As we’ve said before, founders first is more than a motto. It’s a mindset that we look for in current and prospective team members and partnerships.

With that, we’d like to introduce new investors and venture partners who embody this approach and are joining Cherry Ventures. Together, they bring a wealth of experience in angel and early-stage investing, deep operator roots, entrepreneurial know-how, and deep rooted passion for diversity and inclusion in tech. These attributes — plus many others too countless to list — will be a powerful part of our growing team, investments and portfolio, and presence in Europe.

Well, without any further ado, let’s meet them:

Based in London, Dinika Mahtani joins us as a Principal. She previously spent four years at Uber working across multiple business lines, most recently as General Manager of JUMP UK (e-bikes and scooters) and the founding team of UberEats EMEA. Immediately prior to Cherry, Dinika spent a year in the climate tech space at Kaluza, part of the Ovo Group (inc. Vertical Aerospace), a SaaS platform focused on electric grid optimization. Dinika spent her formative years in the US, where she started her career in investment banking. Along the way, she’s become an active angel investor in and advisor to female-founded startups.

“Early-stage venture is a people business, and Cherry is people first,” says Dinika. “I’m beyond excited to build upon the existing VC ecosystem in the UK, supporting founders across all backgrounds.”

A neuroscientist by training, Nicole Lai is also joining our investment team based in London. She most recently worked at European investment firm Atomico. There, she focused on Series A deep tech and enterprise investments. Before moving to Europe, Nicole worked as an investor at Real Ventures, an early-stage VC in Canada, where she also calls home. She started her career as the Scientific Project Lead at Moonshot Health, a developer of scientifically validated digital biomarkers. At Cherry, Nicole brings longstanding interests in health, sustainability, computational biology, and privacy-preserving technologies.

“Having made the transition from academia and tech transfer to startup to early-stage VC and then Series A VC, I wanted to come back and focus on pre-seed and seed,” says Nicole. “Working with founders at an earlier stage is where I can combine my experiences and have the most impact.”

Marie Outtier and Josefin Landgård are joining Cherry Ventures as venture partners and will focus on supporting our French, UK, and Nordic coverage in terms of geographies plus much more. They’ll also support our companies with their entrepreneurial know-how in the scaling of their companies.

Marie co-founded and led Aiden.ai as CEO. The AI-powered marketing analyst that helps growth marketers at SMBs by generating optimization recommendations across Facebook, Snap, Google Ads and Twitter. The startup was acquired by Twitter in 2019, where she is now director of product management. Marie is also an angel investor in 20 startups across Europe and the US, 40% of which have diverse founders.

“The European startup ecosystem needs to see more operators become investors. Having met with over 100 founders in the last 18 months, we have no shortage of talent and ambition in Europe,” says Marie. “We now have large volumes of capital available too, but what we need is experience from the trenches getting shared with early-stage startups. This is what I see when I look at the Cherry team.”

Josefin co-founded and led KRY as CEO and COO. Kry is a European leader in digital healthcare, providing patients with the means to see a doctor via video or chat on their smartphone or tablet. Now, Josefin is CEO of MANTLE, a CBD-focused wellbeing company she founded in 2019.

In the new year, we’ll have more exciting team updates to share. But we’re immensely excited to be joined by these four women as we at Cherry and our portfolio continues to grow and play a part in Europe’s thriving ecosystem.