#19 Salmo - Digitising the visa application process

I'm joined by legendary investor and Forbes acclaimed, "Queen of UK VC", Eileen Burbidge. Eileen is a Partner at Passion Capital, the legendary early-stage tech venture fund with the likes of Monzo, Tide, Nested, Butternut Box & Marshmallow under their belts and is actually a Board Director with Monzo as well as being super involved with a lot of the other portfolio companies too.

Eileen started her career in Silicon Valley, working for the likes of Apple, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems. In 2004 she moved to London to become one of Skype’s earliest employees. In 2011, Eileen became founding partner of Passion.

She is also a member of the board of Dixons Carphone, and awarded an MBE in 2015 for services to Business.

We listened to the pitch from Amber Perng, founder of Salmo - looking to digitise, speed up and make cheaper the visa application process, of which there are 1.5m a year in the UK. Based on her own experience having to get a visa after studying in the UK, Amber realised lawyers were charging £4K to fill out forms on your behalf and not much else...it could be better.

We really dug on the tech importance of a business such as this, the genuine TAM, reaching that target market, the potential to sell more products to the visa customers and whether they are the team to execute. It also brought up an interesting parallel between Eileen (VC) and my (Angel) take on the investment prospects.

Brought to you by my Startup Playground, Horseplay Ventures - https://horseplay.ventures/
Salmo - https://www.salmo.uk/
Playfair Capital - https://www.passioncapital.com/