Ciao Caterina! Hallo Berlin!

Venture Capital is a people business. It’s about meeting, supporting and building relationships with founders who are on a journey toward building something ground-breaking. Despite all of our advances in remote working and communication, there’s still no better way to do that than on the ground and in person. That’s why we are excited to welcome Caterina Lurani to the ZCC team today as our first Europe-focussed colleague.

European startups are going to be critical to the success of our journey toward deep decarbonisation. Europe has a huge number of excellent technical universities turning out some of the best scientists in the world, and we are increasingly seeing them turn their attention to addressing the climate crisis. Early-stage startups need both brilliant founders and vision-aligned investors to get them going, and that’s where we think we can come in.

Caterina has the perfect skills and experience to spearhead this effort for us. Through her work with United Ventures she’s deeply connected to the European VC world. Her background in mathematical economics and in scaling startups with a data-driven approach will help her (and us!) to better understand market and company dynamics during the transition. And her insatiable thirst for scientific understanding and analytical brain will enable her to both evaluate and support the types of startup we love.

Caterina will be based in Berlin, and making the most of that extensive European rail network! When she’s not connecting with founders and partners across the Central Europe ecosystem you might find her climbing in the Alps, teaching sailing or hiding in remote South African communities. So if you want an intro, then please get in touch!