Balderton welcomes two new Associates to cover the UK and Ireland

OCT 29, 2020

We are delighted to officially welcome Greta and Sebastiaan to the Balderton team, as Associates in our early-stage fund.

Some time ago, given the ever-increasing quality and quantity of European startups, we organised our Associates and Principals geographically to cover the major countries and cities in Europe.

Isabel Bescos was previously covering the UK before crossing over to the other side and founding a new company, Riff (subsequently backed by Balderton). Over the past few years, we've seen so many great startups pop up across the UK & Ireland, that it became obvious we would need more than one person to help us cover the region and that we needed to build out the team, as we already have done in France with Caye and Maxime.

After some time we found two superb people to join us.

Sebastiaan is Belgian and studied in London, Washington and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He then joined McKinsey before moving on to work as an early employee at the e-scooter company Circ (sold to Bird) in supply chain and strategy.

Sebastiaan Debrouwere

Seb joined us six months ago. While we were able to interview him in person he joined us in lockdown and it was months until we got to spend any time with us in person. Definitely, not the ideal way to start a new career but Seb threw himself into it and his proactive approach and positive attitude have worked really well to ramp up quickly. Unfortunately, the quieter August we promised him didn’t really happen, with us closing a new investment almost weekly over the summer.

Greta is American with Swedish family and studied at INSEAD and Stanford. She started at Goldman Sachs before joining as an early employee at Resy in New York as head of data & analytics. She then worked on product with Pleo in Copenhagen.

Greta Anderson

Greta had to go through her interviews remotely from her locked-down student house in Fontainebleau. She then endured a joyous experience with the French and American immigration authorities before finally joining us in London a few weeks ago. Greta is something of a gastronome who has co-managed a restaurant and worked at Noma in the past. However, her early meals in London quarantine were a bulk supply of red curry from the Thai restaurant next door.

Seb is mostly covering B2C, SME Saas, Insurtech and Health. He is also covering Ireland (looking forward to one day actually making it over to Dublin again).

Greta is mostly covering Fintech, Deeptech and Enterprise SaaS.

They are supported by our new team of analysts, Charlie Jalali-Farhani, Axel Mitbauer and Clara Ricard, who all started in March 2020. 

All of our new starters have already done a great job of integrating with the team, especially given the circumstances, and we know they will be strong representatives for Balderton.

Welcome!

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