Welcoming new members to our investment team: Cayetana Hurtado, Isabel Bescos and Diane Albouy

MAR 22, 2018

BY BALDERTON

It’s been such a busy time lately that it should come as no surprise that we are expanding our investment team at Balderton, welcoming aboard Cayetana Hurtado, Isabel Bescos and Diane Albouy.

Following our Fund VI announcement in November of 2017, we’ve seen vibrant activity levels. Eleven new companies have already joined that fund: Dinghy, Funnel, Furhat Robotics, HIYA, Infarm, Labster, Luno, Mojiworks, Peakon, SOPHiA Genetics and Virtuo.

Our portfolio as a whole raised over $2BN in follow-on funding last year, and, just since November of 2017 alone, four further companies have raised more than $20M each: Contentful, Depop, Recorded Future and Vivino.

Our investments from Fund VI have been spread across Europe: Berlin, Copenhagen, Guildford, London, Paris, Stockholm and Saint-Sulpice, Switzerland. They have also spanned a range of sectors: gaming, health, analytics, transportation, insurance, blockchain, robotics, agritech and education.

We're seeing an increase in deal sizes in Europe, a trend we attribute to the vision of European founders and the scope and opportunity size of their ambition. Their startups are growing bigger, faster, and need capital to fuel that growth. Plus, there are more successful technology companies flourishing from a European base, and that has led to higher demand for later-stage funding. We see this trend continuing, and it's a positive signal overall for the growth of European tech.

Our new team members arrive at an exciting time for Balderton and for Europe’s technology sector. 

ISABEL BESCOS

Isabel Bescos joins Balderton from BlaBlaCar where she was Head of Corporate Strategy. Isabel focused on international expansion for much of this unicorn’s trajectory, which means she has a valuable hands-on appreciation of the challenges and opportunities of working at a high-growth European-founded startup.

Before BlaBlaCar, Isabel was on the management team of the technology accelerator Entrepreneur First (ef.). Isabel has a BSc (Hons) from the University of Bath, and participated in the PEAR/Harvard Medical School initiative. Besides English, she speaks French, German, and Spanish fluently. Isabel will focus primarily on investment activity in the UK and Germany.

CAYETANA HURTADO

Cayetana Hurtado recently completed her MBA at Columbia Business School, where she focused on venture capital and entrepreneurship. Before Columbia, she worked in the TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications) M&A group of Goldman Sachs, London.

Caye has an MS in Law, Business Administration & Management from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid, with a year at the Université Paris Nanterre, and is a Fulbright Scholar. A fluent English, French and Spanish speaker, Caye will focus on investment activity in France and Spain.

DIANE ALBOUY

Diane Albouy also joins the investment team as Research Associate. Prior to joining Balderton Capital, Diane spent five years working as a technology associate at Goldman Sachs London, building financial software solutions for the Fixed Income and Credit Exotics desks. Diane holds an MBA from Cambridge Judge Business School where she was the co-chair of the social innovation student group. She has an engineering degree from the Telecom ParisTech (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications) in Paris.

Caye, Isabel and Diane are joining a team that recently also expanded to include Alice Lankester and Kiana Sharifi whose remit is to provide comprehensive Marketing and Talent advice to our new portfolio members. 

As a firm, we’re committed to providing the best possible support to our new entrepreneurs as they embark on their Series A journey and beyond. It’s a journey that many of our team members have been on previously and we are committed to putting our experience, and our extensive network, to work on their behalf.

Welcome aboard, Isabel, Caye and Diane!

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