Twitter’s former Head of People EMEA joins VC firm Atomico as Partner

Atomico, the European venture capital firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, is announcing a number of new hires to its investment team, including new Partner Caroline Chayot, who previously led the EMEA HR team at Twitter.

I’m told she’ll be working alongside existing Atomico Partner Dan Hynes, who was formerly the Director of Global Staffing at Skype, with the pair helping meet increased demand from Atomico’s portfolio companies for talent support.

At Twitter, Chayot is said to have supported the leadership team in scaling the social media behemoth from two to six markets, growing the team from 80 based in London to 500 across the region. Prior to that she worked at Google in HR for 9 years.

In addition, Irina Haivas has joined Atomico as Principal. The former surgeon and former surgical fellow at Harvard Medical School (yes, you read that correctly) previously worked at healthcare investor GHO Capital Partners. She’ll focus on sourcing investment opportunities in machine intelligence-enabled businesses, synthetic biology, robotics and other “frontier technologies”.

The other new members of the 30-strong Atomico investment team are:

• Senior Associate Annalise Dragic, a recent Stanford MBA graduate and who was a member of LinkedIn’s Strategy & Analytics Leadership Program’s inaugural class. She’ll be focusing on the U.K.
• Associate Luca Eisenstecken, a German native who spent the last two years in San Francisco with Vector Capital. He’ll be covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
• Associate Christina Fa, who grew up in Australia and New Zealand and joins Atomico from Google’s Corporate Finance team in Mountain View. She’ll be focusing on the Nordics and Baltic regions.
• IR Associate Gunita Bhasin, who joins Atomico from Deutsche Bank and has lived and studied in India, Singapore, Turkey, and the U.K. She’ll support long-time Head of IR Camilla Richards in managing Atomico’s relationships with its global investor base.

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention Atomico’s new addition to its communications team. Eleanor Warnock, formerly with the Wall Street Journal, has joined the VC firm as Communications Manager. The hack-turned-flack will work alongside Atomico’s Head of Communications Bryce Keane to help raise the profile of the firm’s portfolio companies internationally.

Meanwhile, it’s that time of year again. Atomico has launched its latest State of European Tech survey, where it seeks your help in capturing a data-driven snapshot of the current European tech ecosystem and to confront a number of myths along the way. You can read TC’s analysis of the 2017 report here, and if you’d like to contribute, this year’s survey can be found here.