Forbes December 11, 2025
Partners Barend Van den Brande and Firat Ileri at low-profile London fund Hummingbird both won spots on the Midas List Europe for tearing up the venture rulebook and backing “outlier” founders.
Oguzhan Atay was preparing to raise a Series A round for his San Francisco-based medical diagnostic startup BillionToOne back in 2018 when the message from Hummingbird Ventures dropped in his inbox.
The London-based fund wanted to hear his pitch. After a phone call, Hummingbird’s partners Barend Van den Brande and Firat Ileri flew to California to meet Atay and his team, who had been working on genetic tests for common diseases like sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis in unborn babies. The same day Hummingbird wrote Atay a term...
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