Daniela Couto

Daniela Couto is a PhD-trained biomedical engineer with more than a decade of experience in venture capital and in building early-stage biotechnology companies. She joined BioGeneration Ventures (BGV) in 2015 and has risen to General Partner, where she focuses on scientific evaluation and due diligence and on co-creating new companies from academic research. BGV is a leading pan-European early-stage life sciences fund headquartered in Naarden, The Netherlands, managing over €400 million across five funds.

Before and alongside her investing career, Couto has been an operator. From 2015 to 2018 she served as managing director of BGV portfolio company Staten Biotechnology, where she led company strategy including the research collaboration with argenX and the partnership and buy-out option with Novo Nordisk — a deal reported at roughly $485 million in value at the pre-clinical stage. Earlier, she co-founded and served as CEO of Cell2B, a cell-therapy company built on IP and technology from Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia's lab (Broad Institute / MIT) targeting graft-versus-host disease and other immunological conditions.

Academically, Couto holds an MSc in Biomedical Engineering (cum laude) from the University of Minho and a PhD in BioEngineering (summa cum laude) from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST-UTL) in Lisbon, completed in collaboration with MIT through the MIT-Portugal Program. Her combination of deep scientific training and hands-on company-building shapes her investment approach and her comfort operating at the earliest, most technical stages of biotech formation.

• Invests at seed and Series A in European biotech and therapeutics, typically writing initial checks of ~€100K–€1M (sweet spot ~€500K) with substantial follow-on capacity from BGV's funds.
• Backs companies with rigorous science and demonstrable proof of concept — she is known internally for leading scientific evaluation and due diligence, so validated data and mechanism matter more than narrative.
• Focuses on therapeutics across oncology, CNS, rare/metabolic/autoimmune disease, and ophthalmology, reflecting BGV's disease-area orientation.
• Comfortable co-creating and incubating companies from academic IP (e.g., Tessellate Bio's synthetic-lethality platform built around scientific founders' FANCM/ALT work), not just funding existing startups.
• Values strong scientific founders and translational potential — her own path from academic bioengineering to operator to investor signals a preference for teams that can move science toward the clinic.