Celero Ventures

Dave

Founder

NicK

Founder

Dave & Nick have been working together for over 10 years, and in that period have delivered billions of dollars in shareholder value in the success of building and scaling out businesses for both Mulesoft and Databricks.
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They are both entrepreneurial software executives with extensive start up and scale up experience as co-founder, early employee and executive leadership and now act as advisors and mentors to early stage software companies, in partnership with Index Ventures, Atomico, Iconiq, Earlybird Ventures and others.
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In their move from Mulesoft to Databricks they both set out to do things “twice as fast, with half the number of mistakes”, and it is this experience that can really help challenge founding teams and their executives, and help them think about the balance required for survival and building critical foundations. With special focus in go-to-market and post-sales, Dave and Nick have also interviewed thousands of technical and sales focused individuals, managers and leaders and have a strong point of view on the culture and hiring approach that underpins the greatest companies.
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More recently they co-founded Celero Ventures in the belief that their skills and knowledge from operating and scaling some of the fastest growing software companies and the teams within them, would be valuable to earlier stage founders and CEOs.
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This experience and knowledge, alongside great LPs and investors from the world of tech, family offices, UHNWIs, means that Celero Ventures is uniquely positioned to help companies on their scaling journey, with both investment and funding but also the operational depth to coach, mentor and get hands-on to help build great executive teams for their portfolio companies.

A Taste of What we do?

For the last 2 years, Celero Ventures has partnered with some super high-potential organisations and founders, delivering advisory services as well as GTM due-diligence and investing.
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Deepset.AI - Founders of the open source Haystack project, raised $47m to-date, with repeat investments by Balderton Capital and Google Ventures (amongst others). Celero Ventures has been providing the CEO and his leadership team with advisory and coaching services, and are now working with them on a Series B follow-on investment round.

Haizelabs – Seed investment leading making up $20M working toward series A, partnered with General Catalyst at a valuation of $100M. This was a very competitive round, and Celero Ventures secured an exclusive allocation. There is a huge buzz around Haize, and this is one that's expected to be a hyperscale growth opportunity.

Pandatron AI - Celero Ventures participated in the seed round, and also two follow-through rounds to clean up the cap table of early investors, with a current valuation approx. 10X since initial seed and an impressive rosta of blue chip clients. Celero Ventures is working with them on their Series A raise.

Scalapay –whom have more than $700M of investment from Tencent and other leading investors, worked with Celero Ventures provided CEO and operational advisory services.

GetHarley - raised $53m in 2023 from Index Ventures and others. Celero Ventures worked with them on their Customer Success strategy and job architecture and levelling for CS roles.

Pigment - whom have more than $360m of investment from ICONIQ and others. Celero Ventures has provided customer success advisory services to their global Head of Customer Success and SLT, and also helped their thinking around customer success scope and attribution of value.technology.

NextMV - is a DecisionOps platform that accelerates optimization AI teams with tools for deployment, testing, and collaboration on decision models.They've raised $20m and Celero Ventures worked with them on their post-sales approach and customer success strategy.

Non-Exec Directors

Steve

General
Counsel

Stephen is a director of Celero, with a particular focus on its legal and regulatory obligations. Stephen is an English Solicitor, a Cayman Islands Attorney at Law and a Jersey Advocate. Aside from his work with Celero, Stephen is a Partner and the Practice Leader of the Jersey Litigation practice at the international law firm, Mourant LLP. Alongside these roles, Stephen is heavily involved in the financial services industry in Jersey. He is Chair of Society of Trusts and Estates Practitioners (STEP) and also sits on the Legal and Regulatory Committee of Association of Restructuring and Insolvency Experts (ARIES), the STEP Main Committee and Technical Sub-Committee. Additionally, Stephen sits as a standing member of the Law Society of Jersey Committee, the body which regulates the legal profession in Jersey. Finally, Stephen is INSOL Europe's Country Co-Ordinator for the Channel Islands.