Balderton adds serial entrepreneur Phil Chambers to its partnership

Balderton today announces the appointment of Phil Chambers as Partner, where he will focus on early-stage investments.

Chambers joins the firm after a 20+ year career as a founder, operator and angel investor in the European technology ecosystem, including roles in London, Hamburg and Copenhagen. Most recently, he served as CEO of Orbex, the Scottish space launch company.

Prior to Orbex, Chambers co-founded and served as CEO of Peakon, a Balderton portfolio company focused on employee engagement, which he led through rapid international expansion from its Danish home into the UK, Germany, the US, and APAC before its $700 million acquisition by Workday in 2021. He was then GM at Workday for two and a half years, where he grew Peakon’s global footprint to hundreds of millions in ARR. 

After falling in love with computers and technology as a child, Chambers studied computer science at the University of Manchester and worked at startups, including Gumtree in the UK and the local reviews company Qype, based in Hamburg, Germany.

He then became CTO at Podio, a work management company based in Copenhagen that was acquired by Citrix, where he later led the GoToMeeting product line in Santa Barbara. This experience inspired him to co-found Peakon, a product that revolutionised the employee listening market and made continuous listening a standard practice in many companies.  

Alongside his operating career, Chambers has been one of Europe’s most active angel investors, backing more than 100 startups.

At Balderton, Phil will draw from his own experience to support founders as they start and scale their businesses in Europe.

Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner at Balderton, said:

“I have had the pleasure of knowing Phil for almost a decade now, first working with him as a board member of Peakon, where I saw him grow the company from virtually nothing to a $700 million acquisition by Workday.

We then stayed close during his tenure at Workday, and his Orbex years.

I could not be more excited to welcome Phil to the Balderton partnership.”

Phil Chambers added:

“I’m absolutely delighted to be joining the Balderton team: an incredible group of people, working with the most impressive companies in Europe, and a fund at the top of its game.”