At Form, we invest across regulated markets of all kinds: from centuries-old sectors such as financial services and healthcare, to new markets like carbon removal and cultivated meat. Veterinary care is not a sector we have backed before, but it is a market that has increasingly attracted our attention.

Over the last decade, veterinary spending has risen dramatically. UK pet owners spent £1.1bn on veterinary services in 2005; by 2023 that figure had reached £6.7bn. At the same time, the sector has seen extensive consolidation by corporate groups and private equity investors, prompting a Competition and Markets Authority market investigation into pricing, transparency and consumer outcomes.

In our view, these developments stem from two structural features of the market.

First, veterinary pricing remains unusually opaque. Pet owners often have little visibility into costs until they are already committed to treatment. Parts of the value chain command remarkable prices – like prescriptions, which are often charged at £40+ before the price of the medicine itself is factored in.

Second, veterinary regulation is comparatively light-touch. Vets themselves are regulated professionals, but veterinary practices are not regulated in the same way that human healthcare providers are. Combined with inelastic demand and limited price transparency, this has created an environment in which consolidation has been an exceptionally effective route to building profitable businesses.

We think this creates an opportunity for a fundamentally different model: one that is transparently aligned with the interests of pets and their owners.

Enter Snoots.

Snoots is the first members-only veterinary provider offering unlimited primary care for a flat monthly fee. While many veterinary groups advertise subscription products, these often function as customer-acquisition tools, with margins ultimately generated through upselling additional services.

Snoots takes a different approach, most similar to how Costco is counter-positioned in the retail sector. By taking most of its economics through a single, flat membership fee, Snoots can focus relentlessly on delivering value once customers are inside the door. The incentives are clear and transparent. Success comes from retaining happy members, not from maximising revenue on individual visits, tests or prescriptions.

That alignment matters. Veterinary care works best when owners seek advice early and often, rather than delaying treatment because of uncertainty over cost – and where the vets themselves are incentivised to keep pets healthy, rather than deal with the sick.

There will always be customers who prefer a premium experience, or the flexibility of paying visit by visit. But we believe the popularity of universal healthcare systems reflects a deeper consumer preference: people value predictability, ease-of-access and knowing they are aligned with their practitioner, when it comes to dealing with their health. We believe those preferences will also apply to pet care. Snoots is by far the closest a vet business has come to delivering genuinely universal primary care and diagnostics for pets.

The traction speaks for itself. Snoots has already served over 8,000 pets across six clinics in London and is opening its first US location this week

Just as importantly, Jonathan is exactly the kind of founder we love backing: deeply mission-driven, with years spent immersed in the category through senior roles at Bark and Pawp. He understands both the shortcomings of the current system and the opportunity to build something better – and he’s the type of leader that we would quit our jobs to work for.

We’re delighted to be doubling down on Snoots alongside Westbound, Vinyl, Jump Capital, and the rest of the investor group, and we’re excited to support Jonathan and the team as they build the future of vet care. And if you’re interested in using the best service in vet care, go to snootsvet.com in the UK, or joinsnoots.com in the US.

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A key part of the AI revolution is not just what work tech does for us, but how we engage it.

We’re absolutely adamant that the future of tech-engagement will not only consist of tapping at our computers or phones. We believe a large part of that engagement will be driven in the most natural way possible - by human voice.

We’re seeing this already across the economy.

In the home, where people manage appliances through Alexa or Apple Homepod; in the car, where voice is the default UI for safe driving; and in enterprise, where transcription of emails, healthcare notes, or machine commands, is becoming standard.

At the same time, the battle to become the consumer device of the future is underway - we’ve seen smart glasses; pins; necklaces; pens. The one thing they all have in common, is that the input is voice; not a keypad.

This raises a critical question: is our voice infrastructure ready for this transition?

There’s no doubt that the technology for interpreting your voice has vastly improved. But our voices contain a huge amount of data beyond semantics. It carries signal about mental health, including stress, fatigue, depression and wellbeing, and it is being shown to carry meaningful signal for physical conditions, like Type II diabetes and COPD.

That’s where thymia comes in - it provides the layer for a user to identify and analyse all these signals. thymia has built the real-time human state voice intelligence layer - understanding how users actually are, not just what they say. Its technology goes further than detection: a contextual interpreter turns those signals into real-time, actionable recommendations - delivering safety and experience value across every voice conversation. thymia covers 30+ biomarkers from ~15 seconds of speech at 85%+ accuracy, clinically validated and published in Nature Scientific Reports (2026), based on a longitudinal, multi-modal dataset of over 75,000 unique voices.

thymia already helps a car to understand when a driver’s fatigue is excessively high; when a first responder isn’t in the right state of mind to go to work; and when a call centre customer’s stress is sufficiently high to be at risk of churn.

