Investment Administrator – Ventures

About Octopus Ventures

We invest in pioneers creating the next billion-pound companies in the areas of health, money and deep tech. Our core team has been together since 2008 and has grown to around forty people. Together, we run one of Europe’s largest venture funds with £1.3 billion under management.

Our typical investment starts from £1 million for Seed to around £10 million for Series B and we can follow our investment right up to £25 million. Over the years, we have supported over 100 outstanding entrepreneurs that are leading the way in disrupting their industries. Companies backed in recent years include allplants, Elvie, Depop, Big Health, graze.com, Eve, Magic Pony, Secret Escapes, Sofar Sounds, SwiftKey, Swoon Editions, tails.com and Zoopla Property Group.

We’re based in London and New York with partners placed in San Francisco, Singapore and China to help the companies we back scale in those markets. We are part of Octopus Group, managing £8.6 billion (31 Mar 2020) on behalf of more than 50,000 investors, spanning investments, healthcare, energy and property. 

The opportunity to join Octopus Ventures in London as an Investment Administrator is now available. This offers a challenging and exciting opportunity to help pioneers change the world as Octopus Ventures looks to scale its business.

An excellent, collegiate, and effective operations team is crucial to enabling Octopus Ventures to meet its objectives in the European and global VC community as one team. The successful candidate will join our existing operations team to help ensure the investment processes, governance and related obligations are executed seamlessly as we continue to grow our business, and increase the capacity and efficiency of our investment capability.

The role’s primary focus is to provide administrative support for our investment processes. Key responsibilities include: 

• Understanding the steps of the investment processes well and helping ensure the Ops and investment team adhere to them.
• Updating our process management system and drafting, reviewing and distributing key communications for the team, Investment Committee, investors and other key external stakeholders.
• Undertaking and overseeing the recording of our investments or divestments in our various systems (including in accordance with relevant FCA regulation), such as investment, asset & valuation data and investor information, and ensuring the movement of related funds runs smoothly.
• Liaising with the investment leads and legal counsel throughout, using your knowledge of our processes and risk tolerances to manage workload and prioritise requests as part of a team.
• Administration of relevant client or regulatory reporting following completion of an investment or divestment, including VCT or EIS fund-related matters.
• Liaising with core teams across Octopus and suppliers externally to keep things running smoothly and information flowing between us seamlessly at all times.

What you’ll need to be successful:

•  An understanding of venture capital/private equity or equity investments generally, although you don’t need to have worked exactly in our part of the industry before – we welcome transferable skill sets and recognise that diverse working backgrounds make us stronger overall.
• Superb administration and organisation skills, and an excellent sense of how to prioritise and manage your own workload.
• The ability to get your head around complex processes and stick to them.
• Be as comfortable working with databases and numbers as with communicating well both verbally and in writing.
• Proactivity. Being able to spot issues before they happen or volunteering to solve them when they do is vital.
• Great attention to detail, and an ability to keep this up whether it’s the first or twentieth time you’re doing something.
• A passion for putting the customer at the heart of what you do, whether that customer is internal or external.
• A desire to be part of a tight and ambitious team with shared values, where you will both work with others of all seniorities and be expected to own delivery of your own workload.
• The courage to challenge the status quo.

And to really stand out from crowd:

• Be freethinking and proactive in suggesting changes to ensure processes remain efficient, scalable and have minimal time wastage.
• Be comfortable in working in a flexible, dynamic, fast-paced and entrepreneurial environment where priorities are regularly changing.
• Have an interest in learning more about the companies we invest in, the industry and applying this knowledge to the role as you learn more

Our Values and DNA 

At Octopus we don’t just focus on what we do but also how we do it. Everyone shares our values of being straightforward, helpful and bold. And while these are the principles that guide us as an organisation, our DNA goes even further, by revealing our inner strength: 

• We are loyal: we fully buy-in to the company’s vision and believe in everything that Octopus stands for.
• We are respectful: we live and breathe the Octopus values of being helpful, straightforward and bold.
• We are resilient: we have an inner strength that means we never give in.
• We are intellectually curious: we seek to understand how the world works and we’re always learning, adapting and improving.
• We understand who our customers are: and because we know them really well, we always give them our very best. 

What we offer 

Octopus has built an exciting and inclusive high-performance culture where employees feel empowered. This means we welcome discussions around flexible working hours. We also understand the value of diversity, and we have a team dedicated to promoting gender, ethnic, socio-economic, LGBT and disability equality, to make sure we back up our words with actions. All Octopus employees are given the opportunity to develop new skills, aim higher and accelerate their careers.