James Alexandroff

James Alexandroff is a British emerging-markets fund manager turned philanthropist and early-stage investor. He read law (LLB) at the University of Bristol, graduating in 1979, and qualified as a solicitor with Clifford Chance in London. He then moved into asset management, working as an emerging-markets fund manager at Stewart Ivory in Edinburgh and later at GT Asset Management in Hong Kong, before co-founding the emerging-markets boutique Arisaig Partners in Singapore in 1996.

Arisaig Partners built its reputation investing in dominant consumer-sector businesses in emerging markets; its flagship long-only Arisaig Asia Consumer Fund grew to around US$3bn in assets and compounded capital at low-teens annual returns since inception. Alexandroff and his co-founders handed responsibility for the firm to the next generation of employees in 2017, though he remains a director. In 1999–2000 he gifted his one-third ownership of Arisaig to the Perivoli Trust, a UK-domiciled family trust of which he is a trustee, which funds his Africa-focused philanthropic and venture activities.

Through the Perivoli Trust he established Perivoli Innovations (settled 2016), a venture investment trust that backs early-stage UK and African technology companies, and the Perivoli Foundation (2019), which channels investment profits into African education and soil/rangeland projects. He is a principal (with Barry McCorkell) of AMAS LLP, which advises Perivoli Innovations' trustees on investment decisions. He also served as an independent (Non-Executive) Director of Lindsell Train Limited — the London fund manager run by Nick Train and Michael Lindsell — a board role he stepped down from in March 2023, and he sits on the board of Bristol Innovations at the University of Bristol.

In recognition of his philanthropy, Alexandroff received the University of Bristol's 2022 Alumni Award for Transformative Philanthropy and was awarded an OBE in January 2023 for his work on education in Africa, including the Perivoli Schools Trust, which has trained tens of thousands of nursery teachers across several African countries.

• Invests at the seed / early stage in "asset classes which tend in their nature to be capital starved in their formative years" — companies "not yet known to the mainstream venture investment community."
• Four diversified, low-correlation buckets: health/life sciences & MedTech, climate-tech (mitigation & adaptation), African digital/fintech, and productivity SaaS; plus a social inclusion theme.
• Strong bias toward UK university spin-outs (Oxford, Imperial, Bristol) and African digital businesses with measurable societal impact.
• Looks for businesses that "impact large populations significantly," show rigor on product-market fit, prioritize good governance and fairness to investors, and have "highly motivated, extremely capable, flexibly minded" founders with a credible path to profitable exit.
• Patient, impact-linked capital: Perivoli Innovations donates its investment profits to the Africa-focused Perivoli Foundation, so returns are recycled into philanthropy.
• Track record per the firm: 60+ investments made, ~5 exits, averaging roughly 4x on exits, with several portfolio names pushing through US$100m valuations.