based in the United Kingdom Ada Ventures is an unusual VC. Instead of just talking about SaaS or AI, he’s after founders who are about inclusion and diversity. Instead of confusing LPs with this methodology, it attracted them, reaching the $80 million mark for the final close of its second fund (it reached $44.7 million as the first closed in October of last year).
LPs in this fund include British Business Bank, University of Edinburgh, Big Society Capital, Legal & General Capital, Atomico, The Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) and Molten Ventures.
In addition, founding investors have backed this new fund, including Taavet Hinrikus (founder of Wise) and Illusian (the family office of Ilkka Paananen, co-founder and CEO of Supercell).
With the second fund, Ada says it will invest between £250,000 and £1.5m in start-ups and start-ups, with a “significant amount” earmarked for follow-on. So far 12 investments have been made from the second fund. These will focus on climate equity, economic empowerment and healthy ageing.
Companies in the second fund so far include Alive, BlackBear, Glowb, Greenwork, Materials Nexus, MultiOmic, Boldr and Juno Bio.
Launched in 2019, Ada Ventures is also on a mission to pay attention to the diversity of the founding teams it supports. To that end, it claims its portfolio is 14 times more diverse than the average UK VC in terms of gender and race/ethnicity. However, take this with a pinch of salt as this is her own research data.
How does one go about sourcing diverse founding teams, a task that so many other VCs seem unable to tackle?
The short answer is a diverse network of Scouts and Angels. The Ada Scout scheme involves almost 100 scouts and a group of 20 ‘Ada Angels’ who each have access to an investment pot of up to £50,000. Ada claims that 30% of the investments from Fund I and Fund II come this way.
Co-founder and CEO Check Warner told me: “This Scout and angel program is made up of people who have never been angel investors, who are new to the venture and very different. People are often leaders in different communities. This produced 10 times more than the number of all-female teams from industry benchmarks.”
Ada also has a program for founders to bring in emergency childcare if they need it, which is provided by a startup called Bubble.
Warner said: “We’ve launched this first European offer for founders around, giving them all back-up emergency care for children. So if your daycare says you have to pick up your kids and you can’t, we let them use that backup and we pay for it. It’s the first time a VC has done this and we think it’s crazy. We believe that by offering inclusive support to founders, we will help them become better business leaders.”
Since diversity is such a core tenet of the Ada offering, I asked Warner what she thought of the recent controversy involving Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures.
Asked by Sifted because Hoxton still didn’t have a female partner, he gave a long and comprehensive answer that amounted to very few female partners worth pursuing in Europe, and US-based ones were better.
Warner responded: “There are 350+ fantastic female VC partners in Europe. There are literally thousands of partners and managers, and I think we all as leaders need to have a collective understanding of our responsibility to honestly attract the best women, men… anyone in the industry. And I think anything that we’re at risk of not doing sets us all back as an industry. And I think those comments may have been taken out of context.”
Did she think Hoxton had a leadership problem herself? “I think every leader of every VC fund should do everything they can to attract the best talent in the industry. There are many great opportunities and ventures. It will increase in the coming years. And I think we all just have to make sure that we make it as attractive as possible to work in VC for anybody.”
