The right room isn't always the one you'd expect

I found one of our best recent deals in a WhatsApp group. 

Not a warm intro from a friend or VC firm; nor a demo day or a pitch event. A deal group chat run by one of the founders already in my portfolio. I almost scrolled past it. By the third slide I'd stopped, and I already knew I wanted to meet the founder.

The company is Stride, and how it reached me says as much as the deck itself.

People starting out think deal flow is about volume, seeing as many companies as possible. It matters, but the deals I've been most excited about don't come from casting wide. They come from the right room: a small group of people who know my thesis, know what I look for, and think of me when they see it.

Stride reached me because a founder I'd backed was in a room with me and knew it would land. That's the compounding advantage in angel investing. Every founder you back and every investor you work alongside becomes a way into the next deal. The right room is where your best opportunities arrive, often with no intro and no fanfare, sent by someone who already trusts your judgement.

The hard part when you start is that you're not in those rooms yet. You have to build your way in, or find one.

Two things, fast.

The founder. Andrew is an Olympic medallist who then spent over a decade building in health. He co-founded DNA Fit, exited it to Prenetics, and stayed to help scale Prenetics to a NASDAQ IPO. So here was someone who had already done the whole journey in this exact sector; build, exit, and scale to public markets. That's about as strong as founder-market fit gets.

The traction. Stride had gone from launch to £4m annualised revenue run rate in just over six months, with more than 13,500 orders and over 40% repeat purchase. Early consumer businesses usually show growth or retention. Seeing both together, this early, is rare, and it's the thing that made me sit up.

The rest of the deck backed it up. The business matched a thesis we hold at Arāya, the shift from reactive to preventative health, and Andrew clearly understood that the winning version of this is a vertically integrated platform where a person's health data finally sits in one place, rather than scattered across wearables, records, and apps that never talk to each other. 

We backed Stride. Our conviction has only grown since, and when the chance came to put more in this July, House of Arāya members followed on alongside the fund.

This is why House of Arāya exists. To put you in the room where conviction is being built.

Members sit alongside the Arāya Ventures team and each other, see the opportunities we believe in, understand why we believe in them, and have the opportunity to back them together.

That is exactly what happened with Stride.

Because the best companies you’ll see often arrive without an introduction. They move through trusted networks, founder relationships and investor rooms long before they become widely known. The advantage isn’t seeing every deal. It’s being in the room the right deals get sent to.

And once you’re in that room, you’re not investing alone. You’re learning how experienced investors assess opportunities, building your own conviction, and accessing deals alongside people who are doing the same.

If you want to understand what that room looks like, Inside the Room: Where AI Meets Capital is taking place in Dubai on 4 September. Reply to this email and I’ll send you the details.

And in this week’s video, I walk through the full Stride deck and exactly what made me decide to write the cheque.

Warmly,
Rupa

P.s. When you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help: