Shuttle: Countdown to launch

Hello friends, and welcome to The Unsophisticated Investor! Brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle!

If you want to be one of the first to get access to some of the most exclusive private market investment opportunities in Europe, join our limited waitlist now.

Now, let’s get into it 👇

This week we’ve decided to do something a bit different and give you all an update on Shuttle’s private launch and what people can expect!

We’d like to think that most of you are aware that The Unsophisticated Investor is the official newsletter of Shuttle, but we appreciate some of you will have subscribed to our newsletter without knowing who or what Shuttle is.

We started building Shuttle back in 2022 as a platform that allowed people to invest in exciting, high-calibre startups alongside well-known venture capital funds. As investors ourselves…unsophisticated investors of course, we didn’t have access to private market investment opportunities such as venture capital and private equity - a world that has historically been reserved for the ultra-wealthy.

As two young guys in their early thirties, not long married and a 1-year-old each, we were keen to build some financial resilience and grow our wealth outside of the salary from our day job. But, like you, accessing quality investment opportunities outside your typical stocks and bonds was next to impossible. So we set out to fix it!

We spoke with hundreds of people just like us, and we learnt that the vast majority of people (~90%) shared our frustrations. That gave us the validation we needed to push ahead. Our biggest challenge was that we needed to be authorised by a financial regulator - a monumental undertaking. Naively we decided to get authorised here in Ireland where we’re from, not knowing that the Central Bank of Ireland is the most conservative regulator in Europe. But by getting licensed here, and having their stamp of approval, we knew that we were building the business to the highest regulatory standards. Standards that will help build trust within the market. And for us, trust isn’t just something we strive to build; it’s the foundation of our company, and the cornerstone of every relationship - whether with our customers, partners or each other. It took two years just to get our license. A long and arduous process. But we’ve created something amazing. Something we wish was available to us years ago!

And after literally years of work, next week is our private launch. It feels quite surreal to be at this point!

Nearly 1000 people joined our waitlist and indicated their interest in Shuttle. Many of them will also be subscribers to The Unsophisticated Investor. And we can’t tell you how much that means to us. And from that group, 250 of you have put up your hand to become a Founding Member and join us for our private launch. Those people will forever remain a special part of this company.

We’ve been working very hard to find some amazing startups for you to invest in and we’ve whittled it down to four, of which we’ll choose two for our private launch. These two companies will only be available to our private launch members but it will give you all an understanding of the calibre of startup we’re targeting. 

Some info on the companies we’re reviewing for our launch:

• The integration layer for AI agents – an area expected to become fundamental in how AI agents operate across organisations. Experienced founding team - the CEO has built several successful startups and sold a previous startup to a global leader in video game publishing. His technology is still widely used today in one of the world's most popular video games. A well known venture capital fund is leading this fundraising round, with participation from another well known fund and high profile angel investors.

• AI-powered marketing content generator – This company is led by two second-time founders who have built a platform that creates unique content ideas for marketing teams based on popular and relevant cultural moments.  Backed by some of the world's biggest YouTube stars and a reputable UK venture capital fund that’s backed companies like Revolut, Bolt, Just Eat, Loom, and many others in their portfolio.

• On-demand human workforce for AI Agent edge cases – A YCombinator (YC) backed startup just finishing the current batch of YC. For those of you who aren’t familiar with YC, it’s the most successful startup accelerator in the world and has helped create companies like Stripe, AirBnB, Coinbase, Dropbox, Reddit, Deel, Fivetran, and many more. This startup was founded by three talented engineers who have built a platform to provide on-demand human workforce to handle AI agent edge cases - helping companies deploy AI agents with enterprise-grade reliability.

• Customer research and insights at scale – Second time founders and YCombinator alumni who are finalising the sale of their first business and now launching their second. They’re building a conversational AI platform to reimagine how companies engage with their audiences. This enables organisations of all sizes to gather incredibly valuable stakeholder feedback at scale by removing humans from the feedback loop while retaining the conversational approach and efficiency of conducting customer calls.

Opportunities like this usually happen between known entities without anyone outside ever getting a sniff, so to get the opportunity to participate in these conversations right off the bat shows the calibre of opportunity we intend to offer on Shuttle.

We’re incredibly excited to get underway. No doubt it will be bumpy and not everything will work as smoothly as we’d like. But that's the nature of building a startup - it's a game of constant iteration - sanding the rough edges until you’ve created something beautiful. 

We hope that one day soon, you’ll all join us and be a part of the Shuttle community. And if you’re on our waitlist and didn’t put your hand up for our private launch, we totally get it. You want to see a bit more before committing. That's fair! We hope that what you’ve read here and what you’ll see over the next few weeks after our launch will help give you some assurance and certainty. We’re confident it will. But please do not hesitate to reach out to us. We’re always delighted to jump on a call to chat and answer any questions. 

That’s all for now folks. A big few weeks ahead…wish us luck!

What we’ve been working on at Shuttle

• Launch 🚀

• Launch 🚀

• Launch 🚀

The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle. We’re both sick of private markets being a playground exclusive to the ultra-wealthy so we started a company to challenge the status-quo. Shuttle’s singular focus is to unlock private markets for Millennial and Gen Z retail investors and help them build wealth through the highest performing private market opportunities.

Scott & Rob
Shuttle Co-Founders