Form has backed thymia twice in the last five years, and is delighted to see them getting the recognition they deserve as the world’s leading human state voice intelligence layer inside every voice conversation. We remain convinced that as voice becomes ubiquitous as the tech interface, this layer will become foundational.

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It’s not often you have a truly magical experience when using new technology. Paying with a wave of your palm is one of them, as we found out at Atis on London’s Regent Street.

When we co-led Five.id’s pre-seed round with our friends at Blue Wire Capital, we believed biometric payments were inevitable, and that the former Revolut payments team had a real shot at building the category-defining company.

But there were massive questions around merchant interest and customer adoption.

Fast forward and we’ve seen more than enough evidence that both businesses and consumers are ready for biometric payments.

To understand why, it’s worth revisiting the framework that shaped our initial investment. When we invested, we had three core beliefs about the future of payments:

1. In-person payments is a story of marginal improvements in UX, coupled with effective distribution, giving rise to big opportunities for a platform shift. Take the movement from card payments to tap to pay, and then to Apple Pay. Each shift makes payments slightly more frictionless – but none are a true 10x improvement in consumer experience. Crucially, each shift in the payment method relied upon there being zero additional hardware for the customer, and a huge distribution advantage. Tap to pay was easy to adopt because everyone already used a card. Apple Pay was easy because everyone already had a phone in their hand when they paid. We suspect any future platform shifts will follow the same pattern.

2. Biometrics is the natural end point of how we engage with the world – how we authenticate and access the world, from buildings to payments. More specifically, a lot of evidence now points towards palm as being the preferred biometric for lots of use cases. It is arguably the most secure and least intrusive biometric. No face scanning; no finger printing; just wave your palm for a split second, and you enter a building (if you’re one of the 10k people at JP Morgan’s NYC HQ), or make a payment (if you’re having lunch in London 😉).

3. The in-person customer loyalty journey is still so broken. Even at the largest retailers, where vast investments have been made in loyalty schemes, using loyalty in-person means stepping through a separate flow to payment. Or it means separate QR scanners, native apps, or even physical loyalty cards! In person payments can still be clunky; but loyalty is far worse.

When we met Thibaut and Maria, a team out of Revolut building palm payments, we loved that the vision aligned with each of these three points. A super secure biometric payment method that required minimal customer onboarding; ran on existing rails (initially); and could completely integrate payments with loyalty, so that there was no separate loyalty flow at all.

But whenever something feels obvious at pre-seed, it usually isn’t, and the elephants in the room were right there: merchant and customer adoption. Lots of investors dismissed - without much thought, in our view - the idea of customer adoption in particular.

One year since the pre-seed, the evidence leaves us in no doubt.

On consumer adoption, early data from the stores using Five is conclusive – consumers are aligned. Even the low-key, test-and-learn launches of Five so far have seen 5% of customers using their palm to pay, and - crucially - 80%+ of those aren’t going back once they switch to palm. We only expect these numbers to go in one direction.

Merchants seem to agree. The first retailers that piloted in single stores are so bullish that they’ve rolled out to all locations. In particular, there are certain segments where throughput is the priority (e.g. lunchtime/ coffee merchants in London, some of which have seen a 90%+ reduction in checkout time), or where end customers have a clear preference for carrying nothing (like gyms) where the palm-payment proposition is seeing the strongest pull. Yes, palm payments require a new terminal, but it can replace the additional terminals that retailers use for loyalty (and card payments), and, of course, everyone wants to solve loyalty.

Five still have a lot ahead of them. They need to show that the initial consumer appetite for palm payments isn’t just a fad – it’s an enduring behavioural shift. And they need to show that this isn’t just a niche product for particular high-throughput environments – it’s the next platform shift after Apple/Google Pay, for all in-person payments.

That’s when the bigger prize comes into view, as palm becomes the ID layer for all sorts of interactions with the real world. Payments, yes, but also access and any other form of in-person authentication.

When payments become biometric first, everything else follows.

That’s Five. Already in a store near you ;)

We at Form are delighted to back the Stotles team again in their Series A, alongside Headline, Acton Capital, and Seedcamp. We’re adamant that the team is on the way to building the end-to-end software that companies selling to government can live in.

We first met John, Taj and Carsten back in 2022. We’ve worked in and around Government for long enough to understand just how much unnecessary friction there is in the procurement process. It prevents the public sector from fully benefitting from the latest innovation - if at all (!) - and it massively inhibits businesses that could benefit from working with government. A platform that builds a qualified pipeline; finds the right tenders; and qualifies those opportunities, just made sense.

But a lot has changed in the market since then.

Firstly, the government need for innovation has massively increased. Public debt across the UK, US and several other western economies spiked to over 100% of GDP during covid, and hasn’t returned to its pre-covid level. Radically re-thinking public services is absolutely necessary to bringing it down - that urgency is palpable in Number 10 and across Whitehall.

