Investment Associate

Love Ventures; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days annual leave

30 days Working from Anywhere

Competitive compensation package

Job summary

Love Ventures in Greater London is seeking an Investment Associate to play a pivotal role in sourcing and building relationships with early-stage founders. The position requires a passion for startups, technology, and AI, as well as the ability to help identify promising startups for investment.

Candidates should have startup or investment experience, and be comfortable navigating complex topics quickly. The role is based in our Central London office with flexible working arrangements available.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in early-stage companies or VC.
• Ability to build relationships and trust with founders.
• Eager to learn and adapt to complex topics quickly.

Responsibilities

• Source and meet founders to build relationships.
• Conduct deep dives on companies and sectors.
• Assist portfolio companies with hiring and fundraising support.

Skills

Startup experience

Investment experience

Hustle signals

Visible in the community

High IQ and EQ

Tools

AI tools

Technical understanding

Job description

About Love Ventures

Founded in 2020, Love Ventures is an early‑stage Venture Capital (VC) firm backing ambitious founders propelling UK productivity. Having started out as angels in the likes of Revolut, Chip and Crowdcube, we have since invested in 40 companies at pre‑seed and seed across various sectors including fintech, applied AI and consumertech, and companies like Tembo, Fifth Dimension and Unbox. We write cheques from pre‑seed to Series A, and like to work shoulder‑to‑shoulder with founders from day one to exit.

The core team comes from a range of startup, operator and investor backgrounds at Barclays Ventures, Capgemini, Morgan Stanley, Octopus Investments and The Instant Group. Meanwhile, our Investment Committee (IC) is made up of four exited founders and operators from the likes of ClearScore, Google, PayPal Ventures, Salary Finance, The Instant Group and Workday.

We’re a small, tight‑knit team where every person on it matters, and every hire changes the shape of the firm. As Love Ventures continues to grow our portfolio and AUM, we are making our first investment team hire in four years in order to capitalise on this opportunity to back some of the UK’s best and brightest founders as they build generational companies.

The role

We’re hiring an Investment Associate who will become one of the key faces of Love Ventures in the early‑stage market; you’ll become instrumental to how and where this firm invests. It’s a role for someone who lives for tech, startups and AI, who likely already spends their evenings and weekends tinkering with the latest technology, going to hackathons, and who is deeply ingrained in the next‑generation founder community in London (or ready to be). You’ll spend your week meeting 20+ founders and you’ll have, and develop, a strong sense for which teams we should spend more time with.

AI is shifting the key role of an investor from analytics to access; your job is to be the person that top founders want to speak to before they’re even raising, and to be the term sheet they want to take when there are five others on the table.

Your mission is to find the next great company early, and earn the right to back them.

What you’ll actually do

• Sourcing (≈60%): Run our top‑of‑funnel. Develop a pre‑VC pipeline of repeat operators, hackathon winners, and second‑time founders still in stealth. Host and attend events to build lasting relationships with the best founders, as well as VC firms and accelerators to invest alongside, or to back our portfolio companies in later rounds. Your job is to make sure Love Ventures is the first port of call for the types of founders we want to back.
• Deep dives & diligence (≈30%): Lead primary research on sectors and companies you find interesting. Write sharp, opinionated memos. Build models where they matter. Do the customer and reference calls to help us form a view and defend it at our IC.
• Portfolio & firm‑building (≈10%): Help our existing founders on hiring, fundraising narrative, and intros. Help us build the firm: better CRM hygiene, better data infrastructure, better AI workflows across the whole investment process.

Who we’re looking for

We care less about the CV and more about your edge. We’re looking for outlier individuals with evidence of deep curiosity, passion for technology, exceptional ability and unique insight. Though we don’t expect you to tick every box, the best candidates for this role will likely have done much of the following.

Experience and skills (likely 2+ years post‑graduation):

• Startup experience. You’ve probably founded or worked at/with an early‑stage company and know what zero‑to‑one actually feels like.
• Investment experience. You may have already been investing at another VC fund for a couple of years, or have transferable skills from other industries like Strategy Consulting or Banking.
• Hustle signals. You’ve shipped things, organised things, or built a following on your own initiative. You don’t wait for permission to try new things.
• Visible in the community. Founders and operators in London already know your name, or will within six months. You have a magnetic ability to make people want to work with you.
• High IQ and EQ. You’ll need to get up to speed on complex topics at pace, learn to ask the right questions, and earn founders’ trust.

How you operate:

• AI‑native. You use AI tools daily, not as a gimmick but as a force multiplier. You’ve probably built your own agents and have strong views on which models and workflows actually work to give us an edge.
• Technical depth. You can read a technical paper, have a real conversation with an ML engineer, or dissect a product without hand‑wavings.
• Culture fit. Low ego, high agency, direct and kind. You argue hard in the room and work together with camaraderie outside it.

What you can expect from us

• Direct exposure to every part of the job: sourcing, diligence, IC, board observation, portfolio support, from week one.
• A seat at the table in investment decisions: we want your opinion in the room, not a memo from a distance.
• Real mentorship from partners who will invest in your development.
• 25 days annual leave with an additional day per year of service (capped at 5).
• 30 days Working from Anywhere (WFA).
• Competitive compensation package, including bonus and carry participation.

Location & logistics

Default is four days a week at our Central London office (Soho), with some travel, though we’ll consider flexible/remote work on a case‑by‑case basis. We can’t sponsor visas at the moment.

Other information

We want Love Ventures to be a firm where the best people want to work, regardless of background. If our mission excites you but you don’t tick every box above, apply anyway – we want to hear from you.

If you have any burning questions about this role that aren’t covered here, please contact the hiring manager [e-mail].

Please note, this job description is not intended to be all‑inclusive. Employees may be required to perform other related duties to meet the ongoing needs of the organisation.

Love Ventures VC Limited is a private limited company registered in England and Wales, registered number 12829912, with registered office, South Building, Upper Farm, Wootton St. Lawrence, Basingstoke, RG23 8PE. Love Ventures VC Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 1001875).