Leveling up with Atomico’s Hillary Ball and Andreas Helbig as both are promoted to Partner

One look at the Venture Capital landscape, particularly that of the soldiers in the trenches, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice the trend of leveling up. In fact, perusing the Tech.eu archives, and VC appointments are far and few between to note an external party welcomed into the upper ranks.

Following the hat-trick appointments of Terese Hougaard, Sasha Vidiborskiy, and Luca Eisenstecken to Partner announcement in April of last year, as of today, both (now-formerly) Principals at Atomico Hillary Ball and Andreas Helbig are joining the Partner ranks rising from Associate and VP, respectively.

Hillary, who despite her best try, still exhibits a heavy Torontonian accent (tell me aboot it), began her career at Atomico in October of 2017 following a 4-year stint at Goldman Sachs where she advised companies on IPOs, M&A and financing processes, a skill that will serve growing companies particularly well as they enter the next phase of their rise to the top.

“What stands out in my mind about working at Atomico is this really collaborative approach to the work that we do. The diversity of perspectives and experiences enables us to make the best decisions and allows us to be best in servicing our founders,” says Ball.

In her new role as Partner in the Growth Stage team at Atomico, Ball will be investing across both European and US-based consumer internet and enterprise companies from the Series B round upwards, and is fairly industry agnostic.

Hillary sits on the boards of Atomico portfolio companies Gympass and Framer, and was instrumental in the firm’s investments in Sorare, MasterClass, Framer, Gympass, SmartNews and Quit Genius.

After graduating from the illustrious KIT, Andreas Helbig spent six months of his life on a factory shop floor in Karlsruhe before Project A Ventures took a gamble and brought him on as one of the first full-time people on their investment team at a time when they were pivoting from an incubator to a venture capital firm.

Closing a five+ year tenure that saw Andreas operating out of Berlin and Stockholm and working on deals including those of Kry, Voi, Sennder, and Dixa, he joined Atomico in August of 2020 as a VP, rising to level of Principle a short one year and five months later.

With a strong focus on the Nordics and Baltics, Andreas’ area of expertise lies in B2B software, specifically SMB SaaS, including vertical SaaS, and B2B marketplaces.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that Andreas was the driving force behind Atomico’s lead of core software for veterinarians platform Digitail’s recent $11 million Series A funding round. He’s been involved in the sourcing, evaluation, and support of Atmico portfolio companies PocketLaw, Katana, and Pactum.

“The one thing I’m most excited about in my new role is to be responsible, be a reliable partner to founders, to be with them in the trenches,” said Helbig. “Not only standing side by side with Digitail in the booth at VMX in Orlando, the biggest Vet conference in the world with 25,000 people, but also from the board seat, providing strategic advice, really helping to drive a company.”

As many the wise investor knows, a bear market is ripe with opportunities, and those that thrive in a bull market are often the ones that are born of necessity. With this in mind and more authority bestowed upon them, it should be interesting to see when and where, and how both Hillary Ball and Andreas Helbig choose to roll up their sleeves and help forge tomorrow’s titans. The Atomico way.

Lead image: Hermione Hodgson