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2025 got off to a fast start. And the pace never let up.
After announcing the close of our second fund last year, 2025 has seen our team uncover and back an incredible number of founders who are solving the world’s most pressing challenges.
Investing through our pioneering Inclusive Alpha lens has enabled us to invest in the best, not just the best connected - backing a cohort of founders who are breaking barriers and building at scale. We saw eight of our portfolio companies graduate to Series A in 2025 alone - with rounds led by some of the most prestigious funds in the world. By seeking out talent where others aren’t looking, we are finding top technical talent earlier, backing them sooner, and seeing them ship products and capture customers.
The flywheel of technological evolution is spinning quicker than ever. And venture is being reshaped alongside. I’m incredibly proud of our unwavering commitment to investing through an inclusive lens and even prouder of how effective this strategy is proving to be in finding, backing and growing category-defining companies and founders.
Here’s our 2025 in review.
Our strength lies in our Inclusive Alpha strategy: finding exceptional talent that drives alpha results, and making bold bets on ideas and markets that will reshape the paradigms of how we live. Throughout 2025, we have continued to back game-changing ideas that are moving the dial across economic empowerment, healthy ageing, and climate equity.
Our investment stats for 2025 include:
We have seen a number of these investments scale at hyper-speed following Ada’s initial investment. This includes Jack & Jill, a business turning hiring on its head and experiencing rapid growth. We were proud to back them at pre-seed and then again at Seed stage this year, in a round led by Creandum.
Another Ada pre-seed investment which has rapidly graduated to Seed is Aerska, who are developing RNA interference (RNAi) medicines that silence disease-causing genes to treat, delay, and prevent disorders of the brain.
ToothFairy also raised an impressive Series A led by LBO France to continue to work transforming the dentistry market with a combination of digital and on-demand services. Having led their pre-seed round when lots of VCs couldn’t see their potential, we’re incredibly proud of what they’ve achieved.
A number of our 2025 portfolio investments are due to be announced next year, we can’t wait to reveal their success.
We are thrilled to have seen our Inclusive Alpha thesis not only mature but drive returns during 2025. As a team, we remain steadfast in our belief that this investment philosophy is the route to discovering hidden talent that drives outsized returns.
This year, we also teamed up with the behavioural scientists at Synaptiq to commission and release pioneering research on the traits and behaviours of unicorn founders. We wanted to find a way to more objectively assess founder qualities, not just relying on heuristics and biases that marginalise diverse voices.
Our findings are seminal - providing empirical evidence that talent is evenly distributed, even if opportunity is not. This report points to ways in which investors can break free of pattern-matching, by tuning their radar differently when meeting diverse founders. If investors embrace these findings, we can help ensure the whole market is investing in the best, not just the best connected.
This research was covered by publications including Forbes, Impact Loop, Entrepreneur UK and TechFundingNews, and discussed in-depth on stage at the Sifted Summit. The research is a demonstration of our continued commitment to develop the evidence base for Inclusive Alpha - adding a new layer of depth to Ada’s sourcing and selection model, as well as providing the wider ecosystem with the metrics they need to embrace this thesis.
We also open-sourced a range of thoughts and research throughout the year which details the emerging categories and early market signals we are investing time and capital into. This includes: the emerging category of “bioinfrastructure” which we believe will play an enormous role in the future of healthcare; the next phase of the GLP1 economy; our thoughts on the future of AI; and how we’re making sense of the burgeoning AI agent market.
Across the existing portfolio, we’ve also been awed by the progress and impact we’ve seen throughout the year.
AI tutoring platform Medly, which only launched in February, rapidly amassed 150,000 student users and immediately began changing the trajectory of their academic lives. 74% of students who used it to prepare for GCSEs this summer improved by at least one grade.
Legal tech platform Valla supported 13,000 people with their legal or employment claim - empowering individuals who may have faced economic barriers to legal representation to stand-up for their rights.
Portfolio company MatNex pioneered a groundbreaking discovery using their AI algorithm - a rare-earth-free magnet. Called MagNex, it can be produced at 20% of the material cost and a 70% reduction in material carbon emissions (kg CO2/kg), compared to rare earth element magnets currently on the market. A finding of enormous potential. The team also announced a milestone partnership with Viridien to rapidly scale Matnex’s computational capacity for the discovery and production of groundbreaking materials.
