Our Approach
We are serial investors, founders and operators with a deep understanding of the early stage and high growth sector in the UK.
We understand the challenges that founders face in raising capital at Seed to Series A and the complexity of managing insufficient resources to deliver stretch goals, but with the right support around exceptional founders, the evolution required to build teams and processes suitable for scale-up is achievable.
This knowledge and experience enables us to truly partner with our investee companies, to help them take the difficult decisions required to move forward with clarity to scale-up and beyond.
Our intention is build a small but outstanding portfolio of early stage businesses, providing fresh capital and impetus to drive outperformance.
We invest up to £1m in businesses that are not yet at profitable scale where our investment will be the last money in before profitability. We are sector agnostic and founder alignment for us is vital.
How we work
It is important to us that we are involved with our portfolio companies post investment. This is crucial for our and their success given the stage that these companies are at before they are able to reach profitable scale.
What does that involvement mean? At a high level, it means a mixture of strategic, operational and corporate finance advisory. At a practical level, it means solving whatever problems arise as they come through. There are good problems (growth driven) and trickier problems (operational driven) and we know that these arise regularly as companies towards scale.
We expect to speak to our portfolio companies on a weekly basis but in reality we will have multiple touch points with our companies during a typical week.
Ultimately, we want to work like this - we are highly engaged, fully aligned and the founders we work with understand this and value it.
Team
Our partners are deeply embedded in our portfolio companies, supported by our wider network of specialists where required.
David Battey
PARTNER
David founded Lumaca Capital in 2017 to support early stage businesses with capital and strategic advice specialising in Seed to Series A. Recent experience includes an interim MD role at Pot Gang, a fast growth direct to consumer gardening business, and CFO of Nexgen Tree Shelters, an innovative advanced material science company in the forestry sector.
Prior to Lumaca, David worked for a Single Family Office overseeing their early stage investment portfolio, and prior to that head of portfolio at a mid market European PE fund.
David is an ex PwC alumnus and a qualified Chartered Accountant.
Mel Ragnuath
PARTNER
Mel is a qualified Chartered Accountant, trained at PwC in Business Restructuring, and after early career roles as a principal investor at Orbis and 3i, he founded and scaled two venture-backed businesses in the construction technology space, Spiralite and Modulous. At Spiralite, he took the business from 7 to 120 people, in the process entering the Sunday Times Tech Track 100.
He has also advised the boards of Glint, Moneyhub and Iaido on commercial strategy and worked with their management teams to raise capital and to navigate the challenges of taking businesses from start-up to scale-up.
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Portfolio
Dealflowagent is an agentic AI solution for the SME M&A sector, servicing M&A firms, acquisition entrepreneurs and founders seeking pathways to exit. Lumaca invested into the business in March 2024.
Obviously’s seamless intangible asset solution includes powerful IP legal management software, strategic business analysis, real-time data collection and processing, offline intelligence gathering and cutting edge vision AI. Lumaca led the investment into Obviously in July 2024
Wednesday’s Domaine’s range of non alcoholic wines are sold in both on and off trade as well as direct to consumer. Lumaca invested into the business in May 2025.
Investors
Our capital is a mixture of committed and discretionary and we are open to conversations with investors who would like to build a diversified portfolio of assets in early stage alongside us.
Please do reach out to either David or Mel directly through the links in their bios
Founders
Please contact us directly by EMAIL or through the contact form below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. We can help find a solution to your specific needs.