably isn't the right fit.
I have an investment thesis and I believe it's right. But I'm looking for someone visionary enough to look at what I've built and see further than I currently can. Someone disruptive by instinct, not by habit. Someone who can take the foundation — and it is a solid foundation — and challenge it, extend it, and take it somewhere I haven't thought of yet. That's not a gap in the model. That's what a real partnership looks like.
I'm a fairly philosophical person and I want a partner who thinks the same way. If you've read Taleb you'll recognise what's happening in independent retail immediately — a system that looks stable, optimised for first purchase, but fragile by design. The upgrade moment is where that fragility shows. Techster changes the structure, not just the surface.
I want someone who thinks at that level but can also execute. I'm an ideas person. I need someone who can take an idea, make some calls, open some doors, and turn it into something concrete. Capable of working independently but accessible — happy to get on a call and get things done. The best partnerships work because the two people are genuinely different. I think we'd be genuinely different.
This is early stage. There's real work to do and not everything is in place yet. But the model is rigorous, the thesis is sound, and the opportunity is large. If you want to get in at the beginning of something with category-level ambition, raise a round, build it properly, and exit — read up on Techster first and then reach out.
What’s On Offer
Co-founder equity. This is a partnership, not a hire.
Send me a message. Tell me what you built, what happened to it, and what it is about this that caught your attention. That’s enough to start.
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