Secondly, the pace of tech advancements means the scope for improving the procurement process has sky-rocketed. Leveraging the rapid advancements in GenAI, Stotles can now create a first draft of a bid response that is tailored to a customer - and the quality of those drafts only improves as the tech advances as Stotles really gets to know their customer.

Both these market shifts have massively worked in Stotles’ favour - and the rapid progress they’ve made speaks for itself.

Since the seed round, they’ve been serving companies like Amazon Business, Salesforce, Vodafone, NEC Software, Palo Alto Networks, and Snowflake. On average, they’ve generated 4x qualified pipeline growth for their customers, and more than doubled their customers’ public sector contract win rate. They have built a product which both does a lot of the leg work on bid-writing specifically, while also solving many of the smaller problems along the broad workflow. This type of end-to-end product, with embedded GenAI, is exactly where we think sustainable value will be generated in this tech wave.

There’s so much more to come from this team, and we’re absolutely delighted, and privileged, to be supporting them on the journey.

What Firenze does

Firenze is building the platform for wealth-related credit. “Lombard lending” - the lending of capital to investors secured against their investment assets - has been practiced since the 13th century. Despite this long history, it remains the exclusive preserve of Ultra High Net Worth individuals (UHNWs), via private banking. Firenze is building a platform that empowers wealth managers to offer Lombard Lending to a much broader set of mass affluent customers.

The theses underpinning Form’s investment

• The wealth management segment is crying out for new products to offer clients. While there remains a segment of investors that is willing to pay up for the traditional white-glove wealth management service, tech shifts and the rise of passive products have produced significant downward pressure on pricing, and wealth managers are scrambling to offer new products to their customers. Lombard lending is a great way to rebuild the relevance of the wealth manager.

• The gap between the mass affluent and ultra high net worths is increasing. Borrowing against assets is an absolutely key tool that UHNWs access to build wealth - benefitting from simply paying low interest on borrowed finance rather than touching their investment portfolio. Think Elon Musk borrowing c.$500m against his Tesla stock. But for the broader mass affluent segment, any unexpected liquidity requirement means selling part of your investment portfolio. Lombard lending hasn't yet been extended to the mass affluent segment due to a combination of tough technical, regulatory and market issues - but David and the team are well positioned to take it on.

• Lombard lending is the tip of the iceberg for investment-backed credit. Firenze will really open up the market for borrowing against investments - but the much bigger prize is the new credit products that can potentially be secured in this way, such as credit cards or mortgages. Firenze has the opportunity to be the infrastructure for a broad set of new credit products.

Why we love Firenze

• David. David Newman, founder and CEO, is the type of founder we love at Form. His outlier strengths across salesmanship and financial product innovation are complemented by his direct experience of the problem, from his time in wealth management at Barclays and UBS. Lombard lending is complex from a regulatory, go to market, and product engineering perspective, and David has strong experience and ambition for the space.

• David, again. He previously built a VC backed startup from 0 to series-A, and now he’s going again with clear-sighted learnings, bringing some of his old team with him. His compelling mix of hustle, network and insight make him a magnetic force in the industry. He’s relentless.

• Already executing like killers and moving fast. One of the great challenges of building a tech-enabled lending business is the “chicken and egg” of securing a credit line before you have built a track record of lending. The Firenze team are already over that hump, with a £160m funding line from Monument Bank - and this speed of execution is also reflected in the rapidly increasing set of wealth managers signing up to be early partners.

And finally…

As you can tell from today’s announcement, we love companies building the future of credit infrastructure, not least portfolio company Infact - the first real-time credit bureau. Last week Infact announced a market-first partnership with Curve, the digital wallet provider, to bring real-time credit reporting to Curve Flex, an instalment-linked revolving credit line. This enables customers to build credit profiles instantly while giving lenders a true, current picture of creditworthiness. Congrats to the Infact and Curve teams on this milestone!

Traditional healthcare systems, built around hospitals and clinics, are buckling under the weight of workforce shortages, endless wait times, overburdened practitioners and burnout at all-time highs. Hiring more staff and building more capacity within this model is necessary, but slow. While virtual care is lifting some of the burden, over 70% of healthcare decisions still require in-person assessments.

But the future of healthcare isn’t restricted by hospital corridors or clinic walls—it’s embedded in our communities. There is huge potential in bringing diagnostics closer to patients, empowering healthcare professionals to work flexibly and efficiently, and leveraging technology to cut through inefficiency. This is exactly what Heim Health is unlocking.

Bringing health home Heim

Heim Health is revolutionising care by enabling in-person clinical services to be delivered directly in patients’ homes. With a remote-first approach, Heim manages the end-to-end delivery of at-home patient appointments both for private providers and the NHS. Through their API-led platform, Heim matches nurses, phlebotomists and other healthcare practitioners (HCPs) to at-home diagnostic care and health checks, making healthcare more scalable, efficient, and patient-centred.

