London's Zinc gives 50 international entrepreneurs major boost with £1m investment

Today (October 2), company builder Zinc has launched its second mission to unlock new opportunities for people in places hit by globalisation and automation.

The company will invest £1m from its recent seed round from LocalGlobe, Atomico, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and angel investors, to fund 50 entrepreneurs from across the globe.

Among the entrepreneurs, 44 per cent are women and 20 different nationalities are represented alongside many experiences in education, health, transport, architecture, software engineering, tourism, telecommunication, housing, fashion and media.

The entrepreneurs will spend the next nine months building new companies aiming to offer solutions for over 150 million people in places hit by globalisation and automation.

Professor Julia Black, a director of Zinc, said: “The LSE and its partner universities are excited to be working closely with such talented entrepreneurs on this new mission.

“Our academic colleagues are really looking forward to combining their insights from social science with creative entrepreneurship to build new solutions to our most challenging social problems.”

New research from the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that robots will create more jobs than they displace, but there’s no suggestion that they’ll be like-for-like replacements.

Paul Kirby, co-Founder of Zinc, added: “Too often these big social problems are left to governments to sort out. And even with the best will in the world, that’s not possible. We also need to inspire our most creative entrepreneurs to tackle big social problems.

“We want to build new imaginative solutions that help people in left-behind places to transform their own life chances.”

This second mission follows Zinc’s first mission, which sought to improve women’s and girls’ emotional and mental health and resulted in 16 new companies, which attracted investments from some of London’s early-stage VCs and angels.

Zinc Mission 2 has already inspired over 100 experts to offer their help to the entrepreneurs, This includes leading academics, creatives, entrepreneurs, medics, educators, investors, corporates, and local authorities.

Ella Goldner, co-founder of Zinc, concluded: “We hope that even more experts and partners will be inspired by this mission to offer their help to this brilliant and dedicated group of entrepreneurs.

“It is a tough mission, so we need everyone’s creativity and support.”