Adrian
Radu

The Satellite and the Startup

Adrian Radu grew up watching his father work with satellite technology in the UK. His parents had come from Romania after the revolution - part of a generation that crossed borders not because it was easy, but because the alternative was to stay still. That particular brand of immigrant ambition - strategic, restless, unafraid of the long bet - runs through everything Adrian does now.

He studied Economics at Southampton, then took a Master's in Investment and Wealth Management at Imperial College Business School in London. Neither degree was unusual for someone headed to investment banking. What came next was less predictable.

He joined Qatalyst Partners - the boutique M&A advisory firm that punches dramatically above its weight in European tech deals. As an analyst and then associate, he was on the advisory teams for a string of transactions that defined a moment: Tink sold to Visa, Peakon to Workday, Instana to IBM, Spacemaker to Autodesk, Dialog to Renesas. These weren't just exits. They were proof that European founders could build things worth acquiring at scale.

The Lightspeed Chapter

From Qatalyst's deal desks to the investor side of the table was one move, but it required a shift in everything: from advising companies mid-sale to meeting founders before the company fully exists. Adrian joined Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the storied names in global VC, and did something that takes genuine conviction: he helped build their European presence from the ground up.

Europe's startup ecosystem had been the subject of American VC interest for years, but translating San Francisco pattern-matching to Berlin or London or Stockholm requires local instinct and real relationship capital. Adrian had both. He understood the technical ambitions of European founders and the different risk profiles of European operators building companies outside the Bay Area consensus.

Then he relocated to New York, opened Lightspeed's office there, and started operating across both early and growth stages in a city that is increasingly its own thing in the global tech map - not Silicon Valley East, but something original and harder to categorize. His portfolio at Lightspeed reflects the range: Stripe, Anduril, Wiz, ClickUp, Flex, Moment, Payhawk, Lightyear. Companies building financial infrastructure, defense technology, cybersecurity, productivity tools. Not a single vertical thesis. A single quality thesis: founders who are serious about hard problems.

Khosla Ventures: Betting Earlier

In December 2024, Adrian moved again - this time to Khosla Ventures as a Partner. The firm, founded by Vinod Khosla, is built around a specific and uncompromising proposition: back transformational technology at its earliest, most uncertain stage. AI, climate, biotech, space, nuclear. The kind of bets that take a decade to mature and require genuine scientific conviction alongside investor judgment.

Adrian's arrival at Khosla signals an intent to go deeper on early stage - earlier than the growth crossover work he did at Lightspeed, closer to the moment of first principles. His New York base stays the same. The horizon gets longer.

The Person Behind the Portfolio

Adrian Radu does not present himself as a brand. He is on Twitter as @anradu, active but not performative. He has written occasionally - his Medium piece on the Lightspeed investment in Lightyear is short and direct: this is what the company does, this is why we believe in it, here is the founder. No trend-chasing. No eleven-point threads on what the market is about to do.

He plays padel obsessively - more than a hundred games a year, which is the kind of number that suggests the sport has become a genuine organizing principle rather than a networking prop. He is a Daft Punk listener in the top 0.1% globally, which is a specific and somewhat magnificent fact about a venture capitalist. And he has supported Chelsea FC his entire life, a club that has made patience, drama, and unexpected comebacks a recurring theme.

These aren't disconnected details. They are the texture of someone who commits. To places (New York, having moved twice to build things from scratch). To music (top 0.1% is not casual listening). To sport (100+ games is a discipline). To the long arc of a career that started advising European acquisitions and ended - or rather, is in the middle of - backing the companies that will become the acquisitions of the 2030s.

The Romanian Thread

His parents left Romania after the revolution seeking opportunity for their family. The satellite his father worked with required precision, patience, and the kind of technical faith that involves sending something into orbit and trusting it will do what you built it to do.

Early-stage venture capital works the same way. You invest in something that doesn't yet fully exist, based on your read of the founder and the trajectory of a technology. You trust the physics. You wait.

Adrian Radu has been building to that kind of patience for his entire career - through the fast-close world of M&A at Qatalyst, through Lightspeed's European build-out, through New York. Now at Khosla, he is placing the kind of bets that take the longest to know if you got right. His father would probably recognize the logic.

Companies He Backed at Lightspeed

European Tech Exits He Shaped