The EUVC Impact Leader of the Year recognises investors demonstrating positive impact alongside financial performance, with impact intention, measurement and reporting integrated throughout the investment process.

Eka Ventures’ 2025 award reflects a model built around that principle. The firm closed its second fund at $107 million in 2026, making it the UK’s largest early-stage impact VC investing across health, wellbeing and sustainability.

Camilla Dolan⁠, General Partner and co-founder, accepted the award on behalf of Eka before joining a conversation at the EUVC Summit & Awards Show about the thinking behind the firm.

Camilla co-founded Eka in 2018 after a decade investing in consumer companies, first at MMC Ventures and later at Burda Principal Investments. Before moving into venture, she studied law at Oxford and worked at Bain & Company across London, San Francisco and Tokyo.

She now leads new investments at Eka and works closely with the founders the firm backs. Eka means “first” in Sanskrit, reflecting its aim to be an early investor in companies shaping the future economy.

From the beginning, the firm was built against the idea that impact and financial returns sit on opposite sides of a trade-off. Eka instead looks for businesses where solving meaningful problems can itself create commercial value.

Eka’s second fund will continue investing at pre-seed and seed across three broad areas: health, life-essential products and services and sustainable consumption.

The health thesis focuses on the shift from reactive treatment towards prevention. Its life-essential strategy looks at making services including financial products, education and other determinants of health more accessible.

In sustainability, the firm backs technologies that can make major consumer industries and their underlying infrastructure more resource-efficient and lower carbon.

These are not treated as separate impact categories. The investment thesis is built around businesses where wider adoption can increase both commercial value and the positive outcome the company creates.

In the conversation following the award, Camilla describes Eka’s ambition as using impact investing to drive outlier returns and, in turn, attract more capital into the market.

She says that for every pound Eka invested from Fund I, roughly £10 of follow-on capital has subsequently entered those companies, including capital from commercial investors.

That relationship between impact and commercial performance sits behind Eka’s concept of shared value: backing companies where growth and impact develop together rather than treating impact as a separate objective.

Camilla’s role at Eka is centred on new investments, and the firm has developed a structured approach to assessing founders at the earliest stages.

She describes three traits Eka looks for: the ability to learn at an exceptional rate, high intentionality and evidence of outlier achievement.

Runna is one example of that approach. Eka invested in the running training app in Q4 2022 when it was the only term sheet for the seed round. Camilla explains that the combination of consumer accessibility, health and the founders themselves helped the firm see the opportunity early. Runna later exited to Strava.

Eka’s recognition as Impact Leader of the Year reflects its approach of integrating impact into how it selects markets, assesses companies and thinks about long-term returns.