Uniborn CEO and founder Dmitry Samoylovskikh. Image: Uniborn
Uniborn is giving former employees of tech companies a chance to start their own business by linking them up with investors.
An Estonian venture platform has created a free matchmaking tool to connect recently laid-off tech employees with angel investors and VC firms.
Based in Tallinn, Uniborn describes itself as a community-led platform for sourcing, co-funding and amplifying start-ups to help them achieve unicorn status.
Uniborn’s new #LaidOff initiative aims to create an opportunity for workers impacted by the recent wave of tech layoffs. The goal is to help techies who now want to start their own business to get early-stage funding quicker.
The matchmaking platform facilitates deals by creating special purpose vehicles for investments and providing deal syndication services for free. If multiple investors express interest, Uniborn takes care of all associated legal costs.
The initiative comes at a time when global tech companies have been laying off employees en masse.
Since the beginning of November alone, Stripe, Twitter, Meta and Intercom have all announced significant cuts to their global workforces. Andy Jassy has now confirmed layoffs at Amazon, and there are reports that the company could cut up to 10,000 staff across its global workforce.
“We decided to launch this initiative after the latest news about massive layoffs,” said Uniborn CEO and founder Dmitry Samoylovskikh.
“We believe the best of these laid-off tech employees are founding future unicorns right now, so we wanted to match great talent with great investors to facilitate this momentum.”
The matchmaking tool uses an algorithm developed by Uniborn to connect different parties. Once a potential match has been identified, Uniborn makes a double opt-in introduction and gathers commitments.
“We’ve chosen to stand behind the entrepreneurs who are building amazing companies but don’t have easy access to the VC funding in such turbulent times,” Samoylovskikh added.
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