London, UK-based venture capital firm Balderton Capital has added tech entrepreneur and Founder Shikha Ahluwalia as an Associate to its investment team covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH).
Ahluwalia is the venture firm’s second full-time employee based in Berlin, joining Principal Colin Hanna who has been based in the city since 2019, as part of Balderton’s commitment to investing across the DACH region.
Ahluwalia was on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List in 2017 for her role in co-founding SBL, India’s largest, D2C women’s fashion e-commerce company. After running SBL, Ahluwalia set up a tech advisory boutique, offering consulting services to retailers to help them adopt data-driven and iterative prototyping and digitise faster.
She came to the tech sector from JP Morgan’s Investment Banking Division in London. Prior to that, Ahluwalia studied at German business school WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management where she graduated top of the class with her thesis on game theory.
Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm focused on backing the best European-founded technology companies. In the two decades since founding, the firm has worked with hundreds of European founders, and have raised eight funds totalling more than $3bn. Previous exited investments include Betfair (FTSE: BET), Digital Surgery (Medtronic), Frontier Car Group (OLX Group), Magic Pony (Twitter), NaturalMotion (Zynga), Peakon (Workday), Recorded Future (Insight Partners), Sunrise (Microsoft), Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and Yoox Net-a-Porter (BIT: YNAP). Among Balderton’s current portfolio of over 90 companies are Aircall, Carwow, Citymapper, Darktrace, Depop, GoCardless, Graphcore, Kobalt Music, Nutmeg, Prodigy Finance, Revolut, Tessian, THG (LON: THG), VanMoof, Vestiaire Collective, Vivino and Zego.
Balderton is one of the most active investors at Series A, with 10 current investments across DACH including Contentful, Infarm, SOPHiA Genetics and McMakler. In the past year, Demodesk (Munich) and vivenu (Düsseldorf) have also joined the portfolio. Collectively, these 10 companies employ more than 2,400 employees around the world.
FinSMEs
31/03/2021