NOTES FRO
M FOUNDER
S
THE ALCHE
MISTS
Issue 02 Vol. 0
2
STARTUP S
TORIES
STARTUP STORIESNotes from Founders: The AlchemistsThere’s no magic formula for creating a successful business,
but a lot can be learned from the founders you’re about to
meet. From conjuring a global brand out of thin air, to taking
sci-fi from abstract to reality, they’re applying fresh thinking
that’s never short of a few surprises.
05
Discover how this French startup
is disrupting legacy transportation
systems by ushering in a new era
of autonomous vehicles.
04
Be inspired by a former
university professor who’s using
cryptocurrency to help customers
fight intellectual property piracy.
01
Read how one founder left a
career in commodities trading to
start a business out of her living
room that’s now transforming the
bulk shipping industry.
02
03
Learn how this founder took a university
project, and grew it into an award-
winning business that helps companies
automate financial auditing workflows.
The Alchemists
Find out why it was third-time lucky for
a Finnish games startup, whose global
hit has been downloaded over
10 million times.
1
STARTUP STORIESNotes from Founders: Shipamaxshipamax
small
giant
GAMES
CUSTOS
NAVYA
xain
Making waves
in shipping
‘My first business was a failed
university project’
For most of my life, I’ve wanted to start
a company, and I had my first attempt
while I was at the University of Bath.
Four of us created a website for people
to meet language exchange partners.
Unfortunately, we were pretty clueless
about technology and didn’t have any
idea about what we were doing, so the
site was pretty crap. It ended up being a
typical university project that never really
took off.
Jenna Brown and Fabian Blaicher founded Shipamax in March
2016 with one main aim – to transform the bulk shipping
industry through technology. The pair graduated from the
Y Combinator startup accelerator a year later, securing a funding
round of $2.5 million to create cutting-edge machine learning
te