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Carl Sagan

Sam Hields

Partner

,

London

Sam is based out of OpenOcean's London office and has a background working in software development and operations. Having studied Computer Science, he started his career at JPMorgan working on the world’s first real-time liquidity monitoring and flow control system which automatically managed in excess of USD 6 trillion in cash flows per day. He also spent some time in JPMorgan's Cyber Defence team focusing on application security. Sam's experience in high-growth startups came when he joined Uber as an Operations Manager helping to launch the product across the UK and as a member of the executive team at Community Fibre, joining on their seed round, which would later be acquired through a £400 million LBO.

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News highlights

What founders get wrong about speed and scale

What founders get wrong about speed and scale

Every founder faces the same question: how fast should you go? In conversation with our Venture Partner, Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana, we explored why so many startups struggle to balance speed, quality and scale, and how to get it right (at least most of the time). As Dups puts it, for every rule there is an exception, and for every exception there is something to learn.

Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana

Venture Partner

Quantum computing in Europe: lessons from IQM and OpenOcean

Quantum computing in Europe: lessons from IQM and OpenOcean

When we met Jan Goetz, Professor Mikko Möttönen and the rest of the IQM founding team in late 2018, we knew we were seeing something rare. The science was hard to grasp, even for my colleague Patrik Backman, who had studied physics and some quantum theory, but the ambition was unmistakable.

General Partner

The state of agentic AI in 2025: what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s next

The state of agentic AI in 2025: what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s next

At the start of the year, “2025: The Year of Agents” sounded like headline bait. Eight months in, it feels like an understatement. Sam Altman said agents would “join the workforce” in 2025. Satya Nadella expects them to replace segments of knowledge work. Marc Benioff wants Salesforce to be the “#1 provider of digital labour.” That’s not future tense anymore - today, agents are moving tickets, shipping code, and digesting documents.

Investment Associate