Partnering with the people that move the world. Detroit and Berlin.

Assembly Ventures

Co-Founders & Partners

Felix Scheuffelen is a Co-Founder and Partner at Assembly Ventures.

​Prior to Assembly Ventures, he co-founded and managed Beyond1435, an industry consortium, together with Deutsche Bahn, Siemens Mobility, Bombardier and Swiss Railways. The consortium focuses on creating joint ventures and innovation alliances in the transportation industry. Prior to his call from Deutsche Bahn, Felix served as a managing director at Plug and Play Germany on invitation from Daimler, which had just started its innovation platform Startup Autobahn which would scale to more than 30 European partners and is by now considered the leading automotive technology innovation platform in Europe.

​Before returning to Germany, Felix spent seven years in Brazil, during which he co-founded Groupon Brazil and scaled it into a 1,500 person organization that went public on group level in 2011. Afterwards, he co-founded Iporanga Ventures in Sao Paulo with three other general partners to invest in Brazilian early-stage startups.

His operational startup know-how comes from the early days at the startup incubator Rocket Internet for which Felix managed Zalando’s professional rollout in TV and Online Marketing analytics. In-house he co-founded Zalando Lounge, one of Zalando’s biggest EBITDA contributors to date.

Felix holds an engineering diploma from Technical University Berlin.

Felix Scheuffelen

Jessica Robinson is a Co-Founder and Partner at Assembly Ventures. She is a mobility investor, entrepreneur, educator, and champion of Detroit.

As Co-Founder and Partner of Assembly Ventures, she invests in and strategically supports the entrepreneurs and mobility companies moving the Western world. She joined Assembly Ventures from her prior role establishing the Michigan Mobility Institute, an organization she co-founded to accelerate talent readiness for the mobility industry.

Jessica previously led the development of next-generation mobility efforts at Ford Smart Mobility where she was the Director of City Solutions, a team which supported go-to-market strategies for the company’s entire mobility portfolio. An early arrival to the new mobility industry, she was a key field leader at Zipcar, the world’s largest car sharing organization, where she held roles in growth, operations, and marketing across North America.

Her background in technology and innovation includes prior work at Techstars launching corporate startup accelerators with industry-leading partners like Target and Virgin Media. In 2020, Jessica was named Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. She is an active startup mentor, advisor to the Zell Lurie Commercialization Fund at the University of Michigan, serves on the advisory board for the MS Robotics program at Wayne State University, and micro lender who invests in women entrepreneurs and business owners in Detroit.

Jessica served as a 2021 Detroit delegate to the Harvard Business School Young American Leaders Program, an initiative that brings together cross-sector leaders to drive new strategies for shared American prosperity. In recognition of her public-private work, she has also been named a Next City Vanguard, a competitive distinction for top young urban innovators working to make change in global cities. She also previously served as a Governor’s appointee to the State of Michigan’s Workforce Development Board representing mobility businesses.

Jessica graduated with highest honors from the University of Massachusetts with a BA in anthropology and brings an unexpected perspective to the challenges that fall at the intersection of mobility and technology.

Jessica Robinson

Chris is a Co-Founder and Partner at Assembly Ventures. Detroit, Berlin and Silicon Valley. He is a board member at Metropolis and a board observer at ONE (Our Next Energy) and Sortera.

​Prior to Assembly Ventures, he co-founded the Detroit Mobility Lab and the Michigan Mobility Institute and acted as a senior advisor to mobility start-ups around the globe. Previous to this, Chris co-founded Fontinalis Partners and for over a decade worked to build it into one of the premier investment firms in next-generation mobility. While at Fontinalis, he served as a board member for nuTonomy (acquired by Aptiv in October 2017) and Karamba Security, and as a board observer at ParkMe (acquired by INRIX in September 2015), Parkmobile (acquired by BMW in January 2018), Life360 (IPO in May 2019), Ouster (SPAC in December 2020) and SmartKargo.

​Prior to Fontinalis, Chris served in the U.S. Army as a communications officer in the U.S. and Iraq. Before joining the military, Chris worked as an investment banker at UBS within its Technology and Energy groups in San Francisco and New York. Additionally, Chris acts as a senior advisor to the COMMIT Foundation and is a member of the Global Cleantech 100 expert panel. He is also a co-owner of Buddy's Pizza, the birthplace of original Detroit-style pizza, and an avid angel investor. Chris has previously served as the chairman of Read to a Child, a national children’s literacy and mentoring nonprofit in the United States and acted as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Personal Transportation Systems.

Chris earned his master’s degree in business administration from the Yale School of Management. While at Yale he served on the Honor Committee and graduated with distinction in former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s seminar on Faith and Globalization. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in both economics and international relations from Michigan State University.

Chris Thomas

Sujoy Sarkar is a Director at Assembly Ventures. He brings 10+ years of investing and operating experience across technology, consumer, and auto-tech/mobility sectors.

​Sujoy joins Assembly from BYTON, where he served as the Head of Corporate Development leading strategic investments, M&A, business development, and strategic partnerships across North America, Israel, Middle East, and Europe.

Prior to BYTON, Sujoy helped launch Quantamize, a global quantitative macro hedge fund and research company, that was later acquired by Forbes. He was responsible for investing across internet, software, consumer, and auto-tech companies in North America, Asia, and Latin America.

Sujoy began his career in New York City as an investment banker at JPMorgan and later RBC Capital Markets where he assisted startups and private companies with IPOs and secondary offerings across technology, media, and consumer industries.

He is a graduate of Fordham University, where he studied finance and economics and graduated with honors, including In Cursu Honorum distinction.

Sujoy Sarkar

Assembly Ventures' Founding Team includes Jessica Robinson and 2 others.

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