And we continue to be staggered by the progress of Gizmo, the platform aiming to help 1 billion people leave and do anything, who posted 10x growth across 100+ countries this year, with users hitting the multi-millions. Their team continues to impress us with their innovation, energy and commitment to hitting the most ambitious of goals.
Advancements and innovations were also occurring within the Ada team during 2025. Our Principal and Head of Product, Michael Tefula, designed, built and launched AdaGPT and its most recent iteration, Deck Genius. The tools enable founders to get instant, anonymous feedback on their decks. AdaGPT was used by over 1,000 founders. And the new, improved platform - DeckGenius - has rapidly surpassed these figures: with 1,091 decks run through the system within three weeks of launch. You can read about the launch here.
Our portfolio support offer has also continued to expand and deliver benefits throughout the year thanks to the ever-expanding Ada Growth Lab. As part of our wider commitment to giving founders genuine support that moves the needle, we pair companies in our portfolio with an experienced advisor-operator who’s been there and done it. These include trusted peers who have worked at the likes of Darktrace, NextDoor, Flo Health, Monday.com, Microsoft and Prodigy Finance.
Over the crucial 12-month period following investment, these Growth Angels provide targeted, hands-on support to help founders move from “zero” to “one”: focusing specifically on finding product-market fit, developing go-to-market, sales and customer acquisition strategies, and hiring.
In 2025, nearly 10 of our Growth Angels were matched with Ada companies as part of the Growth Angel programme.
We also showed our willingness to jump in and roll up our sleeves. Jack & Jill, through the Ada Ventures Talent Lab, received a few weeks of dedicated time from our Venture Partner, Ben, a talent acquisition specialist. This support was so pivotal, Ben later worked directly with Jack & Jill for 10 weeks, as they scaled up their team at speed.
And we continue to support our founders with our industry-first childcare offer, delivered through Bubble, and access to mental health specialists through Spill.
This year we once again hosted our annual Ada by the Bay event - an annual San Francisco Bay Area trip for our U.S. ready portfolio companies, designed to create an environment where founders can be introduced to top tier US capital. This is a carefully curated event designed to turbo-charge relationships and give portfolio companies the infrastructure and network they need to get US funding and expansion conversations off the ground. According to one founder who travelled out to the Bay with us: “Ada by the Bay” played a key role in catalysing our Series A.”
Whilst we remain a UK-centric fund, our international footprint has continued to grow throughout the year.
In the Nordics, we ran an incredibly successful programme with our Danish Angels, with 19 companies securing investment. These include: Evewave, a zero waste logistics system; Ruumi, a grazing app for farmers to reduce emissions, restore soil health and improve pasture productivity; and Interhuman, an API that detects and interprets behavioral signals across a range of content formats.
Our team has also spent time immersing themselves in international tech ecosystems including San Francisco, New York, Lisbon, Tokyo, Singapore, Oslo, Sydney, Melbourne, Copenhagen and Berlin - deepening our networks across the globe. Ada colleagues also took to the stage at Sifted Summit, Tech BBQ, Turing Fest, and our own flagship event AdaCon, where we were lucky enough to be joined by Regina Benjamin, MD, MBA, President Obama's former U.S. Surgeon General, as our keynote speaker.
This year, we were thrilled to welcome Sophia Draper to the team as Founders Associate. Sophia hit the ground running and has made an immediate impact. We also welcomed Xun back from maternity leave after having her twins in 2024. And Michael also took paternity leave following the birth of his daughter in the summer.
As the world spins faster, we are seeing teams driving harder to unlock growth, models and products evolving at lightning speed, and the venture market becoming increasingly competitive for both funds and founders. Against the backdrop of this pace, Ada is not only holding true to its values but also demonstrating, in real-time, how these are compatible with driving outsized success and scale. The impact on our portfolio and the wider market is tangible.
We are feeling incredibly excited about 2026 - moving into the new year with heaps of momentum and bags of optimism about what can be achieved. But first, a well earned break for all those who work tirelessly throughout the year to make results like these possible.