Ada Ventures is an inclusive venture firm that finds and funds extraordinary talent-building breakthrough ideas for the hardest problems we face. They are investing £250,000 – £1.5mn in UK technology companies across climate equity, economic empowerment and healthy aging. Ada Ventures believes a commitment to backing ‘alpha’ ideas and founders can coexist with a commitment to inclusion, with the latter actively improving the former. This approach, which we are calling “Inclusive Alpha®”, describes an investment strategy’s ability to beat the market using funds derived from an inclusive infrastructure and investing approach. Inclusive Alpha doesn’t just focus on the diversity of founding teams that receive investment, it covers the ‘end to end’ of Ada’s investment process and philosophy – from their own team, to how they find founders, select investments, support founders after investment and the underlying investment strategy. The team at Ada Ventures recently released a Report on Women in UK Venture Capital which has actively raised awareness and driven institutional change in the United Kingdom and other major Venture Capital cities. Based on 2023 data, the financial performance of European VC funds increased with higher representation of women in senior management teams. VC funds managed by mixed teams also show a higher annual internal rate of return.

Sie Ventures is a trusted capital platform for female (co-) founded businesses and investors in Europe. Their ultimate goal is to close the gender funding gap by providing female founders with better access to capital, network, experienced founders and community.  As former founders and investors, the founding team has noted the vast opportunity in backing diverse founding teams, particularly women. Despite this, only 2% of venture capital funding is secured by female-founded teams. They launched Sie Ventures to address this and provide female founders with equal access – to capital and network – as well as demystify the fundraising process. They bring more transparency to venture capital, to unlock opportunities for exceptional founders and drive more wealth into the hands of women – both as investors and entrepreneurs. Since 2020 they have vetted 115 female-founded companies, raised £85m+, generated 120 investments from the Sie Investor Community, made 12 investments by Sie Syndicate, with 90% of Sie founders having raised funding.

Diversity VC is working with entrepreneurs, investors and universities in order to create an industry that is free from bias across their locations in the US and UK. They are setting a global benchmark for Diversity and are on a mission to ensure that every venture fund has the understanding, tools and resources to promote D&I in their own firms, and also the companies they fund. Their community so far includes 100 funds worldwide committed to increasing diversity and inclusion in the venture capital ecosystem. They have also developed the Diversity VC Standard, a diagnostic tool and resource library for funds with guidance on how to improve internal operations, deal flow, and portfolio management. They have also launched Future VC (futurevc.com), an internship program giving underrepresented talent on-the-job experience in the industry and a lifelong network for support and investigate and reports on diversity in the VC industry in order to educate those within and outside the industry on this topic and make recommendations on how to tackle the issues.

Ananda Impact Ventures is an impact-focused venture capital fund investing in sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing ecological and social challenges. Operating with a pan-European investment scope, Ananda has €200M AUM across four core impact funds, including its latest €108M fund, to address the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and 7 Planetary Boundaries.

Ananda specialises in early-stage impact-driven technology companies in DACH, the UK, Benelux and the Nordics across areas such as biodiversity and climate solutions, health, education, biotech, ageing populations, spacetech and sustainable consumption. Its active portfolio of 35 companies includes NatureMetrics (biodiversity monitoring and assessment), Closed Loop Medicine (personalised medicine with precision dosing), OroraTech (space-based wildfire detection and monitoring) and IESO Digital Health (online psychotherapy).

One of the first European impact VC fund, Ananda was co-founded in Munich in 2009 by Johannes Weber, a serial entrepreneur and Florian Erber, an entrepreneur and former VC with over twenty years of startup and VC experience. The team now consists of twenty people, many of whom have broad experiences of founding their own businesses.