HIRO Capital welcomes Sir Nick Clegg as General Partner and launches HIRO III European scaleup VC fund with new Advisory Board of global leaders including Yann LeCun

LONDON, Dec. 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Sir Nick Clegg, Yann LeCun and others join HIRO III, a UK/Europe-focused multi-stage VC, focused on Spatial AI, Robotics, Longevity, Games, Space & Defence.

HIRO Capital, a founder-led VC firm, today announced that Sir Nick Clegg, former President, Global Affairs at META and former UK deputy Prime Minister, has joined the Fund as a General Partner for the launch of HIRO III. HIRO III is a large multi-stage fund able to deploy from €5m-€50m each into promising innovators, targeting the scale-up capital gap in the UK and Europe.

The HIRO founding GP team of Luke Alvarez, Cherry Freeman and UK games legend Sir Ian Livingstone CBE have strong pedigree as founder-entrepreneurs, with multiple exits and IPOs between them totalling >€10bn. That track record has been built on technical expertise and scaleup knowhow from decades of building and investing in start ups. 

HIRO's foundations as an investor in spatial computing position it perfectly for the new era of technology in which we will see extraordinary value creation across Europe in areas from spatial AI and robotics through to defence and longevity.

Sir Nick Clegg said: "I joined HIRO because I share with the founders a belief in the rise of immersive computing and Spatial AI. We will move from staring at the internet, to living in the internet. We are right in the early stages of that platform shift with the convergence of spatial technologies and next generation world model AIs. Unlike other funds, HIRO is wholly focused on those themes, entirely within Europe.

This is an amazing moment of opportunity for the UK/Europe's tech ecosystem. We have some of the most outstanding researchers and universities on the planet, and great engineers and entrepreneurs too. Our problem is not a lack of innovation, it is a lack of capital at scale. Europe may have its critics, but we have a vibrant start-up scene which is now ready to accelerate - I believe the HIRO team has the unique geographic and technological reach to help make that happen."

Alongside the appointment, HIRO's team will be strengthened by the new Advisory Board. The board brings exceptional domain expertise across each of the four core themes of the HIRO thesis: Spatial AI and Cloud, Autonomy & Robotics, Space & Defence, and Augmentation & Longevity.

Professor Yann LeCun said: "I am delighted to be joining the HIRO Advisory Board. We are entering a new phase of AI – an era of systems which can understand the physical world, have persistent memory and which can reason and plan complex actions. HIRO's track record of investing in spatial technologies, 3D tech, wearables and gaming means they are exceptionally well placed to capitalise on this new wave of opportunity in Europe."

The new board includes Professor Yann LeCun, former Chief Scientist of Meta and Turing prize winner for deep learning AI; Malcolm Turnbull, former PM of Australia and a leading tech investor; Major Tim Peake, scientist, test pilot and the first British ESA astronaut; Laurent Solly, VP Europe at META; security and defence expert Professor Deeph Chana of Imperial, London, founding Director of NATO DIANA & the Nato Innovation Fund; Hannah Gladman, Strategy & Special Projects at Google DeepMind; Dr Jack Scannell, biotech investor, longevity founder, creator of Eroom's Law; Edward van Cutsem, Chairman of Private Markets at Westerly Winds and ex-MD at BlackRock; Professor Paul Newman, Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford and founder of the Oxford Robotics Institute; Caroline Daniel, former Financial Times journalist and strategist; and Loredana Crisan, Chief Design Officer at Figma.

Luke Alvarez, HIRO managing partner said: "I am delighted to welcome Sir Nick to our team, together with Yann and our other amazing Advisory Board members. Today, we are in the early stages of a Cambrian explosion of new technologies, powered by the accelerating convergence of computing into the physical world, onto the human body and into autonomous agents. We all share the same belief in Europe's potential to be at the forefront of tech and the same passion to play a part in UK & European success. Our new advisory Board has been selected for their vision, their technology expertise and their networks globally and across Europe. We look forward to announcing the first HIRO III investments in 2026."

About HIRO Capital 

HIRO Capital is a founder-led London and Luxembourg based Venture Capital firm investing in the Superabundant future of humanity. HIRO invests from Series A to Series C / Scale-Up, in our specialist thematic sectors of AI, Spatial Computing, Autonomy, Robotics, Longevity, Augmentation, Games, Simulation and Space & Defence technologies. We focus on entrepreneurs and innovators in the broadly defined Europe+ region, which includes the EU, UK, Norway, Switzerland and Ukraine. We are founders & leaders who back Founder Leaders. We are optimists and futurists. We believe that Europe+ can and should be a global leader in the next phase of human evolution, enabled by technology. We know that people's creativity, ambition and entrepreneurship will build better human societies. https://hiro.capital/ 

HIRO is named after the hero you become when you play a game or sport; the hero you are when you build a company; and it pays tribute to Hiro Protagonist, the hacker hero of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, who codes the 3D digital world and saves humanity against the odds.

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