THE founders of Lastminute. com, Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, have teamed up again to form a new business.

Hoberman has already spent several months recruiting a team for Mydeco.com, which aims to help people decorate their homes. He said it would help customers “make the right choices and get taste validation” – helping them to avoid style faux pas with, for example, their carpet and curtain combinations.

Lane Fox, still recuperating from a near-fatal car crash three years ago, will be a part-time director, working half a day a week. This adds to a portfolio of nonexecutive roles that already includes Channel 4 and, since last week, Marks & Spencer.

Lane Fox was the poster child of Britain’s first generation of dotcom companies in the late 1990s. She and Hoberman turned Lastminute into Britain’s best-known travel website, which attracted frenzied interest when it floated on the stock market at the peak of the technology bubble in 2000.

Investors who bought at flotation suffered heavy losses, but Lastminute survived and expanded internationally before being acquired for £577m two years ago. The takeover made Hoberman about £26m and Lane Fox £13.5m.

Hoberman, who is executive chairman, said Mydeco would be one of the largest technology start-ups in Europe. He said he had raised “a large amount of money” in seed capital – thought to be about £5m.

Backers include Tom Teich-man of the investment firm New Media Spark and Thomas Hoegh of Arts Alliance, both early investors in Lastminute.

The firm has begun to approach retailers and other suppliers that will provide the furniture and household wares sold through Mydeco. Hoberman said he was aiming for “the aspi-rational mass market . . . people who want to improve their home surroundings”.

Hoberman, 38, said Lane Fox, now 34, “was obviously a great partner at Lastminute. She will be very helpful in that we are targeting a large female demographic”.

He stood down as chairman of Lastminute at the end of last year.

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