The VC Rebuild Inside Michelle Robson's mission to redraw Europe's venture map

Odyssey Ventures' founding partner on founder-first capital, fixing structural gaps in European VC, and why the future belongs to investors who think globally from day one. Michelle Robson has never been interested in doing venture by the book. After years inside the industry - from early-stage investing to global networks that shaped the trajectory of deep-tech companies - she kept seeing the same pattern: founders working harder than their funds, and a landscape where geography, background and gender still dictated who received capital. Odyssey Ventures was her answer.

Built on a founder-first philosophy and an ambition to break Europe's regional silos, Robson's firm is designed to open doors - across the UK, the US, Asia and beyond - that most early-stage teams struggle to reach. In this conversation, she reflects on the structural gaps holding the ecosystem back, why genuine decision-making power still sits with too few people, and how Europe can finally build a venture industry that matches its talent.

1. What inspired you to launch Odyssey Ventures after your experience at AP Ventures, and what gap did you see in the European VC landscape?
When we started Odyssey, the motivation was very simple: we wanted to do venture better. Too much of the industry has been built around structures where the fund wins even if the founder doesn't. My co-founder, Ali, and I always wanted to build a firm where the focus is on working incredibly hard for founders, because when they succeed, you succeed. That's been our approach from the start. If you work incredibly hard for your founders and help them succeed on their terms, the returns will follow. That founder-first mindset sits at the heart of Odyssey.

The other part is more structural, as European venture is still highly regional. There are many excellent local funds doing good work in their own markets, but that doesn't always translate into the support needed to scale globally. Ali brings a very deep network in the US. I have long-standing relationships across Europe and Asia, and together we can open doors for founders far beyond their home market. Odyssey exists to combine that global reach with a genuinely aligned partnership model, so ambitious European founders can grow into international companies rather than being constrained by geography.

2. From your perspective, what are the most persistent barriers preventing more women from reaching partner level in venture capital?
Plenty of people carry the title "partner" but don't hold equity or meaningful decision-making power. When you look specifically at who owns the partnership and who ultimately makes the investment calls, the number of women drops sharply. Research from European Women in VC has done important work to highlight this, for example, female cheque writers represent only between 5% and 15% of angel and VC investors. And the latest State of European Tech report shows the downstream impact, with no progress on closing the gender funding gap in a decade.

The other issue starts long before anyone applies for a venture role. A lot of investors come from backgrounds in engineering, software, chemistry or other STEM fields, or they arrive in venture after founding a company, which are still male-dominated areas. Rebalancing this has to start in primary school, not when someone is finishing a degree, because by then the pipeline has already narrowed. If we want more women at the top of funds, we need more girls who feel confident and supported in those subjects from the very beginning.

You also see fewer women founding companies, often because the moments when men are encouraged to take big risks professionally can coincide with a point in life where many women are thinking about stability and family planning. All of these factors compound over time. None of it changes overnight, but acknowledging how early these barriers form is the first step to fixing them.

3. How does greater female representation in investment decision-making translate into fairer or more balanced funding outcomes?
When you look closely at how decisions are made inside a fund, it becomes clear why representation matters. In many firms, the voting power and economic influence still sit with a small group, even when committees look balanced on paper.

Bringing in more women and more varied perspectives generally changes the quality of the discussion. You see it in technology itself, when early AI systems were trained by a narrow demographic, the outputs reflected those blind spots. Investment decisions work in much the same way. If everyone evaluating a company has a similar outlook, you miss opportunities and you misjudge risks.

When more women and people with a wider range of backgrounds are involved in deciding how and where capital is deployed, you get a more rounded view. It leads to stronger discussions and ultimately to decisions that are more considered and more resilient.

4. What practical steps can VC firms take today to build a more inclusive and diverse ecosystem – beyond hiring targets?
The first step is recognising the gaps properly. You can't change anything you don't measure, so firms need to look closely at their own structures before making commitments about diversity. Once you have an honest view of where decision-making power actually sits, it becomes much easier to work out what needs to shift.

If a firm realises it doesn't yet have the range of perspectives it needs at the partner level, there are still meaningful ways to bring that thinking in. One option is to appoint external advisers or investment committee members with different backgrounds and experiences, and make sure they have a genuine role in the process. It's a simple step, but it broadens the viewpoints around the table and improves the quality of decision-making from day one.

5. How is Odyssey Ventures identifying and supporting Europe's next generation of diverse founders?
For us, it starts with recognising that diversity of thought leads to stronger decisions. You avoid groupthink by being deliberate about where you look for ideas and who you spend time with. That's why we don't base our sourcing solely in London or the major financial hubs.

I spend a lot of time travelling across the UK and Europe, meeting university spin-out teams, engineers, researchers and founders who are building in places that don't always sit on the traditional venture map. When you widen the environments you operate in, you naturally widen the range of people you meet.

Our fund exists to support founders to go global – so from day one we are very proactive in connecting our founders and start-ups with our ecosystem of partners, customers and investors. These connections are incredibly helpful to founders – for many of them, we can introduce them to a customer or investor in a geography or sector where they don't have natural connections. This meaningfully moves the dial on how quickly they grow, and how successful they are.

6. You've mentioned Europe's valuation gap with the U.S.—what factors do you think will help close that divide over the next decade?
There are structural reasons for the difference. One is regulatory: Europe is still a collection of many jurisdictions, each with its own rules. Growing across borders means dealing with different regulators, languages and sometimes currencies, which adds cost and complexity in a way a US company expanding state-by-state doesn't face.

The other major factor is the depth of capital. Europe has sizeable pension funds, but they don't have a tradition of allocating to venture, and the current incentives and structures make it difficult for them to do so. For example, European pension funds allocated just 0.01% of their assets to venture in 2024 - that lack of depth in the funding landscape is a major reason the gap persists.

Those two factors explain a lot of the current gap, but they also show where the opportunity lies. As regulation becomes more aligned and as more institutional capital starts to recognise the value of backing innovation in Europe, the landscape will shift. There is enormous potential here, and with the right structural support, Europe is well placed to capture far more of the value it creates.

7. Looking ahead, how do you see the UK's venture capital landscape evolving over the next five to ten years if more women and diverse founders gain equal access to funding?
If more women and diverse founders gained equal access to funding, you'd see a far more dynamic and inventive ecosystem. The more varied the group of people building companies, the more creative and valuable the innovation network becomes. Opening up that pipeline benefits everyone - founders, investors and the wider economy.

The UK has recognised this and is starting to put new programmes in place, including work from the British Business Bank to support underrepresented founders. That's encouraging, but the real long-term shift must happen much earlier.

As AI becomes more central to how the future economy operates, STEM skills are only going to grow in importance. We can't afford for whole sections of society to be excluded from that. STEM has to be accessible from the very earliest stages of education, because if those opportunities aren't open at primary school age, it becomes much harder to close the gap later on. The UK has a huge opportunity here, but it relies on people being equipped with the skills to take part in this next wave of innovation.