FlairMakers, a talent-as-a-service platform built for hospitality, has closed a £500,000 pre-seed round led by SFC Capital, with participation from angel investors, including existing backers of the company. The investment will fund product and technology development and the expansion of FlairMakers' UK venue network.
Connecting hospitality businesses with vetted freelance professionals, from the floor to the boardroom, FlairMakers handles everything behind it: training, compliance, contracts, payments and quality. The platform is live in the UK and Romania, and was named Hospitality, Tourism & Events StartUp of the Year at the 2026 London UK StartUp Awards.
The Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed counts 2.046 million UK freelancers in the top three occupational skill groups, and hospitality's most experienced people are already among them, working through word of mouth because the industry has never built a system to support it at global scale. Demand runs both ways: 83% of hospitality employees rate flexible hours as an important benefit, yet only a third of UK employers of frontline workers offer flexibility in scheduling shifts and rotas, in a sector employing 3.6 million people in the UK.
Chief executive Raluca Epureanu has 20 years in hospitality across 30 countries and four continents, and ran the regional events division for Marriott International in Asia Pacific, responsible for 750 hotels and a workforce of 175,000. Co-founder and CTO Alexis Sikorsky is a serial entrepreneur who built and exited a banking software business in a nine-figure transaction and is the bestselling author of Cashing Out.
Hospitality has always assumed there are two ways to work: employment or agencies. There is a third, and the industry's best professionals are already living it, the same sommelier working shifts across three venues, teaching wine-tasting classes and consulting on wine lists. One skill set, several income streams. Nobody built the system that makes that work, so it runs on WhatsApp groups and favours. We are building it. The industry keeps asking how to get people back. The answer is to stop asking them to fit a model they've already rejected.
I have built infrastructure for a regulated industry before, and the lesson transfers. Nobody adopts flexible talent at scale until the boring parts are solved: identity, vetting, compliance, contracting, cross-border payment. A hotel group will not book a freelancer the way it hires a permanent employee until the platform carries that weight for them. This round funds exactly that layer, so a venue in London and a venue in Bucharest run on the same rails.
The best pre-seed investments back shifts already underway, and hospitality's move to portfolio careers is exactly that. FlairMakers is the first team we've seen treating it as an infrastructure problem, not a staffing one. Raluca and Alexis have the right backgrounds to tackle this issue, and we look forward to being on the journey with them.
I've seen this shift in other industries throughout my career in human capital: true professionals moving to portfolio careers, businesses needing flexible access to vetted talent. Hospitality is next. Most platforms stop at matching; FlairMakers went further and built the full infrastructure: training, compliance, payments and quality to actually own it. That's why I backed them from day one.
