FlairMakers, the digital platform that connects hospitality businesses with talent, has closed a £500,000 pre-seed round.
The round was led by SFC Capital, with participation from angel investors, including existing backers of the company.
FlairMakers is a talent-as-a-service platform purpose-built for hospitality.
It works by connecting hospitality businesses with vetted freelance professionals and 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.
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Raluca Epureanu, co-founder and CEO, has 20 years in hospitality across 30 countries and four continents.
She ran the regional events division for Marriott International in Asia Pacific, responsible for 750 hotels and a workforce of 175,000, and left to build the model she wished had existed.
Alexis Sikorsky, co-founder and CTO, 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.
The investment will fund product and technology development and the expansion of FlairMakers’ UK venue network.
Epureanu said: “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.”
Sikorsky added: “Nobody adopts flexible talent at scale until the boring parts are solved: identity, vetting, compliance, contracting, cross-border payment.
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“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.”
Adam Beveridge, fund principal at SFC Capital, said: “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.”
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