Familiar Faces, New Venture Partners
Ada Ventures has two new Venture Partners joining us to help us find extraordinary talent building breakthrough ideas. You may recognise them!
Dorothy Chou is joining as our new Venture Partner: AI. She has been a friend of Ada Ventures since our founding and spoke last year in our emerging fund manager session at AdaCon 2023. She is the Director of Policy & Public Engagement at Google DeepMind and an Angel investor. She has incredible professional experience, building & scaling some of the most innovative and successful software companies globally, including Head of Public Policy for Consumer Protection & Self Driving at Uber, and Corporate Communications & Public Policy Lead at Dropbox.
Dorothy will mainly be supporting the investment team on due diligence related to how AI is applied within new investments, particularly when comes to its impact, risks, and opportunities. She has already been involved in shaping our framework for investing in AI-first companies.
“Ada’s mission to back startups in socially-relevant spaces that need innovation most — from aging to the economy and climate — is where I see AI having the greatest impact if applied well,” says Dorothy. “Over the past 3 years I’ve invested in 25+ overlooked founders to activate undervalued markets, and I look forward to working alongside Matt, Check and the team to continue making that happen.”
Jasmin Thomas is part of the Scouts Programme at Ada Ventures and is an angel investor in her own right. She is one of our most successful! She has scouted deep-tech start-ups like Materials Nexus and Radiant Matter. She’s a former start-up founder and has extensive experience in recruitment. You can find out more about her here.
Jasmin will be supporting community initiatives, programmes and events, with specific focus on Ada Ventures’ scouts and angels.
“The Venture Partner: Community role will allow me to build on my success as an Ada Ventures’ scout,” says Jasmin. “It’s a great platform to unlock talent across our community of scouts and angels and thereby deliver exceptional deals to the firm.”
Ventures Partners support the core team here at Ada Ventures in rotational roles. Unlike the core team, where recruitment is an open process, Venture Partners are sourced from our extended community, current or former angels, the Scouts programme, LPs and the portfolio.
We select our Venture Partners using our Inclusive Alpha® approach. Here, an inclusive lens is prioritised at every stage of the investment process, from selecting scouts to sourcing the start-ups to strategy and portfolio support and choosing Venture Partners. We believe this drives both investment performance and positive impact. In our first fund, Ada Scouts helped us reach, at seed stage, 10 times more all-female teams and six times more all-Black teams than the UK benchmark.
We want to share best practices and shine a light on people like Jasmin and Dorothy who are doing brilliant work in this space.
Some of our former Venture Partners include Bola Adegbulu, who is now a Principal at Andrew Ng’s s AI Fund in the Bay Area; Kate Glazebrook, now Head of Impact and Operating partner at Blackbird; and Alasdair Thong, co-founder of Ada Fund II company MultiOmic.
We look forward to keeping you updated!
