10 Black Early Stage Investors in Europe

The global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 served as a magnifying glass on racial injustice around the world. It brought attention to systemic prejudice and discrimination in criminal justice systems, health care systems, schools, and even the homogenous European tech ecosystem.

According to Atomico, 61% of Black/African/Caribbean tech workers believe their background makes it harder to succeed in the European tech industry. It should then not come as a surprise that only 0.2% of total capital invested in UK tech between 2009–2019 went to black founding teams. In Germany, according to research carried out by Viet Le, a partner at La Famiglia VC, 85% of venture capital professionals in Germany are male, and 93% of the VCs are white.

The numbers are bleak; the lack of diversity in early-stage investors affects everyone because it determines who receives investment and therefore what products and services we use. Despite this lack, more underrepresented black investors are emerging and making sure that black people on the European continent not only have a seat at the table for financing the region’s future, but that black founders, who are currently underserved and underestimated, are seen as the innovators they are.

Black investors exist and deserve recognition for the work they do. In that spirit, here’s our list of 10 Black Investors in Europe who are helping to reshape the world of venture and the world as a whole:

• Yvonne Bajela: Bajela is a founding member and principal at Impact X Capital Partners, a London-based venture capital firm. Impact X is black-founded and black-led. The firm’s mission is to create access for underrepresented founders with compelling business models. In doing so, they create a uniquely differentiated deal flow that generates returns for their investors. Previously, Bajela worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, Hymans Robertson LLP, and as a senior investment manager at Mitsui & Co.
• Diarra Smith: Smith is an experienced operator with noteworthy capabilities across the broad spectrum of business. He is a venture partner at Ada Ventures, a $50m seed-stage fund looking to invest in UK founders building businesses for the underserved including but not limited to: women, parents, LGBT people, and the ageing.
• Vera Elizabeth Baker: Vera Baker is an operator, entrepreneur, and investor pushing for diversity in the EU technology ecosystem. She is a venture partner at the Jua Fund, an early-stage, Pan-African, venture capital fund that invests capital in extraordinary entrepreneurs at seed stage. She is also an angel investor at Atomico whilst also mentoring underrepresented founders across Europe.
• Judith Dada: Judith Dada is a partner at La Famiglia VC, a VC fund backed by a “family” of successful digital entrepreneurs, angels, family businesses, and industry leaders. La Famiglia writes checks of up to €1.5 million for European startups that make use of technology to tackle important problems within industry. Dada is one of the youngest black women venture partners working in VC in all of Europe.
• Fabrice Do Rego: Do Rego, an ex-analyst at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, is the co-founder and managing director of The Blueprint VC. The Blueprint VC is an early-stage venture capital firm. Its mission is to invest in high-profile diverse founders in the Benelux region and France. With The Blueprint, Do Rego is committed to creating a new generation of role models by investing in underrepresented founders.
• Charmaine Hayden: Before becoming a VC, Hayden was a founder and angel investor. As a founder, she built two incredibly popular diversity brands. One of them is a five-time award-winning ethnic/curve model agency called Face4music, and the other is Goal Digger Power Circle — a hub for female entrepreneurs. After making some angel investments and speaking to diverse founders about their needs and experiences, she decided to become a VC herself. As founder and managing partner at Good Soil VC, she is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in startups whose founders are women, people of color, LGBT or otherwise disenfranchised.
• Olivier Cottin: Cottin is growth partner at Volpe Ventures, a VC firm determined to back and support the founders, teams, and visionaries that will shape the future of our world. With over 12 years of experience in consumer and enterprise-facing products/services, responsive web services, native mobile apps and e-commerce, utilities, and B2B SaaS platforms, Cottin brings his unique insights to the world of VC, helping founders shatter the traditional barriers to growth and capital.
• Andy Davis: Andy Davis is a former angel investor at Atomico and ex-Director of Backstage Capital London. Today, Davis leads the 10x10 group which launched the 10x10 Fund with an open invitation to commit a minimum of £1,000 to be invested in Black founders. Davis is leading efforts to make European investing more diverse and inclusive through bringing attention to the underrepresented and providing support to Black founders.
• Jessye Joyce Mouangué Bimono: Bimono is the founder of the Audax Venture Capital Summit, a one-day summit that hosted 36 panelists including 12 fund managers with millions of euros AUM and CEOs of startups ranging from pre-seed to growth stage. As an emerging fund manager at Audax Ventures, Bimono believes that diverse tech entrepreneurs are the most untapped and underserved asset management class in Europe. She primarily leads Audax Alliance, the capital enablement platform backbone of her investment activities. She enables diverse founders to access European VCs, normalizing investment allocation into Black & PoC led seed-stage tech ventures across fintech and software verticals.
• Jeffrey Williams: Williams is a senior investment manager at ROM Utrecht Region where he invests in early and late-stage health, digital, and sustainability start-ups. Prior to his career in VC, Williams was a business analyst at the DSM Innovation Centre where he was responsible for spotting future growth areas and scouting for new technologies. He later joined Brightlands Venture Partners as an associate and where he then became investment manager.

Impact Shakers is collecting data on black founders and investors, if you would like to join as a partner in our upcoming report on the BeNeLux, please send us a note at hello@impactshakers.com.