Thunder

We're a tech-enabled investment bank for founders, by founders. We help companies navigate their capital strategy for acquiring funding to fuel their growth.

Founders: AI-assisted fundraising for companies. Join the network for free to see which investors are more likely to invest in you.

Investors: Access vetted deal flow and invest with no fees direct on cap table

Thunder X Capital, LLC offers securities through Stonehaven, LLC, a Member FINRA/ SIPC.

Managing Director & Founding Partner

Interplay

Operating Partner

PEF Community

Brining together the London PEF community

Chapter Lead

Hustle Fund

Angel Squad Member

Angel Investor & RE/VC/PE LP

Investor / Advisor 

Generation Esports

President & COO

Walmart Technology

Director Of Digital Media

LiquidSky Software, Inc. (Acquired)

Chief Revenue Officer

ConveyIQ by Entelo

VP of Marketing

Misc Small Businesses and Startups

Built, grew, and sold a few small businesses that are still actively running today.

Founder

I'm a serial entrepreneur that has raised $135M+ and has had multiple exits. I'm now on a mission to support founders with their capital strategy and acquire the capital they need to grow their businesses. 

Thunder.vc is a tech-enabled investment bank for founders, by founders.

When it comes to supporting the founders in our Thunder.vc community, here are some free resources that can help you with your capital raising efforts.

 - Fundraising Demystified newsletter - Sign up at http://join.thunder.vc
 - Free list of AI-recommended VCs specific to your business - https://web.thunder.vc/list-of-investors-vcs-for-founders 
 - Free tool to source lending partners for your working capital needs - https://lp.thunder.vc/apply-for-working-capital-for-your-startup-company
 - Private Slack community for founders - Apply to join at https://app.thunder.vc/signup

Jason Kirby

Founders think raising capital is hard.
Try selling your company while running it. ⚙️

If you’re a founder thinking about selling in 2026, here’s your M&A survival guide (from two people who’ve done it the hard way):

5 Steps to Sell Smart - Not Desperate:

1️⃣ Start early. Build relationships with strategics 12–18 months before you plan to sell. Seek partnerships, integrations, and POCs in the early days to build trust and rapport with them.

2️⃣ Know your numbers. Buyers don’t fund dreams; they fund predictability. After a few intro calls you'll know if you're ready or not with the numbers.

3️⃣ Run a process. Competitive tension is your best negotiation leverage. In today’s market, selling to a strategic is harder; that's why you need to prepare for a private equity buyer, it keeps strategics honest and makes them move faster.

4️⃣ Avoid the earnout trap. Structure cash up front. Earnouts sound great, but rarely workout. Maintain control over the KPIs of an earnout or drop the earnout all together.

5️⃣ Control your narrative. Don’t let your board, your VC, or your emotions run the process. If you're not 100% behind the narrative, it will fall apart.

Bonus6️⃣ Don't run a process without help. Selling your company is a full-time job, similar to fundraising, but even harder. As the CEO, you'll be expected to hit your targets. Having a banker or board member leading the process allows you to stay focus and drive momentum on both fronts.
  
If you want to explore M&A and want to pick someone's brain, comment below or send Oliver Low a DM! He leads M&A deals at Thunder.vc and sold his previous company, he knows what it's like to be in your shoes.

4x Exits, $100M+ Raised. Helping founders raise/exit with clarity, control, and conviction.

I just denied an applicant solely because they have a @hotmail email address. Does that make me a bad person?

I'm looking for tech forward partners who have a deep understanding of technology companies. 

If I was one of my clients and saw that the partner that's supposed to competently understand my business had a hotmail account... I'd immediately discount their abilities. That's my justification.

Is that a fair assessment? or am I just an a** hole

If you're a founder looking to hire a PR in the middle of a crisis, it's likely too late and the damage will get worse.

David Meadvin (CEO, One Strategy Group) breaks down why even the best crisis consultants can’t fix what founders don’t already have... trust.

If your reputation isn’t built before the storm hits, you’re in for a rough time.

💡 2 actionable truths from David’s experience:

1. Your reputation is earned long before crisis day. The founders who invest in team trust and transparent communication recover fastest.

2. The calmest person in the room wins. When everyone panics, composure becomes a superpower, and the board will remember it.

Founders: Don’t wait until you’re trending for the wrong reason.
Start building your “reputation reserve” now.

👇 Watch/listen to the full story:

Watch the full video here. Most founders think they’ll never face a real crisis, until they do. In this episode, David Meadvin shares what happens whe

Open article: The $100M founder’s playbook for surviving bad press by Jason Kirby • 2 min read

The $100M founder’s playbook for surviving bad press

I'm hiring a partner to join Thunder.vc... anyone else getting the AI slop applications like these?

Like they're not even trying to mask the AI. I've gotten like 10 of these identical applications via email. Their cover letters make them sound like a perfect fit, but the resume and the past jobs are WAY off, like not relevant at all. And they all say the same thing.

I hope these desperate people aren't paying for a service like this. I've already created a filter to block them.

