Ada Ventures

Today Balderton launches Built in Europe, a campaign celebrating exactly that. Last year according to Dealroom.co, Europe’s private unicorns and thoroughbreds accounted for $7 trillion in combined enterprise value.  Value created by founders, competing globally and winning. Built in Europe is not just a celebration of the people already in the room. It is a call to the next wave of talent.  To the operator sitting in corporate biding their time. To the engineer building on evenings and weekends. To the future founder wondering if they need to wait. Our message is simple. Now is the time to build something world class. Our mission is to invest in the best, not just the best-connected. Seeing founders we’ve backed stand alongside more than 100 others building the future of the continent is exactly the kind of picture we want the next wave to see. If that is you, BuiltInEurope.com is where to start. You can see the founders involved and find open roles at startups across Europe. Backed by Ada, #BuiltInEurope Saaras building AI agents that introduce remarkable people to remarkable companies | Jack & Jill Jason building the precision platform for immune health | OtoImmune Rachael building the AI workforce infrastructure for social care | Lifted Jonathan accelerating materials innovation | MatNex Daniel and Jason building voice AI for patient contact across the NHS | InTouchNow AI Amber building the automation engine for admin free clinical trials | Research Grid (R.grid) Deepak making dentistry affordable, accessible & available | Toothfairy ™ Dami and Hannah building the intelligence layer for physical security | MOONHUB This is what building in Europe looks like, and there is room for more.

Oxford Medical Products featured on ITV News tonight at 7pm! 📺 Link to the article and video : https://lnkd.in/eG9QQUQz ITV called it "a seismic change." We believe they're right. Sirona is a drug-free, once-daily hydrogel pill that expands in the stomach to mechanically suppress appetite. No pharmacology. No injections. After several days, it breaks down and passes naturally through the body, just like food. In clinical trials, participants on Sirona consumed an average of 400 fewer calories per day compared to placebo. Individuals with class I obesity (BMI 30-35) achieved 6.4% total body weight loss at 24 weeks, with no signs of plateauing. To date, over 9,500 Sirona pills have been dosed and demonstrated a strong safety and tolerability profile. In our randomized, placebo-controlled trial, not a single serious adverse event was reported. Sirona is designed to be complementary to GLP-1 therapies, addressing the gaps they leave: 1️⃣ Before GLP-1s: an early intervention for individuals classed as overweight (BMI 25–35), who are largely ineligible for the weight loss drugs, helping them return to a healthy weight and preventing progression into obesity. 2️⃣ After GLP-1s: supporting individuals transitioning off GLP-1s to maintain their new weight and prevent weight regain 3️⃣ Instead of GLP-1s: an accessible option for those who cannot tolerate or afford pharmacological treatment 📺  Watch the full feature on ITV News tonight at 7pm! Thank you to @Rebecca Barry and the ITV News team for spending the day with us at OMP HQ. #Sirona #OxfordMedicalProducts #Obesity #WeightManagement #Medtech #GLP1 #HealthInnovation

Open Source AI Hackathon: Build Freely, Deploy Anywhere. On 3rd June, we're heading to Mandal, Norway to back the builders shaping what comes next. The era of black-box AI controlled by a handful of providers is ending. Regulation is catching up, users are waking up, and open-source models have closed the gap on their proprietary counterparts. One day. Seven hours of building. One question: what can you build when AI is open, inspectable, and yours to deploy? The winning team walks away with a £150,000 investment (T&Cs apply). Judging the work: Lead Judge Michael Tefula, Principal & Head of Product at Ada Ventures Supporting Judges Jørgen Veiby, Startuplab Alexander Martynau, NVIDIA Anjali Bhatnagar, Ada Ventures Ane Tolnes Haugdal, Investinor Then on 4th June, Michael will be leading the AI Native roundtable at Forge 1 as part of The Foundry, joining a brilliant line-up of founders, investors and operators across the Norwegian ecosystem. Huge thanks to our partners for helping to make this happen: Startuplab, Ole Henrik Golf & The Foundry, Impact StartUp Norge, Insj UiO, 6AM, Alna Gründerhub, CAIR, University of Agder (UiA), Kjeller Innovasjon AS, and SEFiO.

