Alexander Joël-Carbonell

Partner

Growth | Berlin

Alexander Joël-Carbonell made his first stock trade at 14, funded entirely by a year's worth of pocket money savings, high-frequency trading into sizeable teenager money. But It didn't end well. He lost all of it in the dot-com crash of 2000, a lesson that turned out to be more valuable than any of the gains. He studied at EBS and Cambridge, earning two Master degrees and graduating top of his class, picked up a DAAD scholarship and a Student of the Year award along the way, and joined Morgan Stanley in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008/2009

He stayed for nearly a decade, executing IPOs, M&A, and capital markets transactions across the technology sector. From there, he joined Delivery Hero as it prepared for its successful 2017 IPO and jointly helped turn it into a DAX company, leading its M&A and Growth VC efforts across a portfolio of more than 20 companies with nearly €1 billion in AUM.

Among his picks which turned into unicorns, decacorns and some even IPO’ed: Glovo, Rappi, Zomato, Impossible Foods and Instashop. The depth of experience he built across those years has made him one of the most sought-after voices on growth investing in Europe across sectors in the last 10 years

At HV, he has always been drawn to founders capable of building with sizeable, global impact - regardless of its sector, whether Frontier AI, Enterprise SaaS, in Digital Assets, FinTech, or Consumer. Over the past two years, he has devoted considerable time to the AI infrastructure space, working alongside leading researchers and championing HV's major Growth AI investments in Nabla and AMI Labs

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I'm excited by themoments that define a company

Growth stage is where the stakes get real. The product works, the market is there, and everything that follows depends on the decisions made in the next eighteen months. Which markets to enter. Whether to acquire a competitor. How to structure the balance sheet. When to go public. These are the moments that determine whether a company becomes a category leader, and most investors have only ever watched them from the outside. I've executed all of them, repeatedly, at some of Europe's most consequential companies. For founders navigating those decisions, that difference matters more than anything else I could bring to the table.

I’m on the lookout for

Impact that goes beyond the product. The investments that drive me most are the ones where the work clearly matters beyond the balance sheet. Nabla gives clinicians their time back. AMI Labs is rethinking the foundations of machine intelligence. Different categories, same conviction that a company can change something that genuinely matters.

A founder who rises to the moment

The decisions that define a growth stage company are ones most founders have never faced before. I look for those who get clearer as the complexity increases, who make their best calls when the pressure is highest, and who treat every hard moment as something to learn from rather than survive.

Any sector, if the ambition is right

What draws me in has never been the category. It's the scale of what a founder is trying to build and the hunger to see it through. Founders who work with me get an investor who brings pattern recognition from across the market, not just one corner of it.