Oli Harris

I'm a Partner at Dream Ventures, a US venture firm spun out of a single family office that backs tech and consumer founders from late-seed onwards. Since launching in 2022 the firm has deployed around $100M across 75+ founding teams, and I lead our work in Europe from London. Before Dream, I spent three years at Venturebeam (formerly Funderbeam), first as Global Head of Marketing and then as Managing Director, where I led and curated funding rounds for impact-driven companies raising €5-50m, so I've sat on the platform side of fundraising as well as the fund side, and I have a fairly unsentimental view of what actually gets a round closed. I've also raised several times for startups I have either founded or been an early employee with. I came to investing as an operator. I founded The Sporting Blog in 2017, a platform for aspiring sports writers that's now been read by millions, and later launched its baseball sister title Peanuts & Crackerjack. As co-founder and CMO of Championship Horse Racing, I helped take the Racing League from concept to launch, twelve teams, £1.8m in prize money, Sky Sports coverage and commercial partners including William Hill, talkSPORT and eToro, which is about as public a go-to-market test as you can get. I also sit on the board of advisors at Energy Shift Capital. Since surviving a brain haemorrhage, I speak publicly about recovery and second-life narratives, and I'm genuinely happy to have an unstructured conversation: about a raise, a positioning problem, a first marketing hire, or whether venture is the right money for you at all.