Manchester Angel Investor Volker Hirsch joins Amadeus Capital

I’ve known Volker Hirsch for many years since he was part of the Techcelerate Network during our previous tenure from 2006 to 2013. In February 2010, Volker spoke eloquently at Techcelerate Event on Mobile Social, Advertising, Shopping, Payments, Application Development and Acquisitions (what a title!) with Keith Curran, Charles Weir and Barry Sharples.

Volker started out as a corporate lawyer with Luther in Hamburg. He joined one of the world’s first mobile technology incubators in 2000 and was instrumental in helping to launch some of the earliest services and applications in the mobile space over the next ten years. As Chief Strategy Officer at Scoreloop, a mobile social gaming platform, he helped it grow to 450 million users at its peak. After its acquisition by BlackBerry in 2011, he served as BlackBerry’s Global Head of Business Development – Games. To date, Volker has founded or co-founded seven companies.

Volker is currently co-founder of Blue Beck, a mobile development house. He is Venture Partner at Emerge Education, the EdTech accelerator programme, and co-founder of Tech North Advocates, championing the case for technology and innovation in the North of England.

On 23rd October 2018, Amadeus Capital announced the joining of Volker to their team. Volker represents Manchester and the North for Amadeus having ears and eyes on the ground. This strengthens partners of Tier 1 VCs in the North West, e.g. Chris Tottman of Notion Capital, which will accelerate the development of the tech ecosystem in Manchester.

Manchester is also important to Amadeus due to Steve Furber, the principal designer of the first ARM chips who is now a Professor for Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Hermann Hauser who co-founded Amadeus in 1997 spun out ARM from Acorn Computers. Work of Steve would obviously be of interest to Amadeus and other venture backers.

In addition, Manchester and the North West fits well with some of the core areas of Amadeus, e.g. AI, MedTech, Digital Health, Cyber Security and Graphene. Opening of GCHQ office in Manchester is no doubt of interest to Amadeus and others. Amadeus is specially hungry for Graphene technologies having recently invested into Paragraf in Cambridge.

PS: In 2011, we had the pleasure to welcome Amadeus Managing Partner, Alex van Someren to Techcelerate.