It was Fred Soneya’s experience selling online nursery supplies that led to him co-founding early-stage investment firm Haatch. While ecommerce lead at Kiddicare, Soneya dealt with many B2B software as a service companies.
“We used lots of them. We used startups to power our customer experience and as a customer of a SaaS company that gave us a real edge versus other retailers that were using the old guys, the IBMs, the SAPs, the Oracles of this world,” he tells UKTN.
Kiddicare was acquired by supermarket chain Morrisons in 2011 for £70m. Then, in September 2013, Soneya co-founded Haatch with Scott Weavers-Wright and Elaine Weavers-Wright.
“The kind of founding reasons for Haatch were born out of what we learnt at Kiddicare and Morrisons,” says Soneya, pointing to the “mentality” they gained from working closely with and advising startups....