Chris Smith

Chris Smith is Managing Partner at Playfair Capital, where he focuses on pre-seed opportunities across the UK, Europe, and Israel. Playfair’s team page also lists him as a Kauffman Fellow, Class 25, a Forbes contributor, and one of the people who helped found Playfair’s Female Founder Office Hours initiative in 2019.

Before Playfair, Smith was an operator at plan.com, where he was the eighth team member and held senior roles including Sales Director, Head of Tech/BI, and Head of Product Development. Over five years, he helped build the sales team, introduced new products organically and through acquisition, and led rollout of version 4 of the platform. Playfair states that plan.com grew to £60m revenue in 2018 and ranked #1 in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100.

He also worked on the relaunch and rebranding of Vannin Capital, another Bramden Investments portfolio company, which was acquired by Fortress Investment Group in September 2019. Earlier, he spent nearly a decade in the City as a transactional lawyer, including work with private equity and venture funds on international acquisitions, disposals, and restructurings, plus secondments at Weil’s Silicon Valley patent litigation team, Premier Foods, and the Asset Protection Agency.

Smith was also a founder: in 2001 he started a telecoms business offering discounted international calling from 14 countries, partially exiting via an MBO in 2005. From 2008 to 2018, he made 15 angel investments across the UK and US, with six exits cited by Playfair, including SuperAwesome, Nearbuy Systems, Compology, and Bidstack.

• Playfair invests exclusively at pre-seed and aims to be the first institutional investor in a company.
• The firm writes £100k-£1.5m cheques, with an average ticket of £700k-£1m, and usually leads or co-leads rounds.
• Playfair is deliberately low-volume, making about six investments per year so it can reserve time, capital, and operating support for portfolio companies.
• The firm is generalist, but requires a technology element and excludes a short list of sectors including AdTech/MarTech, crypto/blockchain, ecommerce, fashion, gambling, gaming, lending, and medical devices.
• Smith’s stated interests are AI/ML and computer-vision-led automation, autonomous transportation, industrial automation, HealthTech outside diagnostics/therapeutics, B2B SaaS, and overlooked sectors “ripe for disruption.”
• Playfair says it looks for “visionary founders, with hustle, heart and humility” and is comfortable with pre-revenue and sometimes pre-product companies.
• The firm reserves 60% of its fund for follow-on capital and says it can invest up to £5m per company over time.