The London-based talent platform has closed a £500,000 pre-seed round led by SFC Capital, with angel investors including existing backers participating. Terms and valuation were not disclosed.
FlairMakers operates a talent-as-a-service platform connecting hospitality businesses with vetted freelance professionals. Rather than acting purely as a matching marketplace, it takes on training, compliance, contracts, payments and quality assurance for short-term engagements — the administrative layer that has historically kept larger operators from booking freelance staff at scale.
The company was co-founded by Raluca Epureanu, who serves as chief executive, and Alexis Sikorsky, chief technology officer. It is live in the UK and Romania, and was named Hospitality, Tourism and Events StartUp of the Year at the 2026 London UK StartUp Awards.
SFC Capital led the £500,000 round. The firm is one of the more prolific writers of pre-seed cheques in the UK, typically deploying through the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and Enterprise Investment Scheme, which allow individual investors to claim income tax relief on qualifying investments. Angel investors, including backers already on the register, took the remainder of the round. Neither the post-money valuation nor the resulting equity split was disclosed.
Proceeds are earmarked for product and technology development and for expanding the company's network of UK venues.
Epureanu framed the opportunity as a structural gap rather than a supply problem, arguing that hospitality professionals are already working outside the permanent-versus-agency binary and that no one has built the system to support it. Sikorsky pointed to the enterprise barrier directly: a hotel group will not book a freelancer the way it hires a permanent employee until the platform carries the compliance and liability weight itself.
Adam Beveridge of SFC Capital said FlairMakers was the first team the firm had seen treating hospitality staffing as an infrastructure problem rather than a staffing one.
The cheque size places the round at the entry point of the UK funding ladder, where SEIS-eligible pre-seed cheques are the most common form of first institutional money. FlairMakers has not disclosed how much equity the £500,000 bought, nor whether the round was priced or structured as a convertible instrument.
The wider context is a hospitality sector still contending with elevated employment costs following changes to National Insurance contributions, which has sharpened operator interest in variable-cost staffing models. Whether FlairMakers can convert that interest into the venue density needed to justify a priced seed round will determine how quickly it returns to market.
Original source: BusinessCloud
