First Concepts, a workspace for early-stage creative work, has raised £750,000 in a pre-seed round led by Arāya Ventures with participation from Antler and angel investors Jez Jowett, Nathan McDonald, Sean Williams, Sam Winward and Hugo Rodger Brown. Founded less than nine months ago, it builds an AI intelligence layer that applies context and taste to creative pitches.
Agencies can pitch up to 10 times per month and can spend up to £200,000 per pitch, yet up to 40 percent of creative time is lost rebuilding context across fragmented tools. It addresses this by sitting above the stack to coordinate models and creative tools through a shared taste and context layer. The platform combines a Creative DNA taste engine that learns individual and brand judgement, a unified interface that treats context as the source of truth, and infrastructure designed to maintain creative coherence across outputs.
Despite being founded nine months ago, it is already working with over 40 independent creative agencies across London and New York, including Mother and R/GA. Agencies using the platform have reported up to 70 percent time savings for reaching concepts that have ultimately won pitches while improving creative quality using AI.
First Concepts was founded in London by Conor Hoey, Polina Sali and Marin Godechot. Hoey was previously a Product Marketing leader at Amazon where he scaled Amazon Fresh to $500 million in revenue. Sali is a brand and systems designer who has led creative programmes across Europe, and Godechot is a full stack and AI engineer with a decade of experience building mission critical software.
First Concepts has a simple mission to transform creative context from something fragile and ephemeral into a structured, compounding asset. We are building an operating system that understands the value of creative thinking and taste. This will transform creative workflows for teams around the world.
Arāya Ventures is excited to invest in First Concepts because it sits at the intersection of creativity and AI-native infrastructure. The team is reimagining how modern creative work gets done, bringing structure, speed, and intelligence to a process that has long been fragmented. We believe First Concepts has the potential to define the next generation of brand-building tools in an AI-first world.
The founders of First Concepts possess the rare combination of technical depth and creative intuition required to redefine how teams collaborate. By building a taste aware layer that sits above the current AI stack, they are ensuring that human judgment remains the central driver of creative work. We believe First Concepts will become the essential infrastructure for any brand or agency looking to thrive in an AI native world.
