Ada Ventures

Each October, AdaCon, our annual global conference, is held on Ada Lovelace Day, now in its sixth year. The AdaCon conference is designed to celebrate and promote the power of an inclusive investment lens. It aims to meaningfully bring together our portfolio founders, LPs, co-investors, and broader team.

I'm attending the Nordic Fe:male Invest Summit next week in Malmö next week. I look forward to connecting with other investors and founders there. If you're attending, let's connect! #NFIS24

We’re thrilled to celebrate four exceptional leaders featured in the Founders Forum Group's 100 Founders to Watch list for 2024. The 100 Founders to Watch list have launched disruptive new businesses, driving climate action, accelerating #AI, innovating across 20+ industries from #femtech to #spacetech, and they’ve raised more than $1.1b between them. Kudos from the entire Ada team to the Ada portfolio founders who were included: 👉Dr. Camilla Easter, CEO of Oxford Medical Products 👉Hana Janebdar, co-founder and CEO of Juno Bio 👉Dr. Natasha Boulding PhD, co-founder and CEO of Low Carbon Materials (LCM) 👉Elissa Brunato, co-founder and CEO of Radiant Matter    Discover the full list here 👉 https://lnkd.in/e3MRxmpR According to Marco De Novellis, Group Editor at Founders Forum Group & Tech Nation, for many founders who identify as women, there are still significant challenges when it comes to raising investment. Startups founded or co-founded by women raise just 10% of total VC funding in Europe, and women-only founded startups raise just 2% of funding in the US. Companies led by Black women receive less than 1%.

In Liverpool yesterday I joined an investor and founder AMA session at Baltic Ventures. Got lots of great questions from founders on a variety of areas, ranging from the abstract to the tactical. Two quick examples and my thoughts on each: 🚀What levels of ambition are VCs looking for and what type of businesses are suitable for venture capital vs. other types of funding? 🤔My take: VCs look for radical opportunities that have the potential to create and capture massive value with speed and scale. My colleague Francesca (Check) Warner at Ada Ventures wrote a great post about this here https://lnkd.in/eN5X5gYb 🤖 Should founders who are using AI in their products lead with “AI” in a pitch deck or should they focus more on the problem/solution and value proposition? 🤔My take: focus on the value you’re creating with the technology rather than “AI” lingo that’s being overused atm. Technical implementations matter only to the extent that they help you create more and better value for the world.

#TeamAda are heading to Slush 🇫🇮 Michael Tefula and Diarra Smith are heading to Helsinki this November for Slush. If you’re an extraordinary talent building a breakthrough idea across climate equity, economic empowerment and healthy ageing contact the team to say hello. As a first cheque investor, we find and fund UK and Nordic technology companies solving the hardest problems we face. You can catch the team in Helsinki pre-Slush for the The Impact Office (TIO)’s second edition of the House of Impact (HOI) which brings together a new breed of family offices. Michael will be speaking on Day 1 on “The Power of Diverse Ownership: Unlocking Value and Innovation through Inclusive Strategies” alongside Andy Farquharson (a better monday) Linn-Cecilie Linnemann (LUMO Labs) and Kasia Piasecki, (European Women in VC).

Is focusing on impact objectives distracting VCs and venture-backable founders from creating real business value? Join our Founding Partner, Matt Penneycard as he hosts a panel at Norrsken Impact week along with Mala Valroy from Industrifonden and Carol Rossborough co-founder and CEO of ESTHER an Ada Fund I investment.  Come say hello if you want to learn more about how we think about pre-seed investments across our investment themes: climate equity, economic empowerment and healthy ageing. Head to the comments to read our Fund II thesis 👇

At Ada our portfolio is 12x more diverse than the average UK venture fund when it comes to gender, race & ethnicity. That doesn’t happen by accident. That’s why it’s lovely to be shortlisted for the Growth Investor Awards “Investing In Women” award, alongside Albion Capital Group LLP, Angel Academe - increasing female investment, Carbon13 and Women Angels of Wales. Through our Inclusive Alpha®, approach, we find and fund winners by embedding inclusion at every stage of the investment process. The results will be announced in November, but in the meantime we want to give a huge shout out to the leaders in the portfolio who are building changing, fast-growth solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Dr. Camilla Easter from Oxford Medical Products, Dr. Julia Fan Li from Micrographia Bio, Dr. Yanwen Chen from PHINXT Robotics, Flexa’s Molly Johnson-Jones, Nat Whalley and Bex Hay from Organise, Elissa Brunato & Cyan Williams from Radiant Matter, Dr. Amber Michelle H. from R.grid, Dee Coakley and Emily Castles from Boundless, Ariana Alexander-Sefre from SPOKE, Simi L. from Yuty®, Anni Noel-Johnson, Hannah Sutcliffe from Moonhub 🚀, Carol Rossborough from ESTHER, Hana Janebdar from Juno Bio, Ritu Soni, Sarah Weller from OPENFORMAT and Dr. Natasha Boulding from Low Carbon Materials (LCM) just to name a few!

Does every start-up need to be an AI startup? Throwback to the discussion at Colorintech's BTF® two weeks ago. Our Founding Partner, Francesca (Check) Warner, shared the stage with Laura McGinnis from Balderton Capital and Dr Jonathan Bean, Co-founder and CEO of Materials Nexus an Ada Fund II investment. If you want to learn more about how we think about pre-seed AI investments across our investment themes: climate equity, economic empowerment and healthy ageing... Head to the comments to read our Framework for Investing in AI-first Companies 👇

👋🏿 Will be in Liverpool on Monday 28 Oct to connect with startups and visit Baltic Ventures—an accelerator levelling the playing field for tech founders outside of London. If you're in the area and are thinking about building something in AI or fintech and with impact, DM me. I'll have a few open slots for coffees. See more about my interest areas in the post below.

Francesca (Check) Warner, Founding Partner at Ada Ventures will be speaking at the With Intelligence - Women's Summits that is launching this December in The Grove in Hertfordshire.  For women, presented and delivered by women, join Check, and 200 women in the industry to share insights, do deals and make long-lasting connections. Head to the comments to find out more: 👇 Join the inaugural Women’s Venture Capital Summit Europe as it brings together both LPs investing in venture, and GPs from both emerging and established firms. Below are just some of the speakers: 👉 Michelle Ashworth, Ada Ventures' Steering Committee Member 👉 Dorothy Chou Venture Partner: AI, Ada Ventures & Director, Public Engagement Lab Google DeepMind 👉 Tamara Savic Senior Investment Manager Export and Investment Fund of Denmark 👉 Kerry Baldwin Co-founder/Managing Partner IQ Capital 👉 Christine Hockley Managing Director British Patient Capital 👉 camilla richards Partner and Head of Investor Relations Atomico 👉 Elodie Donjon Investment Manager European Investment Fund (EIF) 👉 Hannah Leach GP / Co-Director Houghton Street Ventures / VentureESG 👉 Savitri T. LP Investor COG Capital Group 👉 🚀Kinga Stanislawska Stanislawska Founder, European Women in VC & Co-Founder/Managing General Partner Experior VC 👉 Sarah Drinkwater General Partner Common Magic 👉Chloe Dagnell Principal Isomer Capital 👉Carmen Alfonso Rico Founder Cocoa 🍫 Ventures