Investment Manager

Techstars is one of the most active pre-seed investors in the world, backing founders at the very beginning of company building, with over $1 billion AUM, and 25 unicorns such as ClassPass, Remitly, Zipline, SendGrid, and Snyk. Techstars is built on three ideas: entrepreneurs create a better future for everyone, collaboration drives innovation, and great ideas can come from anywhere.

We are looking for an Investor to work directly alongside the Managing Director in London. This is a dual investor–operator role where you’ll both invest in early-stage companies and have an operational role delivering value for founders through our accelerator program. We’re looking for someone with a strong builder instinct, investment experience, with founder or early startup experience a major plus. This role is based in London.

What You’ll Do

• Find and back exceptional founders: Build relationships with founders everywhere they are; at events, meetups, online, and inside real founder communities. Source companies through organic relationships, direct outreach, referrals, and inbound applications. Run high-quality diligence across team, market, and product. Write clear, thoughtful investment memos and support selection decisions with rigor.
• Run a world-class accelerator experience: Own and manage the full program calendar, mentor pipelines, workshops, and investor sessions. Keep the machine running smoothly across tools, data, scheduling, and communications.
• Support founders through fundraising and beyond: Work directly with founders on pitch decks, data rooms, and investor preparation, acting as a true partner through the full fundraising journey. Build and maintain a strong VC network for follow-on financing and actively introduce Techstars companies to the right investors at the right time. Build and manage a high-quality angel investor network to support early capital needs across the portfolio. Stay closely connected to companies after the program, tracking progress and identifying where additional capital, talent, or partnerships can accelerate growth. Assess which companies would benefit from deeper support and broader global Techstars opportunities and coordinate that access. Proactively nurture and deepen relationships with our high-quality mentors over time. Build relationships with top operators and exited founders across the European ecosystem and onboard them into the Techstars mentor network. Thoughtfully match mentors with the most promising early-stage companies in the portfolio based on real use-case fit. Continuously raise the bar on the quality of the mentor base to ensure founders consistently receive world-class support.

You Could Be a Great Fit If

• You are deeply embedded in founder worlds. You live inside startup communities, not VC circles, and you care more about founder trust than investor status.
• You are deeply tech-curious, hyper-curious by nature, and a structured, analytical thinker. You dive into how things work, explore new products and markets constantly, and use data to guide judgment. A technical background is a bonus.
• You have a builder’s instinct. You do not wait for permission. You hustle and are highly resourceful.
• You have prior investment experience, via a fund, as an angel or scout.
• You operate with speed as a default. You respond in hours, not days. You bias toward action and iteration over waiting for perfect information.
• You hold a high bar for excellence. You care deeply about the quality of your work, seek feedback, and continuously raise your own standards.
• You are deeply empathetic. You stay calm in ambiguity and can hold founder anxiety without amplifying it.
• You treat this as a vocation, not a job. You do what it takes when it matters and understand that elite founder support does not fit neatly into a 9–5.
• You bring real early-stage experience. You’ve lived inside the zero-to-one journey as a founder, early employee, operator, scout, or early investor, and you understand fundraising from the inside.
• You are reliable, hyper-organised, and tools-fluent. You do not drop balls. Your systems hold under pressure. Excel, Airtable, Notion, and Google Suite are second nature.

Logistics

• 6 plus years of experience across startups, product, engineering, operations, or early-stage investing.
• Comfortable working with senior founders, operators, and investors.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and constant change.
• Available to travel up to 30 percent.

Our Working Philosophy at Techstars

At Techstars, founders are the customers. Investors are partners. Everything else is in service of that. Techstars is the most active pre-seed investor in the world having invested through its accelerators in more than 4,800 companies. Founded in 2006, Techstars believes that entrepreneurs create a better future for everyone and great ideas can come from anywhere. Now we are on a mission to invest in an unprecedented number of startups per year enabling more capital to flow to more entrepreneurs around the world. We do this by operating accelerator programs and venture capital funds, as well as by connecting startups, investors, corporations, and cities to help build thriving startup communities.