David Kelnar

David Kelnar joined MMC Ventures in 2016 and built the firm's Research (later "Insights") function from the ground up, becoming Director and Head of Research and then being promoted to Partner in January 2018 after a strong 2017. In that role he led MMC's thematic research — proactively identifying emerging areas of value creation, understanding them deeply, and using that work to guide the firm's investment themes and to give portfolio founders domain expertise. He is best known publicly for authoring MMC's widely cited "State of AI" reports (2017 and 2019: "Divergence"), research that was covered by the Financial Times, CNBC, Bloomberg and Forbes and that, in 2019, mapped 1,600+ European AI startups.

Before venture, Kelnar spent roughly eight years in entrepreneurial leadership in early-stage companies, serving as founding CEO and CFO of two consumer-service technology businesses. He also held an operational role as Chief Financial Officer of an early-stage digital-health company (associated with Babylon Health) that later went public in New York. Earlier in his career he was an equity research analyst and investor covering the European technology sector at Goldman Sachs in London and at Calypso Capital, a New York hedge fund.

He holds an MA and double First Class Honours in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

Since leaving MMC, Kelnar moved into growth-capital advisory: he served as Managing Director and Head of Growth Capital Solutions at Numis Securities and is now a Managing Director at Houlihan Lokey in London, leading its Capital Solutions Group (minority equity, growth and structured equity), where he has advised on raises for companies such as Klarna, Rapyd, Getir, Cazoo and TravelPerk. His hands-on early-stage VC investing was concentrated in his MMC years.

• Research-led investing: Kelnar's approach at MMC was to let deep thematic research drive sourcing — "Research is at the core of MMC… to deliver market-leading insight" — meeting 300+ early-stage AI companies in 2017 alone to inform where MMC deployed capital.
• AI/data as the central theme: He championed AI and machine learning as a defining wave of value creation, favouring companies where proprietary data and applied AI create a durable moat (framed in "The MMC Ventures AI Investment Framework: 17 success factors for the age of AI").
• Stage: Seed and Series A, early-stage technology businesses.
• Sectors: Enterprise SaaS, fintech, digital health, and data-native consumer services in addition to core AI.
• What makes him say yes: Strong technical founding teams, a defensible data/technology advantage, and alignment with a research-validated market theme rather than hype.