I Sold My AI Startup Before Revenue: Here’s What Investors Missed — And Founders Shouldn’t¶

Ch01.144 I Sold My AI Startup Before Revenue: Here’s What Investors Missed — And Founders Shouldn’t¶

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I Sold My AI Startup Before Revenue: Here’s What Investors Missed — And Founders Shouldn’t¶

Markdown Content: By Alexander Kardos-Nyheim

I sold my AI research company while I was qualifying as a lawyer in the U.K. I built Safe Sign Technologies with researchers from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT who believed in the mission enough to trust a 21-year-old law student to lead the ship.

Roughly 20 months later, when Thomson Reuters acquired us, it was the first time in its 170-year history it bought a company pre-revenue. Thomson Reuters acquired us for the science.

Getting there was painful, though. Our published papers put the model among the best in the world at legal reasoning, and we trained it for a fraction of what the large labs were spending. We had been a quieter version of “the DeepSeek story,” developing very capable models using novel algorithms with huge capital efficiency.

None of that counted for much in the rooms I walked into. Investors always asked about the product and the traction. U.K. investors passed, and I ended up raising most of our funding in the United States.

I back founders now, and the things I weigh have stayed consistent. As a founder, I was told again and again that science meant little until it was bolted onto a product. That test was wrong then and I believe it is fatal now.

In the first quarter of 2026, foundational AI startups raised around $178 billion. The market is realizing that foundational AI is where the long-term value sits, and this is the year we may see the exits and IPOs that prove the bet right.

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