Since I joined Ada Ventures in 2022, one person has quietly been the operational backbone of the firm: Xun Ning Choong. A former funds lawyer, Xun had just changed career to become Ada’s very first employee. As Head of Operations, she builds the systems and processes that allow the rest of us to do our jobs with clarity and focus.

“A lot of operations is done in the background,” she says. “A job well done is one where our systems just work like we expect them to, with minimal fuss for the end user.” But while Xun’s work may have been behind the scenes, the impact has been front and centre. In just five years, Ada Ventures has invested over $100m across two funds, in more than 50 companies, and pioneered a new approach to venture capital. Her role has been foundational to that success.

Now, Xun is stepping into a new position that reflects both her growth and Ada’s evolution: Head of Operations & Impact.

“It’s much more about the actual positive change you can make,” she says. “Ops is about maintaining the ship. Impact is about driving the ship forward.”

At Ada, our ability to drive change stems from the strength of our foundations. You can’t lead in this industry—attract talent, capital, or influence—without being respected. And respect is built through reliability, transparency, and depth of knowledge. That’s why combining ops and impact is a natural progression. 

Over the last few years, Ada has transformed in service of our mission. Our investment philosophy—Inclusive Alpha®—takes a holistic approach, embedding inclusion into every aspect of the process: team structure, sourcing, selection, strategy, and portfolio support. It’s about delivering strong returns while also generating meaningful change. For us, operations and impact are inseparable. 

Defining “impact” remains one of the sector’s biggest challenges. “Everyone seems to use it to mean something different,” Xun says. Often, it’s used to virtue signal rather than to interrogate the mechanics: What does impact actually mean? How is it measured? What are the trade-offs? What are the consequences?

At Ada, our impact goals are embedded in our DNA. We spend significant time thinking about the type of impact we’re best positioned to create—and how to communicate that to founders, LPs, and the broader ecosystem.

“We want to invest £100 million into companies that improve the lives of 100 million people by 2030,” says Xun. “It’s about how we actually deliver on that.” When considering the impact of a company, one of the questions we're thinking about is: does this company give you hope that if it succeeds and reaches venture scale, it will solve a social or environmental problem and/or improve it by 10x? 

One standout example of a portfolio company doing just this is Organise, a platform that empowers workers to advocate for their rights. Through the platform, night shift workers at G4S successfully campaigned in March 2025 for equal pay with day shift colleagues—a meaningful victory that put an extra £2,000 in their pockets every year.

A new investment that couples commercial success with improving the lives of customers is Medly AI. It’s a good example of  Inclusive Alpha® in action, and how we work to embed an inclusive lens at all stages of an investment. The two medical doctor founders have first-hand experience of educational inequalities and feel so passionately about levelling the playing field that they left jobs in the NHS. They are using AI tech, neuroscience and proven teaching theories to reach those currently underserved by the current educational system. We’re already seeing tangible progress with the recently launched Medly Mocks 2025: the first national automated mock exams marked by an AI examiner. 

Xun’s role further cements the Ada Venture’s position that impact is a source of value, rather than a separate criteria a company needs to fulfil. For example, the way you grow your customer base. If you are able to tap into a currently underserved group of people, like students who cannot afford private tuition, you unlock a whole new market. Demonstrating the evidence of positive impact, will help companies attract and retain the best talent and customers. “Your financial success grows alongside your impact,” says Xun.

In her new position, Xun will also lead the refinement of our own impact investing strategy. Some of the processes are outlined in the Ada Ventures Impact Report, which draws on the Impact Frontiers framework. “But how do we make that even more authentic to Ada?” she asks. “How do we tie evidence-based impact back into our investment strategy, impact assessment and ESG due diligence?”

It’s a real question—especially in sectors like AI, where the risks tied to impact and ESG are still unfolding. “The field is still evolving but we’re clear on the potential for impact,” she says, referring to our updates to the AI investing framework. “The goal is to think critically and act efficiently.”

Our second impact goal, in addition to our investment targets, is to help drive systems change in venture capital itself—we want to have made tangible progress in catalysing the VC industry to make it more inclusive by 2030. We want more funds to have adopted Inclusive Alpha® as an operating strategy in the coming years. That’s not easy in today’s macro climate. “I believe in the work we are doing,” says Xun. “In five years time, I hope to have produced tangible evidence that inclusion, impact and alpha go hand-in-hand.”

Here at Ada Ventures, we are as deeply mission-driven as the founders in our portfolio. While VC cycles can ebb and flow, the long-term trend will reward those who stay the course. “I see the difficult times as an opportunity; it’s not just about survival” she says.

At Ada, we believe small, practical changes are just as important as grand visions. Over the next few years we will be building out the  Inclusive Alpha® playbook. 

We’re proud to support Bubble, a portfolio company providing trusted, local childcare—and to make their service available to founders facing last-minute or emergency needs. Xun—just back from maternity leave with twins—has already used it herself so knows what a big difference it can make in the lives of working parents. It’s a small benefit that’s vital to our ethos as an inclusive organisation. 

We want Ada to be a force for inclusion in the industry - that’s what our Ada Angels and Ada Scout programmes are designed to do. We want to empower people who might traditionally feel left out of the industry with real money to make change. 

And we want to lead by example, championing Inclusive Alpha®, encouraging more funds to adopt it, and using our power to level the playing field.

At Ada Ventures, we treat impact like we treat operations: as a core function that enables everything else to happen. VC has funded some of the biggest changes in modern society in the last 25 years. As Xun puts it: “We have a lot of power—and we intend to use that power for good.”

‍