Believing In Believers
Investment Verticals
HealthTech
Longevity
Digital Health
Mental Health
FemTech
FoodTech
Alternative Proteins
Next Gen Beverages
Low & No Alcohol
Personalised Diet & Nutrition
Financial Wellbeing
Personal Wealth & Finance
Financial Education
InsurTech
ESG Investing
Investment Thesis
Exceptional Ventures is a £20M London-based fund. It has an early-stage focus, investing in companies mainly at pre-seed and seed stage, primarily in the UK/EU and opportunistically across the rest of the world. 20-25% of the fund is carved out for reserves and used as follow-on funding. Exceptional Ventures is building a portfolio of ~40 companies over 3 years (40x first checks), and following on in 10-15 series A.
Team
Silicon Valley Software Engineer turned Technology Executive turned Venture Capitalist, Paolo is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Exceptional Ventures. Prior to this, Paolo was the Managing Director for Europe at Joyance Partners, a US VC firm investing in health and happiness start-ups, where he led 25 investments across 9 countries and built a team of 8.
Paolo started his career at Cisco in Silicon Valley as Software Engineer, then Product Manager, then moved to Switzerland to lead Business Development across EMEAR and APAC.
Paolo graduated Summa Cum Laude from his MS Engineering in Turin, and received his Executive MBA from London Business School where he won the AQR award for academic excellence in asset management.
Experienced CEO and Chairman. Over the past two decades, Matt has been a very active angel investor, and has chaired and sat on the Boards of numerous high-profile, high-growth U.K. start-ups, including co-founding and Chairing Tandem Bank, and serving as Chairman for ClearlySo Ltd and IGF Invoice Finance Ltd.
In addition to co-founding Exceptional Ventures, which he chairs, Matt is currently Chairman of Octopus Capital and Cudoni. He sits on the Boards of VouchedFor, and Restless. Matt was part of the founding team of CapitalOne Bank in the US. He was also responsible for founding and running CapitalOne Bank (Europe) Plc, the company’s businesses outside of America.
Originally from New Jersey, Matt graduated first in his class in Chemistry from Princeton University in 1988.
