Anu Adebajo has taken the top job at Newton Venture Program, and the Anu Adebajo Newton Venture Program pairing is generating some pointed questions about where European venture capital goes from here. Adebajo joined as chief executive in February, bringing with her a career built almost entirely on the capital-allocation side of the industry.
Newton Venture Program was launched in 2020 by VC firm Phoenix Court and London Business School. Its purpose is straightforward: train new generations of VC talent, whether they are seasoned investors or people exploring the industry for the first time.
A career spent on both sides of the table
Adebajo’s background spans more than 14 years deploying capital across Atomico, the British Business Bank and British Patient Capital, according to Newton Venture Program’s own announcement. That breadth matters for a role that sits at the intersection of training and industry access. She did not arrive at venture capital through the conventional route.
She began in Sheffield in 2012, joining a fund before moving to the British Business Bank, where she spent close to five years. From there she moved to the LP side, eventually becoming a Senior Investment Manager at British Patient Capital, where she led over £365m of investments into early and growth stage venture capital funds, according to her profile on BWAM. Before all of that, she had worked as an Analyst at the £100m Angel CoFund, making investments into companies alongside angel syndicates.
After the LP years, she moved to Atomico, where she led its fund of funds strategy. The journey from angel co-investment analyst to fund of funds lead at one of Europe’s best-known VC firms is a long one, and it gives Adebajo a perspective on the ecosystem that relatively few people can claim: she has seen deals from the company level, the fund level and the LP level.
Zombie funds, boys’ clubs and the question of a Newton fund
Speaking on the Sifted Podcast with host John Thornhill, Adebajo discussed what limited partners are actually looking for from European VCs right now. That conversation inevitably circled back to Europe’s so-called zombie funds: vehicles that are neither performing well enough to raise a successor fund nor failing badly enough to be wound down, quietly consuming management fees while delivering little. It is a problem that has been building across the continent, and Adebajo, having personally deployed hundreds of millions into the asset class, is well placed to describe what LPs make of it.
She also raised what she called a re-emerging “boys’ club mentality” in parts of the European VC ecosystem. The concern is not new, but the framing of it as something returning rather than something that never left is worth sitting with. Newton Venture Program was built in part to address exactly this kind of structural imbalance, by widening the pipeline of people who can plausibly enter and advance in the industry.
One of the more open questions from the conversation is whether Newton Venture Program itself might one day launch its own fund. Adebajo and Thornhill discussed how far away that possibility might be. No timeline was given, and the programme’s primary identity remains educational rather than investment-focused, at least for now.
For a programme aimed at reshaping who gets to work in VC, having a CEO who has sat in LP meetings, reviewed fund terms and written the cheques herself is a different kind of credential. Whether that translates into something more formal, such as a Newton-branded vehicle, is the question the industry will keep asking as the programme grows.