For those of you hiring, how obvious has been the AI and what are you doing about it?

Spoke my mind on the AI bubble and where I think it's going and shared some personal deal dynamics I rarely mention publicly. Check it out on the The Mergers podcast

Jason Kirby sold his startup for $40M - but only after the CEO of Samsung Electronics went to prison and nearly blew up the deal.

Investors got greedy.

The new Samsung CEO shut everything down.

Jason's team showed up at 9am to celebrate… and there was nothing to announce.

Welcome to the world of venture capital — where founders are often left holding the bag.

This week on The Mergers, Kenneth Kashif Thomas and Rory Mason sat down with Jason Kirby, now founder of Thunder.vc, to hear the wild behind-the-scenes of what really happens when you raise, scale, and try to exit a venture-backed company.

Jason has:

- Raised $100M+, 
- Sold 4 companies
- Advised on $200M+ in founder exits
- Navigated M&A deals with Walmart, Samsung, Verizon... and lived to tell the tale
- Watched VCs ghost founders when they no longer show “breakout velocity”
- Built Thunder VC to help bootstrapped and “orphaned” founders find exits, growth capital, or both

In this episode:

🖊️ What most founders get dead wrong about term sheets, preferences, and secondary sales
🖊️ The dirty secret of management fees and why VCs often win even when startups lose
🖊️ How to create “phantom leverage” when you have no options left
🖊️ Why AI is a bubble — and why that might not matter

If you’re a founder, investor, or operator - you need to hear this

🎧 Listen here: https://lnkd.in/dDCNNsTr
 📺 Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eNztGnxG

When Oliver Low sold his startup, he thought he’d hit the dream exit.

Instead, he walked straight into a trap most founders never see coming:

The earnout...

He hit his growth targets, but the parent company missed theirs — and the big payout disappeared.

Nine out of ten earnouts fail for this exact reason.

That’s why, at Thunder, we help founders structure exits, not just chase them.

Here’s the truth no one tells you:

Selling early isn’t losing. It’s creating optionality.

Once you have liquidity, you can take bigger swings, with less risk — and 10x your next outcome.

But you only get there if you understand deal architecture: competitive process, buyer psychology, and clean incentives.

Oliver Low breaks it down in this week’s episode:
 🎧 “How to Sell Your Startup: The Founder’s M&A Playbook”

💡 Tactical takeaways:
- How to avoid the 9/10 earnout failure rate
- Why selling in the fourth inning is often smarter than waiting
- How private equity is changing founder exits forever

Listen on: Youtube Spotify Apple Most founders wait too long to sell and end up losing leverage. In this episode, Jason Kirby and Oliver Low share the

Open article: The M&A playbook for founders in 2025 by Jason Kirby • 2 min read

He left venture capital to help take Life360 from Seed to a $7B public company. 

When Itamar Novick joined Life360, it wasn’t yet the household name it is today. The team was small. The product was early. The vision was big but uncertain. 

Like every early-stage company, there were challenges: 

💬 Raising VC capital was tough. 
💸 The company didn’t have much cash. 
🚀 The future was uncertain. 

But instead of staying in VC, Itamar made the rare move, he joined the founding team, betting his career & his networth on building something lasting. 

Years later, that decision helped shape Life360’s journey to 80M users, $200M+ raised, and a dual listing on the ASX and NASDAQ.

In our latest episode of $100M Exits, Itamar shares: 

🔥 Why he left venture to join a scrappy startup 
🔥 How Life360 scaled from early chaos to IPO readiness
🔥 What founders can learn from dual IPOs and post-IPO growth

Watch the full video here. When Itamar Novick joined Life360, it wasn’t yet a global brand — it was a small, ambitious startup still proving itself. T

Open article: The VC who quit to build a $7B company - Itamar Novick on Life360’s wild ride by Jason Kirby • 2 min read

The VC who quit to build a $7B company - Itamar Novick on Life360’s wild ride

CEO @ Cubish

My passion for technology started at 8, when my grandmother gave me a Compaq 286, my first computer. I took it apart to understand how it worked, and I haven’t stopped since.

Augmented Reality is my greatest passion, not just a technology, but a true revolution. It’s a way to amplify the world as we know it and imagine new possibilities.

Today as CEO of Cubish S.r.l.

Cubish is a geolocated social network built on Spatial Web technology that divides the Earth's surface into over 5.1 trillion cubes, each covering 100 square meters. Each cube acts as a geolocated container where anyone can create one or more Cube Domains, digital spaces for videos, audio, images, documents, interactive content and much more. Thousands of Cube Domains can coexist in a single cube, creating a unique layering of digital experiences and allowing users to leave content anywhere on Earth.

In the future, Cube Domains will be organized by quality through a merit-based system that highlights relevance, usefulness and impact, ensuring the most valuable content is prioritized. Cubish is an open, general-purpose system, just like the web once was.

Cube Domains are anchored to real-world coordinates and can expand into other cubes across streets, squares, shops, buildings and public or private spaces, even locations far apart. Each expansion can host different content depending on the location, creating a rich, distributed, geolocated digital network.

