Location London, England, United Kingdom Regions Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Gender Male
Investor Type Investor Stage Number of Exits
Website erroldamelin.com/ LinkedIn View on LinkedIn X (Twitter) View on X
Errol Damelin is the founder of Dust Road Ventures, a seed-stage investment firm investing in fintech, AI, health-tech, and enterprise software. He has made over 75 investments since 2011, almost all as first or second cheques. Before investing full-time he built three companies — Supply Chain Connect, Wonga, and Tide. Portfolio includes Wise
(invested pre-revenue), Purplebricks (first investor), HiBob, K Health, Cleo AI, Earnin, Elliptic, Cazoo, Citymapper, YuLife, and Zoe. TechCrunch Founder of the Year (2010). Based in London. Originally from Klerksdorp, South Africa.
Among the companies co-founded by Damelin are groundbreaking fintech company Wonga, and SME banking startup Tide. His early investments include Wise, Cazoo, Purplebricks, K Health, YuLife, Sure, Demyst, Zoe, Farewill, CityMapper, Modifi, UnBabel, Thimble, HiBob, Modifi, Elliptic, Lendingkart, and VivaReal. Using his own personal equity, Damelin continues to invest early on in the next generation of entrepreneurs so that he can help them succeed. He is not an institutional VC fund and does not maximize the assets under his management. He best describes his approach as Riding Shotgun.
Damelin's success as a founder has been recognized by The Guardian, which named him Digital Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011; by Ernst and Young, which named him the UK's Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011 as well; and by TechCrunch, which named him Founder of the Year in 2010.
