Ada Ventures — 5 Years in
2024 was a year of huge growth here at Ada Ventures.
In 2023 we coined Inclusive Alpha®, an investment approach where an inclusive lens is prioritised in every part of the investment process.
And in 2024 we put it into practice. Inclusive Alpha® was central to everything we did here at Ada Ventures this year, from new investments to great hires, increased transparency and free childcare for founders. We were recognised with an award for our innovative approach to inclusive support too.
The pace did not let up: after having my second baby Lyra in November 2023 I spent a month in San Francisco in January with my family getting immersed in the ecosystem there and hosting a couple of events for portfolio companies and funds
Read on for what we achieved in 2024, and for some learnings along the way.
Ada wrapped… stats from this year:
We closed Fund II oversubscribed £63m and announced it in TechCrunch. We are backed by LPs including the British Business Bank, The University of Edinburgh, Big Society Capital, Legal & General Capital, Atomico, The Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) and Molten Ventures.
New investments made: £8 million deployed in 13 new investments including new materials company Radiant Matter, Tract, which uses AI to source potential building sites and acquire planning permissions, robotics software company PHINXT Robotics and climate-tech Low Carbon Materials.
Average cheque size £615k
Investment opportunities we’ve screened this year: 1,698
Investment opportunities found by our Scouts this year: 216
Investments made in those scouted opportunities: 5
Angel deals completed: 4
The Ada Ventures team continues to grow
We’ll start with the personal news: two babies — Xun welcomed her beautiful twins in July and three house moves for Emma, Xun and Michael! Emma Richards, Head of Finance, celebrates her “Ada-versary” today and 12 months with us.
We welcomed Mike Tefula as Principal and Head of Product. He’s hit the ground running, leading two deals in his first six months, developing innovations like AdaGPT and most recently mapping 130+ AI Agent companies backed by Y-Combinator.
We also grew our immediate network which is vital to supporting our portfolio and finding the best talent. We welcomed Jasmin Thomas as a Venture Partner to support with community-driven investing. Jasmin started as an Ada Scout and has successfully scouted Radiant Matter and MatNex. To support with people and talent, Ben Norton came on board as a Venture Partner.
We also worked with Shanika Amarasekara MBE, former Chief Impact Officer at British Business Bank, as a Venture Partner for Impact. We were thrilled to also welcome the Director of Policy & Public Engagement at Google DeepMind, Dorothy Chou as a Venture Partner in AI. She has already been involved in shaping our framework for investing in AI-first companies.
In May, we also launched our first European Angel programme with 10 investors in Denmark. They are scale-up operators, founders and community leaders and are investing in Danish companies with cheques of up to 200,000 DKK per investment. In March 2024 we brough our second UK Ada Angels together at Google to celebrate a new phase of the programme.
We also started a series of dinners to nurture conversations and relationships between some amazing diverse emerging fund managers and established LPs in our network. It’s part of our goal to catalyse VC to make it more inclusive: signs are that a more diverse fund management team leads to more diversity in deals (see this research from BCG). You can find some best practices here.
It was also a year of travel. We were spotted at Startup Aarhus, and even hosted an after party. In April, Matt and I went to Boston to meet with key GPs and LPs and I very much enjoyed cheering Matt on as he ran the iconic Boston Marathon! (Matt pictured here mid run)!
We also popped into NYC on that trip to spend time with Ahmed Medhat, founder of Occam AI, now part of the Ada Ventures portfolio. We also went to SuperVenture, Katapult Future Fest, Latitude 360, TechBBQ and Slush in Finland. We were proud to be a sponsor of the Black Tech Festival. I have just come back from speaking at the inaugural Women’s Venture Capital Summit Europe.
Portfolio updates
One of my favourite parts of being a VC is working closely with portfolio companies as they develop the breakthrough, pioneering technologies and bring them to customers. And this year, the start-ups we’ve backed did not disappoint.
MatNex used AI to develop a magnet free of rare earth elements. This was reported in the national press as it’s an advance that was made in record time and could revolutionise clean energy production.
While in November, MultiOmic Health discovered novel endotypes and biomarkers for diabetic kidney disease. This will help predict different progression rates and timelines at an early stage of the disease to enable a shift from reactive to proactive care.
Carbometrics helped author a ground-breaking paper published in Nature in October. It has been a long-standing goal among scientists to engineer a glucose-sensitive insulin that can auto-adjust according to ambient glucose levels in the patient’s blood. Their research is a step on the way to accomplishing that.
Research Grid announced in November that they raised $6.5 million to make clinical trials admin-free. We’ve backed Dr Amber Hill since day one and we’re proud to still be on this journey with her. The clinical trials market is ripe for distribution.
MOONHUB announced an investment of $1.4m led by Danish VC Unconventional Ventures.
