Amanda Cai spent a decade in investment banking before she built her first company. iContract, launched in 2016, matched professional contractors with recruiters and grew to more than 20,000 users. Running it, she kept hitting the same wall: the people on her platform worked across clients, countries and contracts, and the insurance they needed wasn't built for that.
A contractor landing a new role needed professional indemnity and public liability, fast, in a form the recruiter's compliance team would accept. What they got was a paper form, a broker, a wait and a policy that stopped at the border. Recruiters had the mirror-image problem: thousands of contractors on the books and no clean way to check who was actually covered.
Cai started Jove in 2020 to fix both sides. Contractors and small businesses get a quote and cover in about 30 seconds, valid across borders. Recruiters and workforce platforms plug Jove into their systems via an API and automatically check a contractor's insurance, rather than chasing certificates by email.
Angel Academe's members, the super angel Matt Cooper and our Access EIS fund backed Jove in November 2021 at a £2.5m pre-money valuation. There was no live product. The beta was eleven months away. What Jove had was a founder who had run the marketplace where the problem showed up every day.
In 2024 Explorer Investments led a £3.6m seed round at about £12m pre-money, on a fully diluted basis. By then Jove had signed recruitment and workforce partners including Hays, Magnit and Remote, and had authority to write cover in all 50 US states.
Angel Academe is a UK angel network that invests in female-founded technology companies. Its members put their own money into each round, alongside other angels and funds, and by Jove's round it had backed nearly 60 companies across more than 100 rounds. In a typical year the network sees hundreds of pitches and takes a handful to its members.
The network invests where capital is thin. Our own Companies House analysis of every UK equity round from 2023 to the first quarter of 2026 found all-female founding teams took 6 to 7% of deals and 2.5 to 3.7% of the capital; the British Business Bank's tracker had the capital share at 2% in 2022, unchanged since 2011.
Matt Cooper came into the same round. He's one of a small number of super angels SyndicateRoom follows, the top 0.06% of the UK's roughly 300,000 angels, each of whom has returned 5x or more across at least eight companies with £100,000 or more deployed.
Matt was on Capital One's founding team in Europe, has chaired Octopus Investments and co-founded Exceptional Ventures, which later invested in Jove's 2024 seed round.
Access EIS, our data-driven co-investment fund, followed him in at the same price and on the same terms as him and Angel Academe's members. The British Business Bank is also a shareholder in Jove.
The beta launched in October 2022. Two moments since then have defined much of their growth.
The first came in February 2023, when Jove's contractor insurance checks went live inside Bullhorn, the recruitment software many staffing firms run on. Contractors rarely go looking for insurance; the recruiter asks for it at onboarding. Putting the check inside the recruiter's own system put Jove in place at the moment the need arises, and it is how partners such as Hays, Magnit and Remote came to use it.
The second was capacity. A startup can sell insurance only if an established insurer will carry the risk. In December 2024 Jove gained authority to underwrite with Great American Insurance Group in all 50 US states, the same month it announced the £3.6m seed round. In May 2025 it partnered with Chubb on what it describes as the UK's first digital insurance programme for tech contractors.
With insurers of that size behind it, Jove could build its own cover as well as make existing cover easier to buy: a digital business liability scheme for recruitment and umbrella firms with turnover up to £100m in July 2025, and a combined professional indemnity and business insurance scheme covering 250 occupations across the UK and 30 European countries in November 2025.
Jove has the authority to write cover in every US state. The open question is whether it can turn that authority into policies sold in a market with different regulators, different buyers and much larger incumbents.
Closer to home, Jove's stated plan has two more parts: more recruiters and workforce platforms running its checks inside their own systems, so insurance becomes part of onboarding, and larger businesses, up to €100m turnover, served through the same digital journey.
Angel Academe's angels, Matt Cooper and our Access EIS fund went into Jove in November 2021 at a pre-money valuation of £2.5m. Explorer's 2024 seed round priced the company at about £12m pre-money on a fully diluted basis, which counts the option pool. That is 4.8x growth in the company's valuation in a little over two years. For the investors who came in in 2021, once the new shares are counted, each share is worth 3.9x what they paid; the gap between the two figures is dilution, which is why we quote both. Both are paper values set by a funding round, not a return on capital.
In early-stage portfolios a few companies typically drive most of the return and many return little or nothing, so one company's progress says little about a fund as a whole. If a company fails, EIS loss relief can offset part of the loss, depending on your circumstances.
When | Round | Pre-money valuation | Who invested? |
November 2021 (closed February 2022) | First round, £750,000 | £2.5m | Angel Academe's members, Matt Cooper, Access EIS and other angels |
2024 | Seed, £3.6m | £11m, fully diluted | Explorer Investments (lead), Seed X, Love Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, New Alpha Asset Management, Exceptional Ventures, Start Ventures |
Source: Companies House filings and Sonde data
Angel Academe backed Jove eleven months before it had a product. That early judgement on founders is what Angel Academe EIS Fund 2 invests alongside. Jove is held by Angel Academe's members personally, not by either Angel Academe fund; Fund 2 invests in the rounds the network's members are funding, at the members' price and on their terms, and no company for it is chosen yet.
Its predecessor, Angel Academe EIS Fund I, invested in eight companies between December 2025 and May 2026, so the oldest is about nine months in. All eight are still trading. You can read more about that portfolio here.
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