Behind the scenes, Heim abstracts away the complexity of matching healthcare practitioners (HCPs) with the right tasks by focusing on three elements:

• Unlocking untapped workforces: Although significant parts of the health system are facing workforce crises, Heim can surface other areas where, surprisingly, there is actually evidence of underutilisation. While some clinical environments can trigger burnout, driving talent out of the system, at-home appointments allow retired, part-time and locum practitioners seeking flexible hours to rejoin or remain in the system by fulfilling before/after work appointments outside their regular shifts. Heim have proven this source to be hugely untapped and have already derisked practitioner availability as a bottleneck. 

• Optimising skillsets & cost for clinical need: For many marketplaces (e.g. delivery platforms), labour supply is homogenous. But in health, skillsets and tasks are heterogenous: Heim’s platform not only ensures that practitioners with the right skill sets—such as phlebotomists, nurses, or healthcare assistants—are matched to jobs with specific requirements, but also minimises cases where more costly practitioners are matched to tasks for which they’re overqualified. This decreases redundancies and frees up resource to be deployed elsewhere in the system.

• Logistics & routing efficiencies: The platform uses ‘last mile’ delivery-inspired algorithms to optimise the practitioner’s route and schedule, reducing time spent on the road and enabling more patients to be seen within a shift. AI-powered scheduling and route optimisation create up to 30% more capacity within the same pool of practitioners, unlocking untapped potential in the workforce.

In the UK, the new approach Heim brings to market is driven by necessity and bolstered by policy. The new Secretary of State of Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, has emphasised the need to shift care out of hospitals and into the community, with the NHS Long Term Plan and Long Term Workforce Plan delivering on this. Rapid response teams, Community Diagnostic Centres, virtual wards, and point-of-care testing all pave the way for a new era of healthcare—and Heim Health is poised to lead this shift.

Meet the team

We have been speaking to Heim Health founder Kelly Klifa since May 2023, when Heim was just getting started. She struck us then as she does now: grounded, self-aware, focused, and methodical, with an undeniable sense of grit. Together with James Monico, Kelly previously co-founded Testing for All, the UK’s only not-for-profit COVID testing service to emerge during the pandemic, generating tens of millions in revenue and delivering more than 1 million at-home tests. Before that, James founded and sold Cloudreach, the cloud software enablement platform, to Blackstone in 2017.

Kelly and James have now teamed up with Sasha Tory, a senior health sales leader from the US, where she was formerly Head of Partnerships at Qured, a preventative health screening platform for employers, to drive Heim Health to international scale.

We see huge potential in Heim to build the software layer for distributed healthcare, as the market transitions away from its heavy reliance on in-clinic/hospital care. The team have already proven they can scale in-person healthcare tech quickly and we’re thrilled to be part of their journey.

Hit reply with follow up questions, suggestions of technology or policy leaders we should interview, or get in touch if you’re building at the frontier of tech and regulation.

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What Rodeo does

Rodeo helps gig delivery drivers aggregate and analyse their earnings across different work providers, and then optimise their work accordingly. How much have I earned for a given time period? Which platform should I be spending time on? Which restaurants or parts of the city should I be focusing on? Rodeo helps drivers easily answer these questions.

The theses underpinning Form’s investment?

1. Continued demand for on-demand. Delivery of hot food, groceries, and pretty much all other goods, are projected to continue to grow as a share of all purchases — and we see this being a one way trend.

2. The gig model needs to mature. In the past, platforms have benefited from the grey area that has been the employment status of drivers, and at times drivers have seemed to lose out. For instance, some platforms have attempted to benefit from a level of driver-platform exclusivity, while avoiding the employee-employer relationship. This behaviour has declined, and will continue to do so as platforms look to shore up the non-employee status of their drivers.

3. Gig model 2.0 emerges. There will be a maturing of the gig model, whereby power asymmetries between drivers and platforms dwindle and drivers are increasingly seen as businesses in their own right. There is a clear space for new products and services focused on empowering riders and drivers — and these will have data at their heart. Like any other business, one of the biggest questions that third parties can help drivers answer is: how do I optimise my earnings?

Why we love Rodeo

The team — Will and Alfie know the gig delivery space inside out, having spent years in the space. Their energy is undeniable and they have a relentless bias to action that makes us believe they could build the next huge gig platform.

The mission — Both consumers and gig platforms get a great deal out of the gig model, but at times it has seemed drivers have lost out. Inevitably, as drivers are seen increasingly as standalone businesses, businesses like Rodeo will emerge that are built from the ground up to serve a gig driver’s interests. This is very much Rodeo’s mission — they’re always going to be on the drivers’ side.

The white space — As the gig market has matured, the market for driver focused products is only just opening up, which means Rodeo has a broad set of areas to expand into.