Big news from the portfolio: Aerska takes fundraising to $70m in seven months with fresh investment. Read the story in the Business Post 👇 in the comments below. We're proud that Ada was Aerska’s first institutional investor, investing at the end of 2024, before some of the leading health-tech investors in the world, because we were blown away by the team and their vision to redefine how neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are treated. Read Francesca (Check) Warner why we invested piece 👇 in the comments below. Co-founded by Jack O'Meara (previously Ochre Bio), Stuart Milstein (a pioneer in RNA delivery), and David Hardwicke, Aerska is built on three pillars: next-generation RNA medicines, systemic administration with targeted brain delivery, and a precision approach that could one day shift neurology from treatment to prevention. RNAi has already transformed how we treat liver and cardiometabolic disease. Aerska is unlocking that same potential for the central nervous system, building on decades of advances in brain shuttle technology to get RNA medicines across the blood-brain barrier. The initial focus is on genetic forms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, with applications that could extend much further. Headquartered at Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, Aerska is backed by an exceptional group of investors including the EQT Group Dementia Fund, age1, Iaso Ventures, BACKED VC, BlueYard Capital, Kerna Ventures, Norrsken and Speedinvest. Huge congratulations to Jack, Stuart, David, and the whole team. Excited to see what's ahead.

Two good things for Ada Ventures portfolio company Valla this week. 1. Mapped by Sifted as one of 60+ European legaltech startups evolving how legal work gets done. 2. Cited in a new Bloomsbury publication on AI in the Employment Tribunal process. The data point that matters: in 88% of cases, Valla's AI assessment of a client's legal claims matches the final report after human review. Substantially more accurate than decision-tree models. 👇 Links in the comments below The vision Danae Shell is building: all consumer legal work in the Western world will delivered by the Valla brand. When most people don't understand what 'discrimination' means in a legal context, £149 and an hour with a Valla coach is what access to justice actually looks like. Proud to back this one. Congrats Danae and team

Just spoke to Michelle Fleury live on BBC Business US about the Musk vs Altman law suit being thrown out and what it means for founders in AI and Governance. The law suit was thrown out for a timing issue - Musk didn't file his claim in time, but it doesn't tell us much about the underlying dispute about Governance, power and control. I think the key takeaways for founders and investors in AI companies - given the unprecedented power of this technology - are: - Be cautious about relying on one model company - especially for a critical part of your product - Founders building in healthcare, energy, security or defence should be particularly mindful of which models they bake into their product - Do due diligence on the values of the founders and the governance structures of key suppliers, business partners and potential acquirers. In many cases these are buried in legalese but these will reveal a lot about what happens when something goes wrong or in a dispute - When you set up your company set up checks and balances too - a board, an advisory committee, a system where employees can raise concerns. - Talk openly to your investors about the risks in your product and your strategy, particularly in relation to AI - bias, energy consumption, platform dependency, job displacement, discrimination, misinformation, hallucination - build a risk register and review it every month with your investors and board. We are thinking deeply about this at Ada Ventures and have built some internal tools to assess risks of AI and strength of Governance. If founders get this part right companies will grow faster and not be held back by customer backlash or law suits like this one. Xun Ning Choong Diarra Smith Matt Penneycard Michael Tefula Benjamin Norton Emma Richards Ed Zimmerman Charles Hudson Marta Sjögren. Check out some of the articles and resources in the link below if you want to dig deeper...

I'm really pleased to share that we've co-led a €1.5m round into Alcolase, the Danish-British biotech building the world's first enzyme system that breaks down alcohol in the stomach, before it enters the bloodstream. We're joined in the round by Delphinus Venture Capital, Antler, Manigoff Invest and a group of angels. The brilliant Alasdair Thong Ada's Venture Partner for Health will be joining the board and supporting the team to open a UK office focused on clinical development. Roughly 540 million people in East Asia carry a genetic variant called ALDH2 deficiency, which makes it physiologically difficult for their bodies to break down alcohol. The result is flushing, nausea, discomfort, and meaningfully elevated long-term health risks from even modest alcohol consumption. Alcolase was first sourced and backed by three of our Danish angels, Charlene Putney, Hadiyah Mujhid and Ellen de Bever, who saw what Mikkel Precht and the team were building before most of the venture world had heard of them. They invested as angels, then brought the company to us. To learn more about Alcolase, their expansion plans and why we invested - check out the links in the comments below.. Diarra Smith Matt Penneycard Xun Ning Choong Michael Tefula

