How LeoTrace found the right pre-seed investors through ThatRound

LeoTrace closed a £1.45m pre-seed round backed by Aligned Syndicate, Leeds Angels, Outward VC, Twin Path Ventures, Golden Egg Check, Arx Ventures, and Essink Family Office. Founder Patrick Rycroft built part of that line-up deliberately through ThatRound, choosing the right investors rather than chasing more conversations.

Securing code before it ever ships

LeoTrace is a computer and network security company built for a world where AI agents write most of the code.

Patrick Rycroft, the company’s co-founder and CEO, and the founding team have spent more than 40 years in the space. Existing security tools catch problems only after a developer has already committed the code, he says, and that’s now too slow, because humans can’t review machine-generated code at the speed it’s produced.

LeoTrace sits inside the coding agent itself and blocks insecure code as it’s written, so the vulnerability never makes it into a commit at all. Patrick says the company currently intervenes on just over a quarter of all agentic coding prompts it sees, stopping that code before it ever reaches production.

“At the moment, models can’t verify themselves. So when a bank, for example, ships machine-written code into production, that’s on the model’s word that it’s safe.” Patrick explains.

As coding agents get more capable, he argues, fewer humans check their output, which makes the problem worse rather than better. LeoTrace’s job is to be the check that sits inside that process, so an organisation can actually show its AI-assisted development is secure.
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‍“Advances in agentic coding are transforming the software development lifecycle, but they’re also creating a new generation of security challenges that cost developers time and consume expensive compute to resolve. LeoTrace removes that trade-off, addressing security risks without sacrificing the productivity gains AI brings. That’s a rare combination, and exactly what CISOs are asking for right now.”
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— Rob and Maarten, Arx Ventures

Why raising the traditional way wasn’t working

Before LeoTrace went looking for investors, Patrick and his team had already built a working prototype and tested it across more than 50 benchmark code sets to prove the underlying science held up.

What they hadn’t done yet was raise the money to prove that at scale: independent validation on different code bases, a research and engineering team, and the compliance groundwork, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and Cyber Essentials, that enterprise customers expect.

LeoTrace’s first funding came from two strategic angels already known to the team, buying enough runway to avoid rushing the process. When it came time to look further afield, the usual route, cold outreach to angels and syndicates, chasing recommendations and introductions, proved to be exactly the kind of time drain he wanted to avoid.

Questions a strong investor would ask

Signing up wasn’t the “black hole” of filling in forms on VC websites that go nowhere, he says. There was no wasted admin. The application itself did some of the thinking for him: working through it meant setting out his thesis, his objections and his reason for raising in a way that mirrored what a strong investor would actually ask.

The setup process was quick, he says, and the most useful part was the feedback: before his pitch page went live, the ThatRound team pushed back and told him to simplify how he explained the business.

“It wasn’t just like a commercial gain for them as an organisation,” he says. That, and the price, were what struck him first.

The matches

Rather than spend days vetting every angel or syndicate himself, Patrick found his shortlist already narrowed to investors relevant to his sector and stage, and ThatRound flagged which of his own picks weren’t a fit and why.

“It more gave me that single pane of glass which had already been screened. To me, the whole process was actually more like they were an extension of your own team.”

The conversations

None of the conversations felt wasted: every one ended in an offer, a term sheet, or a discussion he chose to walk away from himself. Even the couple that didn’t convert led directly to other, better-fitting introductions elsewhere, including tickets in the region of half a million pounds each.

His first conversation with an investor from the Aligned Syndicate went from introduction to a committed cheque in under 72 hours.

Harrison Faull, the syndicate's co-founder, puts that down to the diligence already being done,"LeoTrace's team has a genuinely complementary mix of technical and sales talent, with deep sector experience in a market crying out for a solution. ThatRound made the diligence easy, surfacing exactly what I care about when screening a startup, and I was investing alongside strong co-investors including Twin Path Ventures and Outward VC."

Other investors saw the same signals. Mark Roberts, Chair of Leeds Angels: "I was struck by Patrick's convincing pitch and articulation of the problem. Knowing that Florian was the person banks turned to for help with security questions was also a key driver of our belief that they could solve this problem. I also think the 'inline QC' capability for agentic coding is a problem that's only going to get bigger! The follow-up call with our D/D was also exceptionally well handled."

Building the investor ‘squad’

For Patrick, the single biggest difference in raising through ThatRound wasn’t speed or the number of introductions. It was the range.

“Our whole hypothesis was we wanted a squad of investors,” he says. That meant building a deliberate mix:

• High-net-worth individuals able to move fast
• Funds with deep tech experience in AI
• Experienced angels willing to support when needed

Building that mix meant being honest about what he didn’t yet know about the wider investment landscape. “It’s hard, when you’re a first-time founder, to be opening your eyes to the broader world of capital,” he says. He treats the investor relationship as a long-term one, worth taking the time to get right rather than accepting the first offer on the table.

‍"I’ve been writing code myself, and as AI speeds up development, keeping that code secure will only get harder. The team’s deep security expertise could give them a strong moat: proprietary technology built on practical knowledge that’s difficult to replicate and can’t simply be found online. Very early stage, but significant upside."

— Chang Choon Fah, Venture Scout at Leeds Angels

Lessons for founders

What surprised Patrick most was how connected the UK’s early-stage investment community turned out to be. At one point, several of the investors he’d been introduced to ended up sitting around the same table at an industry dinner. “It just shows how tight-knit” the market is, he says, and how much it changes the odds of finding the right fit rather than just more contacts.

His advice to other founders considering ThatRound:

• Don’t treat it as a shortcut past knowing your own business and raising strategy
• Treat it as a way to spend your limited time on the conversations that are actually worth having

£1.45m raised

LeoTrace closed its pre-seed round at £1.45m, with investment from Aligned Syndicate, Leeds Angels, Outward VC, Twin Path Ventures, Golden Egg Check, Arx Ventures, and Essink Family Office. Two of those introductions, Aligned Syndicate and Leeds Angels, came directly through ThatRound, and LeoTrace received term sheets from several others found via the platform. Patrick says the return went well beyond the cheques themselves.

“It was by far the strongest ROI we’ve had, in terms of knowledge learned, and the network we’ve been able to build off the back of it, not just the actual investment itself. I couldn’t recommend it (ThatRound) more.”
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 — Patrick Rycroft, Founder & CEO, LeoTrace

Learn more about LeoTrace at leotrace.io, or follow the company on LinkedIn.