We refined our offering
Over this year, portfolio dinners and the annual AdaCon were chances for portfolio founders, LPs, co-investors, and the broader team to come together. We’ve assembled some exceptional talent. And we’re always talking to them to refine the support we provide for pre-seed companies.
And what is that offering? Ada Ventures finds and funds extraordinary talent building breakthrough ideas for the hardest problems we face. We want to invest in companies tackling healthy ageing, climate change, and economic empowerment. But what do we mean by that? We’ve come up with three thesis guides for our own internal thought process. Hopefully it will make it easier for founders to understand what we’re looking for. We also brought this to life by hosting the first Ada Ventures Health Equity dinner, with portfolio founders, LPs, and investors, to continue discussing the healthy ageing thesis.
Most companies pitching to us this year have had AI as a key part of the value proposition. So we felt that we needed to lay out in our Ada Ventures Framework for Investing in AI-first Companies why we at Ada are interested in AI-first approaches and how they relate to Inclusive Alpha®.
Talking about AI, in November we launched AdaGPT, the brainchild of Head of Product Michael. AdaGPT offers founders instant feedback on their decks — creating an anonymous, free-to-access sounding board for any founder to use before they approach us. You can read about it in TechEU.
We also launched a talent network, with the guidance of our new Venture Partner Ben Norton, who has some serious experience in the field. He led People & Product hiring at JBM, and has top tier search firm experience across Egon Zehnder, The Up Group and The Big Search. The Ada Ventures Talent Network helps us support portfolio companies in finding exceptional and diverse talent for key roles. Join it here.
Delivering more widely on Inclusive Alpha®
In the recent Atomico State of European Tech report data revealed that the number of all-women founding teams securing VC funding at pre-seed, dropped to a paltry 4.9% between 2021–2024. If you look at 2017–2020, it was still only at 13.2% — a number that in no way represents the talent out there.
In November we released the first ever Ada Ventures Impact Report. It’s part of our bid to be as transparent as possible about how we’re building Ada Ventures and how we make our investment decisions. It means we can be held to account but also, hopefully, inspire other VCs to do the same.
Please read the Impact Report for more diversity stats for our portfolio, including:
👉78% of Fund I and II companies have an underrepresented founder
👉56% have a woman founder (vs 28% of wider market — IWC 2024)
👉76% have a founder from an ethnic minority
The Impact Report also detailed the success of the Bubble partnership, where we offer working founders up to 40 hours of free back-up childcare a year. 30% of eligible founders in the portfolio have already used the service and we plan to expand and extend the scheme in 2025. Diarra, Head of Portfolio and Brand, wrote about how childcare challenges may be stopping founders from scaling — backed up by data from the Rose Review Report on Female Entrepreneurship. It showed that primary care responsibilities remained the biggest barrier for female founders with 46% of “mum entrepreneurs” identifying it as a “very important” or “important” barrier to growing businesses.
I am personally very invested in making sure that Venture Capital is an industry that is welcoming and genuinely inclusive for parents. I contributed to the WVC:E Investing in Women: The Untold Stories of Mothers in VC research. I also wrote in Forbes about how childcare is VC’s most overlooked investment. I think the Bubble service, alongside our Spill mental health offering, is a reason why 82% of founders rated Ada Ventures as welcoming and inclusive to people from diverse backgrounds with diverse needs (compared to -64% in the VC industry as a whole). Ada Ventures also achieved a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 90+ among founders.
I was appointed to the High Growth Women Led Taskforce in February 2022, with Anne Boden as Chair. Our findings and recommendations were published in February 2024 in the Women-led high-growth enterprise taskforce report. You can read it here.
The thinking we did
First, shout out to the team. Their thinking is key to our goal of driving wider impact and systematic change in the industry. I loved this interview with Diarra by his coach Genevieve Nathwani in Systems Changers — he talks about his unique background and how he thinks about the impact he was to drive within the industry.
Michael provided some incredible thought leadership — including this piece on the social good of automation. He also wrote about AI agents.
Ed Zimmerman, one of our LPs and member of Ada’s advisory board since 2019, gave a talk about the pitfalls of later-stage rounds — and Diarra provided a summary what seed and early-stage VCs, founders, family offices, angel investors and LPs need to know when the price per share dips below previous rounds.
Matt was interviewed by Maddyness, and gave one piece of advice founders should heed. He also wrote in UKTN about how too many leading tech firms are snapped up by overseas acquirers or public markets and what the government needs to do to incentivise start-ups to scale up in Britain.
And I talked with Manchester-based Martin SFP Bryant in PreSeed Now about how to look beyond the stereotypical pattern of a tech founder.
Looking forward to 2025
As we look forward to the end of the year, we’ll be launching our new website which will really showcase our vision, our founders, our offering and where we want to take Inclusive Alpha®.
