There are a lot of great investors out there. Some of them work at storied funds, the Sequoia/ A16Z/ USVs of the world. Others work at smaller emerging funds, some which avoid the limelight, and others which are just starting to embrace it.
Being on the investor side of the table, I thought it would be cool to spotlight a few of the funds who I respect for doing something different, or performing very well, or having a unique view.
And yes, there are also a lot of bad investors out there too. But, I want to focus on the positives.
Concept Ventures
Concept Ventures are a UK based fund, with a $88m Fund 2, investing in European pre-seed deals. Their first fund made 44 investments, and their portfolio standout is ElevenLabs.
Concept had been grinding away from some time, but their rise to fame really happened with ElevenLabs, where they came in at the pre-seed/ seed round. I think Mati Staniszewski mentioned on a podcast that it was an 11m post. Seeing as 11L just announced a round at 11b post, it’s gone pretty well. Concept have seemingly ridden that wave and are now comfortably positioned as the UK’s top pre-seed fund.
They’re not a fund I know super well. We’ve got two co-investments with them, I sit on boards with two members of their team, and have had limited interactions beyond that. But, there’s a few things I really like about what they do:
- They don’t over-intellectualise. They’re not a high conviction fund that only does three cheques a year. They also aren’t thesis driven investors spending months mapping out the vagaries of different markets. They know what their strengths are (attracting and identifying smart hungry founders in potentially big markets), and they focus on that.
- They’re brave. They’re willing to do a lot of different deals in different spaces. And, they’ll take risks. Their portfolio has a huge range, and from the outside it seems like they’re always willing to try something new.
- Some first-principles thinking and a willingness to experiment. I know at one point they were testing potential founders with psychometric tests to identify traits and behaviours. God knows if this works, or if there’s any predictive power here. But someone from the team raised a great point when I asked them about this - we’re better off collecting this data now anyway and then we can see if there’s a correlation once we have unicorn founders in our portfolio.
Unruly Capital
Unruly are a smaller fund (around 20m) doing follow-on cheques into transformative deep tech, and some truly scifi stuff.
Not a fund I know super well. We’re a co-investor on two (I think) investments, but their style is super hands off and easy capital-at least from what I’ve seen-and so I wouldn’t even know if we were co-investors on other companies. My main experiences with them come from attending one of their summits. It was the Human Futures Summit, hosted in London in October 2025. It was in those cool arches under Waterloo station (funnily enough the second VC event I’ve attended there). Let’s talk about the Human Futures Summit for a sec.
- they had 19 super quick talks, each from guest speakers who were either investors, founders, operators or academics.
- the talks were grouped into two sessions, one biotech and one physical world. I skipped the biotech sessions and got there for the second half.
- some super interesting speakers. My favourite talk was the last one, “Malthusianism in Year 3000”, by Elad Verbin. He was talking about how the paradigm of constant growth (and consumption) means humanity ends up using all the matter in the solar system in the next millennium. I didn’t check his maths, and I don’t fully agree with the conclusion, but it was eye-opening nonetheless. The Summit was awesome. I didn’t stay for the networking but what I saw was super interesting. A few of the speakers were overly intellectual (at times performatively so), but I didn’t even sign up to speak so I shouldn’t be throwing too many stones.
The other great thing about Unruly is their portfolio dashboard, where they “open source” all their deals. You can see it here. I would love them to go one step further and show performance for their current fund, but maybe that’s just me being nosy. However it seems like they have some great deals and I think their numbers would reflect that.