The first time Tom Blomfield met Silicon Valley's best-known startup school, he was not in the room. His partners in an Oxford student venture, Boso.com, went through Y Combinator. He stayed behind to sit his exams.
Blomfield was born in Hong Kong in 1985 and grew up in Buckinghamshire, attending Dr Challoner's Grammar School in Amersham. Even as a schoolboy he was selling: he built a website for a local estate agent and charged £250 plus £3 for each house listed. Then he went to Oxford to read law.
Collecting money from customers every month is a pain for small businesses.
Boso.com was meant to be an eBay for students. It struggled to raise money, and the YC trip happened without him. It was eventually sold to a Canadian company for what he has described as several million dollars, and became Auctomatic. A success, on paper. But the wound is easy to see: the programme he skipped for a degree became the thing he later chased.
So in January 2011, with Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson, also Oxford students, he started again with a duller problem. Collecting money from customers every month is a pain for small businesses. Cards fail, invoices are chased, direct debit is available mostly to large firms. GoCardless would let anyone do it through code.
This time he did go. Y Combinator invested £125,000, and the doors opened: about £1.5m in 2012 from YC, Google Ventures, Salesforce and Accel.
What almost nobody knows is how slow the early years were compared with the later glory. Blomfield left after about three years, having raised roughly £35m and hired around 100 people, to start Monzo in 2015. GoCardless kept compounding without him: UK launch in 2013, Europe in 2014, the US in 2018, a unicorn round in 2020, and $312m at a $2.1bn valuation in 2022.
The ending was quieter than the rise. In December 2025 Dutch payments firm Mollie agreed to buy GoCardless for about €1.05bn, mostly in stock, with closing expected by mid-2026. The company then served around 100,000 businesses.
For a first-time founder the lesson is in the exam he chose. Missing the programme once did not close the door. The second company worked partly because he had already failed to get through the first.