Nick Clegg takes on a new venture capital role at London-based Hiro Capital, expanding his post-politics career after senior leadership positions at Meta.
Clegg is becoming a general partner in the European tech investment business after leaving his position as the head of global relations for the Facebook owner this year.
In 2018, the year he started working at Meta, Hiro Capital was established. He faced harsh criticism for quitting the People's Vote campaign and the influential pro-remain group of former politicians who were trying to block Brexit.
According to the Financial Times, the company, which makes investments in video games, esports, and artificial intelligence, is seeking to build a new fund valued at over €500 million (£375 million).
“[Europe has a] very, very profound dilemma,”
Clegg
told attendees at a Financial Times conference.
“We’re not only completely dependent on US tech … [but] when we have good people with good ideas, we export them to the US.”
According to Clegg, the new Hiro fund was designed to concentrate on areas where Europe had "deep, deep sort of academic and research laboratory experience." According to the FT story, the fund will invest in UK businesses engaged in robotics, longevity, gaming, space, defense, and artificial intelligence.
Ian Livingstone, a co-founder of Games Workshop and Eidos, the company that created Lara Croft, co-founded Hiro. In the first part of the following year, the venture capital firm hopes to reveal its first investment from the fund.
“Having an understanding of how government and regulators work is relevant to helping our portfolio flourish and building global leading companies from Europe,”
said
the Hiro co-founder Luke Alvarez, commenting on Clegg’s hiring.
In addition to joining Hiro as an adviser to evaluate investments in AI firms, Yann LeCun recently revealed that he will be leaving his position as chief scientist of Meta AI at the end of the year.
“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,”
said LeCun.
“Hiro … is exceptionally well placed to capitalise on this new wave of opportunity in Europe.”
In 2010, Clegg led the Liberal Egalitarians to power by forming a coalition with David Cameron's rightists.
Five years later, Clegg abdicated as leader after accepting responsibility for the Lib Dems' 2015 election loss, which he called "immeasurably more crushing and unkind" than he'd anticipated.
After losing the general election in 2017, he declared that he "never had any desire to sit in an unreformed House of Lords."
Nick Clegg's expansive government ties, from his time as UK Deputy Prime Minister to his elderly part at Meta shaping global tech policy, can profit Hiro Capital's portfolio companies by furnishing access to policymakers, nonsupervisory perceptivity and strategic prolusions that accelerate growth in regulated sectors like AI, robotics and defence.
Clegg maintains connections across Westminster, Brussels and transatlantic governments, enabling portfolio enterprises to secure signatures, hookups or backing from bodies like the UK AI Safety Institute or NATO invention programmes.
In spatial AI and immersive tech, his perceptivity into US- UK trade dynamics and import controls can help companies gauge internationally, situating them for defence tenders or ethical AI instruments amid rising tech sovereignty debates.