London and UK scaleups can lead the world in AI and agents. As intelligence gets cheap, the real question is who wins on adoption and deployment. OpenAI buying Scottish Tomoro to launch its Deployment Company points to where the expertise sits. Accenture's acquisition of Faculty a few months earlier said the same thing. British scaleups can beat global peers on adoption. See the group we're bringing together at Atomico next week: 'agent-native scaleups' as an entire company operating model. It's 100% UK-based teams, funded by incredible investors in the UK, Europe and US: GV (Google Ventures), Partech, Creandum, Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), Seedcamp, NFX, Connect Ventures, GSV Ventures, DFF Ventures and more. It's a real high-density room of ambition and expertise, e.g.: - Wulfie Bain, OpenAI Applied AI Lead - James Kaplan, McKinsey & Company Technology CTO - Ben Blume, Atomico Partner - Bethany Ayers, Metomic CEO The UK can win on adoption, and this room will prove it. Space and licenses are limited. Founders/execs at Series A–C+ scaleups, I'll try to prioritise you. Registration link in the comments.

Back in Helsinki this June but for the first time not for Slush ✨ After attending Slush the past five years, I’ll now be joining #Arctic15 and speaking at the LP Summit in my role as Venture Partner Nordics at Ada Ventures. As part of Ada’s growing Nordic focus, we recently launched a venture scout program across 🇩🇰 🇳🇴 🇸🇪 🇫🇮 strengthening our presence and relationships across the region’s early-stage ecosystem. Over the last years, I’ve worked closely with Helsinki Partners on Nordic initiatives, where they’ve been instrumental in building LP/GP programs and creating stronger meeting places across the Nordic venture ecosystem. At ARCTIC15 - 15th Anniversary Edition 🌟, we’ll discuss: Nordic Scale: Does early-stage VC in the Nordics need stronger regional platforms to compete globally? Joining the panel:  • Yannick Sonnenberg, Partner at Emergence Ventures  • Maria Wasastjerna, leading Kvanted, a Finnish VC focused on industrial tech  • Moderated by Tian Yu from the LP/VC team at Helsinki Partners Looking forward to the discussions and to experiencing #Helsinki without snow and slush for once 🇫🇮 Thank you for the invitation Helsinki Partners ArcticStartup Link to LP Summit page: https://lnkd.in/etzcBf-b

Meet the people who'll be in the room when the timer hits zero on 3rd June. 🇳🇴 Seven hours. Open-source AI only. £150,000 equity investment in the winning team (T&Cs apply). And a judging line-up that's actually built things, and broken things, in the worlds you're building for. Here's who's judging our Open Source AI Hackathon in Mandal, in collaboration with Startuplab and Ole Henrik Golf & The Foundry team 👇 👨🏿 Lead Judge: Michael Tefula, Principal & Head of Product at Ada Ventures. A self-taught programmer and Oxford MBA, Michael is energised by technical founders who are obsessed with what technology can bring to the world. 🧑⚖️ Jørgen Veiby, Investment Manager & Head of Accelerator at Startuplab, Norway’s incubator, accelerator, and investor for ambitious technology startups. He’s motivated to help technology startups succeed out of Norway. 🧑⚖️ Alexander Martynau, Regional Lead, Nordics & CEE, NVIDIA Startup Ecosystem. He helps AI start-ups become global champions. He’s your go-to for anything machine/deep learning, data science and accelerated computing. 👩🏽 Anjali Bhatnagar, Serial founder, Venture Scout at Ada Ventures, PhD physicist and serial founder who built Tørn from idea to 120 MNOK in sales and ~70 MNOK raised. She’s writing The Physics of Startup Failures, a book that maps the structural pattern behind avoidable startup failure and names the window where it can still be caught. 👩 Ane Tolnes Haugdal, Investment Manager at Investinor Invests on behalf of one of Norway's most active VCs, and she’s a NHH economist. The criteria they'll judge on: ⚡ Speed of execution, how far did you get? 💡 Originality, how non-obvious is the idea? 🎯 Clarity of problem, is this real? 🚀 Team potential, could you scale this? 🛠️ Demo quality, does it actually do something? The rule: no closed-source frontier APIs doing the heavy lifting. Your stack, your choice. 🗓️ Wednesday 3rd June 2026 | 8:30 AM to 6:00 PM CET 📍 Bryggeta 24, 4515 Mandal, Norway ⏰ Applications close 11:59 PM CET, 17th May 2026 👇 Apply via the link in the comments.