Hummingbird Ventures

Founding partner Barend Van den Brande holds a Master of Science in Economics from the University of Louvain in Belgium and began his career in the United States as a financial analyst at SG Cowen in Boston, covering internet and data-networking companies. In 2001 he started a small venture fund in Belgium, Big Bang Ventures, which followed the American model in backing Dutch and Belgian SaaS companies and university spin-offs, without success.⁠[1][2]

In 2010, Van den Brande relaunched as Hummingbird with a new $25 million fund dedicated to “outlier” founders. That November, guided by then-partner Pamir Gelenbe, Hummingbird led a $500,000 seed round in Istanbul-based game company Peak Games, which Zynga later acquired for $1.8 billion in 2020.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In 2012, Hummingbird raised its second fund, which went on to return 10 times its initial invested capital with a net internal rate of return of 46%, its best-performing fund to date. The same year, Firat Ileri joined; he had worked on JP Morgan’s emerging-markets debt team in London and studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT for both his undergraduate and master’s degrees. Istanbul game developer Gram Games, one of his early investments, was acquired by Zynga in 2018 for more than $250 million.⁠[2][1][2][1][2]

Also on Pamir Gelenbe’s introduction, Hummingbird led the $5 million Series A of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken in March 2014. That investment earned Van den Brande a place on the Forbes Midas List Europe, and as of October 2026 he remained involved with Kraken. In 2014 Hummingbird also raised a separate $25 million “Opportunities fund” for later-stage follow-on investments.⁠[2][2][1][3]

Hummingbird often makes only a few investments a year and does not prioritize diversification. In 2015 it put 40% of one fund’s capital into a single company, British food delivery platform Deliveroo; Van den Brande worked with Deliveroo until its IPO.⁠[2][1]

Hummingbird announced that its third fund had closed at $95 million to invest mainly at the late seed and Series A stages, writing checks of $500,000 to $5 million, with a focus on marketplaces, gaming, SaaS, and crypto and on emerging startup ecosystems such as Turkey, Brazil, and Africa. Van den Brande said the fund was raised in 40 days from more than 100 private investors, including entrepreneurs who had built $1 billion-plus tech companies, family offices, and founders Hummingbird had once backed at seed stage, without taxpayer money; it could have been larger, but the team chose to cap it to stay focused on early-stage investing. As of December 2025, Hummingbird’s third fund had returned 0.7 times paid-in capital in distributions, with a further 5.3 times in unrealized gains, and a net internal rate of return of 33%.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][2]

Hummingbird reached out to San Francisco-based medical diagnostics company BillionToOne; Van den Brande and Ileri flew to California to meet founder Oguzhan Atay, issued a term sheet the same day, and in March 2019 led its $15 million Series A. BillionToOne listed on Nasdaq in November 2025, with Hummingbird holding 16% at the time of the IPO; the deal earned Ileri his first place on the Forbes Midas List Europe.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

After a sky-high return from selling its stake in Peak Games, Hummingbird raised €175 million in less than two weeks for two new funds, Hummingbird Ventures IV and Hummingbird Opportunity Fund II, against an initial target of €150 million. The first continues seed investing with checks of €400,000 to €2.5 million; the second can invest up to an additional €20 million in companies it strongly believes in. The two funds drew more than 200 investors, just under half from the Netherlands and the rest from Flanders. The same year, through a third fund, Hummingbird invested in four Indian companies: InVideo, FPL Technologies, Jupiter, and Khatabook.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

In 2021, Firat Ileri became Hummingbird’s managing partner.⁠[2]

Van den Brande and Ileri were both named to the Forbes Midas List Europe. They say they look for “outlier” founders, people who have lived through difficult circumstances and drawn from them an inner drive to win; Ileri said the greatest value they add is giving founders an honest conversation and not subtracting value. At the time Hummingbird managed more than $1 billion, with a 14-person team at its London headquarters searching worldwide for deals, and it had recently created a talent team to help portfolio companies recruit key executives; the two partners also run a $300 million fund that invests in other similarly unorthodox firms, as well as Magnificent Grants, a program similar to the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry that awards grants starting at $12,000 to people under 25.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Hummingbird Ventures took part in the first funding round of AI lab Conway ResearchConway ResearchConway Research is an artificial intelligence lab founded by Sigil Wen that works on efficient models, inference engines, and personal AI that runs on devices users already own; its first product is Underdog, a locally run personal assistant. In October 2026, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was leading the company’s first funding round.Open the full entry, completed in April 2026, alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, Anthology, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, and Breakneck.⁠[5][6]

Hummingbird describes itself as a global investor that does not limit itself to verticals, niches, or geographies and backs companies at every stage from inception to IPO, saying it does not meddle, does not care about pedigree, and provides patient long-term capital through near-death moments. As of October 2026, its website listed representative investments including LovableLovableLovable is an AI-powered natural-language programming tool for generating, modifying and publishing websites and web applications through conversation. It is developed by a team co-founded by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, with roots in the open-source GPT Engineer project. The team started the business in 2023 and launched the Lovable-branded product in November 2024. It subsequently expanded into cloud backends, collaboration, mobile building and enterprise application development.Open the full entry (2023, pre-seed and seed), Kraken (2014), Revolut (2025, growth), Deliveroo, BillionToOne (2019), Etched (2024), and Enveda (2019), plus more than 70 other companies; by region, 23 are in North America, 12 in Asia-Pacific, 3 in South America, and 25 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and by stage, 35 are pre-seed or seed, 23 early-stage, and 18 growth-stage.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7][7]

As of October 2026, Van den Brande is founding partner and also founded Nomads and Magnificent Grants; Ileri is managing partner; the other partners include Lukas Decoster, who joined in 2016 and runs operations including fund management and investor relations, and Mario Gabriele, founder of the media company The Generalist. The funds are managed by an in-house operations team in Belgium, and the manager, Hummingbird Ventures Management NV, is an EU alternative investment fund manager subject to the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation; in its disclosure it says it does not formally consider the adverse impacts of its investment decisions on sustainability factors, because such impacts are difficult to measure reliably for early-stage companies.⁠[1][1][1][1][8][9][9][9]

Hummingbird Ventures: Official website: https://www.hummingbird.vc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/HummingbirdVC (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hummigbird-ventures/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

Medium: Official account: https://hummingbirdvc.medium.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]