Investor Day 2021

We recently held our 15th annual Draper Esprit Investor Day at the end of February. Investor Day is always an excellent opportunity for us to show case our incredible portfolio of companies to our investors. This year’s event looked a little different as we traded the cozy theater at the Hamyard hotel for Hopin’s virtual platform. Given the digital nature of our event this year, with no limit of building capacity, we were able to introduce our portfolio to an even wider audience of over 300 attendees, many of whom were joining us for the first time.

We heard from several companies in our core including Graphcore, ICEYE, Aircall, and Thought Machine, as well as several of our newer emerging companies such as Endomag, CoachHub, AGORA, Paragraf, PrimaryBid, and Riverlane.

Draper Esprit's Investor Day - Martin Davis Introduction & Update from Draper Esprit on Vimeo.

CEO, Martin Davis took us through the peaks and troughs of the tech industry over this past year and the progress we continue to make investing in the best of the best while democratizing venture capital.

Sofia Hmich, the Founding GP and Managing Director of Future Positive, one of our Fund of Funds, took us on a journey to describe how sustainability can be done within early stage venture capital.

We were joined by Director, Stuart Chapman as he led a fireside chat with two of our portfolio companies’ CEOs, Eva Schönleitner of Crate & Alex Neill of Resolver.

Managing Partner of Seedcamp Carlos Eduardo Espinal and Managing Partner of Stride VC, Fred Destin spoke with Partner, Jonathan Sibilia, on the State of Seed and thriving in chaos.

As tech evolves overtime it’s interesting to observe the ways it can facilitate, change, and improve certain things. It’s also interesting to observe how technology can exist but, we all might need a little extra push in order to embrace it. The change in tech adoption the last year has indeed been remarkable, and yet the technological capabilities were there, waiting. As the saying goes in the technology industry “slowly at first, then all of a sudden”. With that in mind we will continue to invest. In recent years companies like Graphcore,, UiPath, ICEYE and Trustpilot, have become recognized for the value the offer. So, we look to the future with investments into companies like Riverlane, Agora and our seed funds for the opportunities just around the corner, for they too will challenge the way the world thinks and operates.

It was a pleasure to have everyone join us for Investor Day and we look forward to being able to return to the Hamyard in the future, because that human interaction is still what matters. While we were so pleased to be able to reach out to a broader audience range, allowing everyone to tune into investor day from wherever they were in the globe, we certainly missed the coffee, croissants, and conversational element that our in-person event provides each year.