Richard Anson

Richard joined the Octopus Ventures team in 2022, alongside which he leads the academic agenda at Conception X and lectures in Entrepreneurship at UCL.

Operating at the intersection of entrepreneurship, investment, and academia, he’s passionate about supporting science and technology ventures that solve humanity’s most pressing challenges. Over the course of his career, Richard has worked with more than 40 ventures, raising multiple rounds of investment.

Richard started out as a geologist, before joining 3i in the early 1990s, as part of a team managing investments of up to £5 million. He went on to a Ph.D. in engineering geology at the University of Bristol, before spending time as a post-doc researcher and four years in the industry.

He returned to the textbooks for an MBA at the Cranfield School of Management, then, immediately after the dotcom crash, joined KPMG’s Information Communication and Technology practice as a strategy consultant, where he was seconded to Orange as interim head of group planning, covering 22 countries.

After four years, he left to gain some experience on the other side of the table as the co-founder of Reevoo, where he spent six years as CEO, leading the business through multiple funding rounds and securing some 300 brands as customers, before moving into a non-Exec role and supporting the business through to sale. More recently, Richard was Entrepreneur in Residence and Strategy Director at the investment and innovation firm, True.