Last month, London-based biotech Science Machine announced it had raised a $3.5m seed round — despite having just two full-time employees.
Cofounders Lorenzo Sani and Benjamin Tenmann are part of a new wave of AI-powered “tiny teams”, companies which have been able to keep their workforce to a minimum by leveraging recent technological advances.
Sifted sat down with Sani and Tenmann to find out what investors made of their miniscule headcount, the best ways to get attention with so few people onboard and how the vibe coding craze is enabling the tiny teams of the future.
Telling a story
For cofounder and CTO Tenmann, who worked as a machine learning engineer at BenevolentAI before leaving to launch Science Machine, pitching to investors could be intimidating.
“It was my first experience of fundraising, so I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t daunting,” he tells Sifted. “There were weeks where it was fairly painful. I was thinking, ‘Oh god, maybe I shouldn’t have quit my job’.”
Luckily his fellow founder Sani, a serial entrepreneur and Y Combinator alum, had the experience and contact book to get the ball rolling.
That meant the pair were well-placed to pitch their AI agent product Sam, a reflexive interactive dashboard which researchers can easily adapt when trying to extract insights from their data.
Tenmann says: “The main question investors would have is: ‘If there’s only two of you, why do you need the money?’”
Whenever this question came up, however, Sani says it allowed them to show off their size as a strength. “We can tell this story about how it’s just the two of us but we’ve made so much progress,” he tells Sifted. “Imagine — as we get more people on board — what we can do.”
Tenmann agrees: “The reality is we’re not going to be able to stay as a team of two forever. As we grow, we’ll need more people. But we’re very picky with who we hire.”
Attention seeking
With AI increasingly being used to generate cold emails and pump out ever more slop on people’s LinkedIn feeds, it can be hard for small startups like Science Machine to stand out online.
That’s why companies have to get “significantly more creative” with their go-to-market strategy, says Tenmann, in order to stand out from the crowd. “Getting attention is so hard. This is the one thing that is quite a differentiator,” he says.
Sani says the rise in AI-automated outreach has left unsolicited emails a deadend when it comes to pitching investors. He emphasises the need to arrange in-person meetings and attend conferences.
A recent survey found a quarter of 18-34-year-olds in the UK never answer the phone, but taking calls could be the differentiator between getting funding or getting ignored.
“I think there’s been a resurgence in phone calls, like, actually calling people up,” says Sani. “It’s not something that AI can do very well yet. Those kinds of things are bespoke and provide a bit more of a human feel.”
The same goes for posting online. A quick look at Tenmann’s LinkedIn profile reveals a regular habit of hot takes and reposted memes.
“LinkedIn has been surprisingly good for getting attention from both customers and investors,” says Tenmann. “I’ve had people come up to me at events, thinking we’re much bigger than we are, because they’ve seen my posts on LinkedIn.”
And vibe coding platforms like Lovable and Replit, which enable non-coders to build their own apps with relative ease, are making it easier than ever for people to ship new products with limited resources.
“My bullish take is that we’re gonna see way more smaller companies. Lovable is going to enable that […] The industry will expand in size but the exceptional people will become way more valuable.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/science-machine-funding-how-tiny-team/
