It’s back-to-school season, and there are new faces at Atomico
Welcome (L-R): Associate Luca Eisenstecken, IR Associate Gunita Bhasin, Communications Manager Eleanor Warnock, Associate Christina Fa, Senior Associate Annalise Dragic, Principal Irina Haivas & Partner Caroline Chayot
When Atomico started, very few people believed that Europe could produce multiple billion-dollar companies. Since then, there have been over 50. Now, more than ever, we believe with deepest conviction and a sense of pressing urgency that Europe has the right ingredients for far greater tech success in the decade to come.
That’s why Atomico is strengthening our unique team model of experienced investors, founders, and operators with seven new hires across our Growth Acceleration, Investment, Communications and IR teams. Our mission is to identify the most ambitious founders, building category-winning companies, and help them scale a world-leading business. With these seven new hires, our offer for European founders is only going from strength to strength.
Atomico Partner Caroline Chayot
With that in mind, we’re excited to announce today that Caroline Chayot is joining Atomico as Partner. Prior to joining Atomico, Caroline was Head of People EMEA at Twitter, where she supported the leadership team scale the business from two to six markets and grow the team from 80 based in London to 500 across the region. She partnered with Twitter EMEA’s leaders on strategic people issues, from expansion strategy to change management, and prior to that she worked at Google in HR for 9 years. Her appointment comes amid increased demand from Atomico’s portfolio companies for talent support by Atomico’s unique Growth Acceleration Team.
As we highlighted in last year’s State of European Tech report , the battle for talent in Europe is intensifying. Europe may have more developers than the U.S. , but founders must compete with global tech giants, corporates, and other venture-backed startups for engineering talent. Finding, developing and retaining the best people is the number one pain point for Europe’s most ambitious founders. Caroline will join long-serving Atomico Talent Partner Dan Hynes, further strengthening our commitment to solving this problem for our founders as part of our Growth Acceleration offer. Caroline will be based in London.
But Atomico can’t support ambitious founders without finding them first. That’s why we’ve also brought in four new hires to our investment team. With their hard-won local knowledge, extensive networks and deep sector expertise, they will help Atomico seek out and partner with game changing entrepreneurs.
Principal Irina Haivas
Irina Haivas joins as Principal from specialist healthcare investor GHO Capital Partners, and will focus on sourcing of investment opportunities in machine intelligence-enabled businesses, synthetic biology, robotics and other frontier technologies. Irina is a former surgeon, and was a surgical fellow at Harvard Medical School before completing an MSc (Dist) in International Health Policy at London School of Economics.
Associate Luca Eisenstecken
Also new to the investment team, Senior Associate Annalise Dragic is a recent Stanford MBA graduate and was a member of LinkedIn’s Strategy & Analytics Leadership Program’s inaugural class . She will focus on the UK. Associate Luca Eisenstecken, is originally from Germany but has spent the last two years in San Francisco with Vector Capital. Luca will cover Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Associate Christina Fa, who grew up in Australia and New Zealand and joins Atomico from Google’s Corporate Finance team in Mountain View, will focus on the Nordics and Baltic regions.
IR Associate Gunita Bhasin
Gunita Bhasin joins Atomico as an IR Associate from Deutsche Bank and has lived and studied in India, Singapore, Turkey, and the U.K. She will support long-time Head of IR Camilla Richards in managing Atomico’s relationships with its global investor base.
Finally, as European tech goes from strength to strength, we want to help the region’s founders share their innovative ideas and hard-won successes with the world. Our new Communications Manager, Eleanor Warnock, will work alongside Atomico’s Head of Communications Bryce Keane to raise the profile of the firm’s portfolio companies internationally. Eleanor recently received her MBA from INSEAD in France, and previously worked for The Wall Street Journal for five years in Tokyo
Eleanor Warnock joins Atomico as Communications Manager from the Wall Street Journal
We’ve been founder-centric from the start but we can always do more. We’re excited to work with our new joiners to find and partner with the best entrepreneurs.
