According to Forbes, London-based Hummingbird Ventures partners Barend Van den Brande and Firat Ileri both landed on the 2024 Midas List Europe by tearing up the traditional venture capital playbook. Their strategy focuses on backing “outlier” founders who have endured significant childhood trauma or hardship, believing it creates an unmatched internal drive. This approach led them to lead a $15 million Series A in medical diagnostics startup BillionToOne in March 2019, which went public in November 2023 with a market cap hitting $4.4 billion, turning Hummingbird’s 16% stake into $745 million. They also led Kraken’s $5 million Series A in March 2014, with the crypto exchange now valued at $20 billion. The firm, which now manages over $1 billion, has delivered standout fund performance, with its 2012 fund returning 10x on invested capital.
The Trauma Thesis In Practice
Here’s the thing: lots of VCs pay lip service to valuing “grit” or “scrappiness.” But an angel investor who’s co-invested with them put it bluntly: most funds “just end up investing in guys who worked at Palantir or McKinsey.” Hummingbird seems to actually mean it. They’re not looking for the polished Stanford MBA. They’re looking for the person whose background is, in Van den Brande’s words, “a minefield” that would scare other investors off.
Take Oguzhan Atay of BillionToOne. He didn’t frame his childhood as traumatic, but he grew up in a middle-income family in a small Turkish city where they couldn’t always afford the books he wanted. He rose to the top through intense academic competition. Ileri saw past the “softly-spoken PhD guy” to the “killer” underneath—a drive proven when Atay hustled in parking lots and gave away N95 masks to get meetings during the pandemic. That’s the “abnormal resourcefulness” they’re betting on.
Building A Fund On Contrarian Instincts
Van den Brande arrived at this strategy after failing with a conventional one. His first fund, Big Bang Ventures, backed European SaaS and university spinouts the way American VCs did. It flopped. “At some point even my LPs wanted to fire me,” he admits. But those awkward LP meetings became a lab. He steered conversations toward the psychological makeup of self-made entrepreneurs, the challenges they’d overcome. That insight led to Hummingbird’s 2010 relaunch with a $25 million fund specifically for outliers.
Ileri’s path was similarly non-linear. From Northern Cyprus to MIT, he couldn’t break into U.S. VC. He found Van den Brande’s job posting on an obscure Turkish blog. Their shared understanding of emerging markets and outsider status clicked. Now, their 14-person team operates with huge freedom, scouring the globe without being tied to a sector or region, sometimes meeting 50 companies a week. It’s a search for a specific signal in the noise.
Unorthodox In Every Way
Hummingbird’s quirks go far beyond its founder thesis. They make very few bets—sometimes just a handful a year—and concentrate capital wildly. In 2015, they put 40% of a fund into one company: Deliveroo. They dismiss the common VC practice of guiding on product, believing most “value-add” actually removes value. Instead, they focus on honest conversation. And unlike most VCs, they openly share performance data, which is undeniably strong.
Basically, they reject every box institutional LPs try to put them in. Are they a biotech fund? A crypto fund? A gaming fund? No. They’re an outlier fund. That makes them hard to categorize, but the returns speak for themselves. Their 2012 fund’s 10x DPI and 46% net IRR puts them in the top 10% of U.S. venture funds from that vintage. That’s a staggering claim for a London-based firm fishing in global, non-traditional waters.
Can You Systematize The Search For Outliers?
So, the big question: is this repeatable, or just a lucky streak built on a few massive wins? There’s a clear parallel to Peter Thiel’s Founder Fund in their pursuit of “intellectual arbitrage.” But Hummingbird operates even earlier and, arguably, with more concentrated conviction. Their “Magnificent Grants” program is like a pocket-sized Thiel Fellowship, trying to spot and fuel that drive in people under 25.
But let’s be skeptical for a second. Trauma or hardship doesn’t automatically build a great CEO; sometimes it just builds trauma. And a strategy that requires “never lowering the bar” on such a specific, intangible trait is incredibly hard to scale. Now they’re managing a $300 million fund to invest in other, similarly unorthodox firms. It feels like they’re trying to build a system around an instinct. That’s the ultimate venture bet—and one that’s made them, ironically, the establishment figures in a London square surrounded by other VC giants. The outsiders have arrived.
