Ian Sosso, winner of EBAN’s “best European early stage award” in 2019, is the founder of Monte Carlo Capital (MCC), a group of business angels, UHNWI and family offices investing in Europe and the US in early stage deep tech and highly disruptive businesses.
MCC combines the best features of business angels and venture capital: a global group of sophisticated investors and family offices capable of taking businesses from seed all the way to exit, providing financing and helping management scale their businesses up internationally. MCC typically starts investing as pre-seed/seed, taking an entire financing round, and leads follow-ons too.
Ian is also a managing partner of the Start Up Nursery fund, a fund dedicated to financing the creation of deep tech US university spin offs. Ian started his career in 1993 and previously worked in Paris, London, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong with HSBC, UBS and JPMorgan, holding investment banking positions in trading, sales and financial engineering. Before founding Monte Carlo Capital, Ian was, until 2009, the regional managing director and head of capital markets in Asia for Commerzbank where he was managing all capital markets activities in Asia, including equity derivatives, credit, precious metals, foreign exchange, debt capital markets, as well as the treasuries of HK, Singapore and Shanghai.
Over the years, Ian has been a keynote speaker at numerous conferences in China, HK, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Russia and Monaco. Ian currently lectures venture capital to MBA and finance MSc students at the International University of Monaco, and a regular speaker at leading business school. He is also a board member of the Monaco Venture Capital Association. Ian joined the European Business Angels Network (EBAN), in 2016 and recently won the best performing new member award at the annual conference of EBAN in Malaga. Ian is a Monégasque and holds a MSc in Finance from the London School of Economics (LSE)