From the Arena to the Frontier: Will Wells Joins Speedinvest as Partner to Champion Deep Tech Founders

We’re thrilled to welcome Will Wells as our newest Partner, bringing deep expertise across frontier science, AI, defence, and climate to the Speedinvest team. A founder-turned-investor with a sharp eye for generational companies, Will joins with a rare mix of operational empathy and high-conviction, deep-tech investment experience.

Will is Speedinvest DNA through and through: a founder and operator who knows the tech investment landscape inside out, with multi-stage experience and knowledge that will help the fund as we double down on Deep Tech at Seed and build out our pan-European platform at Growth.

Having built and exited Hummingbird Technologies, a pioneer of autonomous AI systems in Europe a decade ago and the first software platform to measure soil health from space, he knows firsthand what it takes to scale a deep tech company from zero to one. He also brings a combined wealth of Silicon Valley and Europe investment experience and knowledge from his time at Lightspeed and firstminute capital, where he’s been in the orbit of some of the world’s most ambitious frontier companies, including Wayve, Mistral, n8n, SpaceX, Base Power, Helsing, and Proxima Fusion.

At Speedinvest, Will’s focus will be on finding the next generation of early-stage deep tech startups - those solving the hard problems across foundational AI, energy, defence, robotics, space, and compute - as well as on building out our Growth investing activities.

He also brings a powerful mix of pattern recognition, firsthand grit, and global perspective to help the next wave of founders build breakthrough companies.

We sat down with Will to hear more about his Founder journey, what he’s excited about in deep tech today, and where he sees Europe’s opportunity to lead.

From founder to investor: “the Man in the arena” mindset

Will’s shift into venture is rooted in his own time as a founder. “Being an ex-founder in VC hopefully gives you a degree of empathy,” he said. “You know a little of what being the ‘man in the arena’ is like…. the blood, sweat, and tears, the hard decisions, the 2am existential Slack messages.”

He also notes how uncommon this background still is in Europe: “Less than 5% of European VCs have been operators, compared to the vast majority having this DNA in Silicon Valley. This statistic still baffles me - hopefully the gap will close.”

At Speedinvest, we’ve long believed that hands-on, founder-first support is critical, especially in the early years, and Will’s experience on both sides of the table makes him a perfect fit for our model.

The founders Will wants to back have qualities like “relentlessness, focus, obsession, and hustle”, alongside the technical brilliance and bold vision required to do well in the deep tech space. “I think I’m naturally biased towards founders that have both longitude and latitude to their thinking, the ones who can go incredibly deeply across their chosen field, but also have the uncanny ability to see years ahead and plan accordingly,” he said. “Also, one pragmatic filter I like applying is, ‘would I want to work for them if I were 21 again?’”

The Deep Tech opportunity

For Will, the deep tech opportunity has never been broader or more urgent. “The problem set is only getting bigger,” he adds. “Whether it’s wars, pandemics, the space race, climate change, or supply chain sovereignty, we’re entering an era where hard problems are getting more complex, and therefore might require breakthrough science to overcome.”

At the same time, foundational AI advances are creating entirely new deep tech categories and constraints. “The AI unlock brings its own unique challenges in compute, security, and energy. That’s a huge opportunity in itself.” But taking the neo agentic layer of verticalised solutions as an example - where we’ve already seen overlap with Will on shared portfolio investments into Vocca and Scalera - these next gen software winners “must be powered, protected and processed better for them to be viable long term: we ultimately need a more inexpensive compute base and an efficient picks and shovels ecosystem for these to really fly”.

Beyond siloed bucket thinking: the convergence of science, strategy, and sovereignty

While deep tech categories like bio, defence, space, and compute have become more popular in recent years, Will cautions against thinking in terms of narrow, standalone verticals. “I think the most interesting opportunities today exist between the buckets, or rather they morph into multi-bucket, generational titans,” he says.

“‘Sovereign energy’ can mean both climate and defence tech. ‘Compute safety’ spans cybersecurity and advances in semiconductor design. ‘Resilience’ touches almost everything.”

He points to companies like Palantir and Tesla, which transcend and combine conventional categories like AI, defence, government, health, robotics, and mobility: “We need to think much bigger: the tectonic plates are at once both shifting and converging, and founders who can navigate that complexity will build the most important companies of our generation.”

What deep tech founders really need

So what separates great founders in deep tech? It’s a mix of “science vision, techno-operational brilliance and the ability to raise a hell of a lot of money,” he says.

This last point is often underestimated. “Deep tech companies are capital-intensive, especially early on. For every PhD coming out of Oxford, CDTM, or ETH, there needs to be a matching level of commercial savvy on the founding team. Almost YC-like in terms of securing some kind of pre-product, commercial commitments. Otherwise, your risk profile is needlessly treacherous.”

That’s where investors come in, not just with capital, but with conviction. “Founders need support in building great teams, finding product-market fit, and then pulling off a great Series A,” he adds. “That’s where I like to roll up my sleeves.”

Will has worked closely with some of the best emerging frontier tech founders in this regard. Using his corporate CEO network, he helped ex DeepMind leader and Dayhoff Labs founder Steve Crossan to bring in key early commercial pilots, and similarly, with the star Base Power Founders, Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, helped them to navigate complex battery supply chain issues early on.  In terms of getting stellar follow-on rounds done, Will said: “I’ve been lucky enough to share a trench with many a gifted technical leader during fundraising, such as Chad at Cusp AI, Francesco at Proxima, or Mostafa at Automata. Helping these tier 1 companies get the value-add investors they deserve is a big part of the job”. 

Europe’s moment, if we get it right

Will is optimistic about Europe’s ability to win, at least from a talent perspective. “We’ve got hotspots that are now rivalling historic US hubs. Just look at the UK golden triangle (Oxbridge, UCL, Imperial), ETH in Zurich, CDTM in Munich, the next waves filtering down through the Stockholm ecosystem,” he says.

But we’re still held back by structural gaps. “We need more late-stage funding, more second-time founders, and more capital from institutional sources like pension funds. A perpetual European own goal is the lack a simple, liquid and cost efficient public market exit landscape. We need to get regulators and regulation out of the way, or, better, turn governments into active backers of new technology, like the US DOD has been for companies like Anduril or SpaceX.”

He also highlights the lessons we can learn from companies that didn’t quite make it, like Graphcore or Northvolt. “Those journeys still add crucial DNA to the ecosystem. My own Founder failures taught me this more than ever.”

Rooftop gardening, tennis, and BBQs

When he’s not chasing frontier tech companies, his priorities shift closer to home. “My wife Liv and daughter Alba keep me grounded, and remind me what it’s all about,” he says.

He’s a passionate sportsman (especially football, skiing, and tennis), an enthusiastic amateur chef, and a rooftop gardening convert. “The dream summer Saturday is to host friends on the roof in London for a BBQ.”

Will is also a longtime supporter of the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, where he was a patient in his twenties, and has completed a series of physical challenges to raise funds over the years.

With his incredible personal and professional experience, he’s joining a growing team committed to backing the best in tech.

“We’re incredibly excited to have Will join our deep tech partnership,” our CEO & Managing Partner, Oliver Holle, said. “His founder empathy, big-picture thinking, and on-the-ground experience make him a powerful addition to our team, and to the founders we back."

If you're building in deep tech, whether in AI, climate, defence, compute, or something we haven’t seen yet, we’d love to hear from you.