Welcoming our newest Partner and Principal

While our day to day job is partnering with companies led by ambitious founders, perhaps our most important investments are the ones we make in our team as we build Atomico into a venture firm for the long-term. That’s why we are excited to announce that we are strengthening our investment team with two new hires in London.

Sasha Astafyeva is joining the Atomico team as Partner to lead sourcing, due diligence, and management of Atomico’s investments with consumer companies. Originally from Ukraine, she spent three years as a Principal at Felix Capital prior to joining Atomico. With her extensive experience prior to this helping scale consumer startups, Sasha is the perfect example of a career investor with operational experience who embodies our hands-on investment approach.

Before entering VC, Sasha worked as Head of Business Intelligence and Strategy at Lyst, a London-based online fashion marketplace, VP of Finance and Business Intelligence at VivaReal, an online real estate marketplace in Brazil, and at Dafiti, Latin America’s largest online fashion company.

“As a former operator with deep expertise in scaling and leading global consumer teams, Sasha is able to provide unique insights to our gamechanging founders. I’m proud to have her as a Partner at Atomico and excited to see what she will achieve in the years ahead as we look to partner with ambitious teams in Europe building category-winning companies,” said Atomico’s CEO and Founding Partner Niklas Zennström.

We are also very excited to welcome Terese Hougaard as Principal. Originally from Denmark, Terese joins Atomico from CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund based in Mountain View, where she spent five years and invested in or worked with companies like Stripe, Robinhood, Gusto, and UiPath. Prior to that, she worked in London in Google’s SMB marketing organisation and held roles in internal strategy and e-commerce business development at American Express’s London and New York offices.

Welcome to the team, Sasha and Terese!