"It is like taking a web domain or a social network and spreading it across the real world."

Today it starts with data. Tomorrow, immersive technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), Extended Reality (XR) and more will be fully integrated. The team envisions Cubish as a geolocated social platform where people, communities, businesses and content coexist within the same spatially organized, interactive digital layer.

It is the first true Spatial Web, designed to bring the web fully into the real world and create an intelligent, living digital layer seamlessly integrated into the physical space around us.

Cubish S.r.l., an innovative startup officially registered in the Business Register (VAT: IT10724711212), has 26 cofounders, including two corporate entities. Cubish is protected by PATENT PENDING No. 102025000004906, filed March 10, 2025.

Dorian Lazzari

One of the initial objections we often hear is: “Oh, so Cubish is just an app that geolocates content.” ❌ In reality, this is a misunderstanding.

There are hundreds of apps that geolocate data and content in the real world 🌍, Google being the first. But try organizing hundreds or thousands of pieces of content in the same location using these platforms, and the result is total chaos ⚠️ (see image below).

Cubish does more than just geolocate content. Its strength lies in organizing large amounts of content and data in the same space, in this case a 10x10 cube 🧊, solving a real technical problem: content overlap and collision management.

The Cubish system manages content through multiple layers and patented priority rules, preventing conflicts between elements and allowing the orderly overlap of multiple contributions in the same real-world space. Essentially, this makes it possible for multiple “realities” with different data to coexist, and in the future, even overlapping immersive realities in the same location 🎮. It is like having hundreds of different Pokémon Go games in the same spot without creating chaos.

Imagine what would happen without this system. John creates a piece of content at a location, but it is not useful or high-quality, so the space is wasted. Michael, on the other hand, had a great idea to enhance that spot, but John has already “occupied” the space. The result is that the structure fails to share value because it is constrained by low-impact content and built on a single imaginary layer.

With Cubish, this cannot happen ✅. Thanks to multi-layer management and priority rules, John, Michael, or anyone else can enrich the same location, creating an overall effect of shared value where content integrates and amplifies each other.

So yes, Cubish uses geolocation, but it is not the main feature. The real innovation lies in the structure of the Cubes, Cube Domains, and Expansions, a completely new, patented system not immediately recognizable unless explored in depth, which revolutionizes the way content is organized and experienced in both real and immersive spaces. 🚀

#EmpowerYourReality #SpatialWeb #LocationBased #GeoTech #GeoWeb #ImmersiveTech #GIS #Social #Data #Geolocation #App #MultiLayered #XR #AR #MR #VR #DigitalTwin #BIM #GEO #StartupItalia #PokemonGo #Tech

The web is no longer something we use. It’s something we live 🌐.

Digital spaces, immersive interactions, endless possibilities 🚀. This isn’t science fiction. It’s the present.

Every day, we get closer to a digital multiverse, made up of worlds we can inhabit and shape ✨.

Cathy Hackl Diego Borgo Leila Hurstel Nonny de la Peña, PhD Laura Shin Anthony Pompliano Camila Russo Brady Dale Olga Kharif Josh Quittner Kent Bye Adaora Udoji 

#DigitalTransformation #Web3 #ImmersiveTech #SpatialWeb #Multiverse #FutureOfWeb #TechInnovation #Metaverse #DigitalExperience #Innovation #EmergingTech #XR #AR #VR

The Peaceful Coexistence Between Web Domains and Spatial Domains 🌍

Whenever something new emerges, there is always a mix of curiosity and apprehension. But innovation does not necessarily imply replacing what already exists.

Spatial domains represent a new generation of domains. They no longer live exclusively on the classic web but take root in reality, in physical places. They extend at the discretion of their owners like a “cloak” over the real world, coexisting with it invisibly, without overlapping, and offering gateways to the digital world directly within physical space. This is what makes Cubish domains unique. ✨

They were not created to replace traditional web domains, but to extend their reach beyond the online digital realm. The classic web will continue to function as a vast archive of accessible data; spatial domains allow that content to gradually “spill over” into the real world, in the places that best represent the information they contain.

Imagine, for example, a tree in a forest: it could have its own domain telling its story, its spread, and the habitat around it. This information already exists on the web, but thanks to spatial domains, it becomes an integral part of the place it represents. 🌱

That’s why we speak of peaceful coexistence and mutual value: the web and spatial domains complement each other, enriching one another.

However, immersive experiences require a solid infrastructure, and until now, it simply didn’t exist. This is exactly what Cubish provides, enabling a new dimension of interaction between the digital world and the physical one. 🔗


#SpatialWeb #GeoSpatial #Startup #EU #UK #USA #ImmersiveTech #Tech #DigitalTwin #SocialNetwork #XR #AR #VR #MR #GeoWeb #Innovation #IT #DigitalAssets #Domains #Investing

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The Battle

Jason Kirby

Dorian Lazzari

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The Battle

Jason Kirby

Dorian Lazzari

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jason Kirby's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreJason Kirby's LinkedIn Performance