Simone Maini, CEO @ Elliptic, on Leading Through Crypto Winters and Building Elliptic into a Blockchain Analytics Leader

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Anatolii Papulov, Co-Founder & CEO of NewOrbit, the UK SpaceTech company developing satellites designed to operate much closer to Earth than conventional satellite constellations. The company recently raised an $18.5 million Series A to bring its technology to market. Most satellites operate around 500–600km above Earth. NewOrbit is working to unlock Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), at altitudes closer to 200km, where satellit...

For this special episode of Riding Unicorns, there is no guest. James Pringle and Hector Mason sit down together to look back at six years of the podcast, what they've learned along the way and how much the technology and venture landscape has changed since the first episode in 2020. They discuss how Riding Unicorns has shaped their careers, from Hector going from Associate to General Partner at Episode 1 to James meeting his current boss through the podcast, as well as the network, investmen...

AI is creating extraordinary new demand for electricity. But what happens when the grid can't keep up? In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Karl Bach, Co-Founder & CEO of Axle Energy, the energy technology company building a virtual power plant from hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles, batteries and heat pumps. Rather than relying solely on large power stations to balance electricity supply and demand, Axle connects distributed devices across homes and...

What happens when companies deploy AI agents before fixing the data those agents rely on? In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Toby Mather, Co-Founder of Rig, the AI-native data infrastructure company building the data layer that allows humans and AI agents to work from the same trusted context. Rig started as a "data brain" sitting on top of platforms like Snowflake and BigQuery, making sense of fragmented company data so teams could use tools like Claude and Cu...

What happens when AI moves beyond the digital world and starts transforming the companies that manufacture the things around us? In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Robin Van Aeken, Co-Founder & CEO of Magentic, the AI company building digital workers for some of the world's largest manufacturers. Magentic's AI agents, or "mages", work alongside procurement and supply chain teams at companies including Siemens and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. They connect...