Julie Meyer’s Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund has joined forces with three angel investors to back ClickSlide in its first allocation.
The business, which is based in London and has an office in New York, is developing a cloud-based platform for building apps. It allows users without development or coding experience to build cross-platform apps, reportedly reducing build-time and cost for businesses.
The two ClickSlide founders, Gabriel Ortiz and Aaron Franco, are currently based in New York and have been working on the ClickSlide proposition for the last three years.
According to the business, ClickSlide is the first start-up to establish itself on New York’s Roosevelt Island, the site identified by Cornell University as the location of the tech centre they will be calling Silicon Island.
Silicon Island is set to receive a number of large-scale investments from the likes of Cornell, Microsoft, Google and IBM totalling $6 billion.
Ortiz, founder and CEO of ClickSlide, says, ‘Aaron France and I founded ClickSlide because we believe that the world’s technology needs to acquire an added dimension of humanity.
‘Too often technology excludes rather than includes and our belief is that there should be fewer barriers to its creation.’
American-born entrepreneur Julie Meyer has backed the pair through her Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund (ACE Fund), an investment pot that was raised in 2012. The investor, who is one of two dragons on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den online, has previously founded First Tuesday and is the founder and chief executive of Ariadne Capital.
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The seed capital fund achieved its first close in July 2012 and attracted commitments from investors such as Clive Jacobs, founder of car rental broker Holiday Autos.
The new ACE Fund is investing in ‘digital enablers’ in the UK. This will involve deals in sectors such as media technology (gaming, video and radio), financial technology and health and clean tech.
Joining Jacobs and Meyer as contributors to the fund are Russ Shaw, non-executive director of online dating website Cupid and Unwire, Travis Baxter, ex-managing director of Bauer Media and Jon Rubenstein, director at Amazon former CEO of Palm.
‘When we first met the ClickSlide team we were immediately excited by what they were working on,’ Meyer says.
‘We believe that they’re doing exactly what entrepreneurs should always do – set out to change the world. It’s the ability to break the mould, to do things differently, that leads to true progress. We think ClickSlide is a game-changer.’
