Balderton brings serial entrepreneur Phil Chambers on board as Partner

Chambers joins the firm after more than 20 years as a founder, operator, and angel investor in the European tech ecosystem, with experience across London, Hamburg, and Copenhagen. Most recently, he served as CEO of Orbex, a Scotland-based space launch company.

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Before joining Orbex, Chambers co-founded and led Peakon as CEO, a Balderton-backed company focused on employee engagement. He guided the business through rapid international expansion from Denmark into the UK, Germany, the US, and APAC, culminating in its $700 million acquisition by Workday in 2021. He later spent two and a half years at Workday as General Manager, scaling Peakon’s global presence to hundreds of millions in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Chambers developed an early interest in computers and technology as a child. He went on to study computer science at the University of Manchester and began his career working at startups, including Gumtree in the UK and the Hamburg-based local reviews platform Qype.

He later became CTO at Podio, a Copenhagen-based work management company that was acquired by Citrix. Following the acquisition, he went on to lead the GoToMeeting product line in Santa Barbara. This experience ultimately inspired him to co-found Peakon, a platform that helped transform the employee feedback space by making continuous listening a standard practice for many organisations.

Alongside his operational career, Chambers has also been a highly active angel investor in Europe, backing more than 100 startups.

At Balderton, he will use his experience to support founders in building and scaling their companies across 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.”