Janneke Niessen

Who they are

Janneke Niessen is Co-Founder and Founding Partner of CapitalT — she also built VCVolt, a data-driven VC team assessment platform, and co-created Project Prep, a novel for young girls, alongside InspiringFifty and The New Girl Code.

Person

Janneke joined CapitalT in October 2018 when she co-founded it from scratch — a people-focused, data-driven early-stage VC fund backing software, AI for Climate Tech, and Future of Work. Before that she was an angel investor, board member, and startup mentor, and picked up executive education at Harvard Business School in 2007 and the Deloitte Academy in 2014 — a pattern of investing in her own craft at key career inflection points. The through-line across her career is the belief that team quality is the primary variable in startup outcomes, which is why she built VCVolt, a platform for data-driven VC team assessment, as a side project alongside the fund. She runs three public initiatives — InspiringFifty (highlighting women in tech), The New Girl Code (a book and initiative for the next generation of female tech leaders), and Project Prep (a novel for young girls co-created with an award-winning children's book author). She speaks widely — SuperReturn Venture 2026, Impact Week Barcelona 2025, EU-Startups Podcast Episode 65 in 2024, European Women in Tech — and writes for Fortune MPW, TNW, Inc, and Cambridge on VC, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Based in Amsterdam, she posts actively on LinkedIn about investing, team evaluation, and building more representative tech.

Company

CapitalT is an Amsterdam-based early-stage VC fund that Janneke co-founded in October 2018 with a data-driven, team-focused investment thesis — the fund backs software technology, AI for Climate Tech, and Future of Work companies. Portfolio companies include Cur8, which recently secured a strategic investment that Janneke amplified publicly, and Overstory, a forestry-technology and drone-based cleantech company that featured at SuperReturn Venture 2026. The fund's ESG and impact credentials have drawn external attention, including a feature in Blue Future Partners' ESGinVC series. CapitalT's investment approach — using data to evaluate founding teams rather than relying solely on pattern-matching — is a differentiated positioning in the European early-stage market.

Market

CapitalT operates in the European early-stage VC market, where it competes and co-invests alongside funds focused on software, climate tech, and future-of-work themes. The fund's dual focus on AI for Climate Tech and team-quality analytics differentiates it in a crowded Amsterdam/European VC scene where impact and ESG-aligned investing are growing in investor appetite. Norrsken and similar impact-oriented European funds occupy adjacent territory.

Network

Janneke's visible network is primarily built through the European VC and impact-investing circuit rather than traceable named colleagues. She has engaged with Blue Future Partners (Sabine Kaiser's ESGinVC series) and the Norrsken House Amsterdam community, and has portfolio relationships with the founders of Cur8 and Overstory. Her conference circuit — SuperReturn Venture, Impact Week Barcelona, Women's Forum for the Economy & Society — maps her peer group to European growth-stage and impact investors.

Sabine Kaiser· Partner, Blue Future Partners

How they likely show up

Co-founded CapitalT in 2018 and is still Founding Partner — likely thinks in fund-cycle arcs (7–10 years), not short-term quarters.
Built VCVolt as a side project to systematize team evaluation → applies a builder's instinct to problems she encounters in her investing work; not content to use received wisdom.
Active public writer across Fortune MPW, TNW, Inc, and LinkedIn → comfortable being visible and opinionated; likely responds well to substantive engagement on her stated views.
Three parallel public initiatives (InspiringFifty, The New Girl Code, Project Prep) running alongside fund management → high operational capacity, comfortable managing multiple tracks simultaneously.
Hybrid role type signal (investor + founder + author + speaker) → probably values conversations with people who wear more than one hat and bring cross-domain thinking.
Executive education at Harvard Business School and Deloitte Academy at career mid-points → deliberate about skill development; likely respects people who invest in their own learning.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific CapitalT portfolio company — Cur8 or Overstory — rather than talking about the fund in the abstract; she engages at the company level.
→ Ask about VCVolt specifically — it signals you know she's a builder, not just a capital allocator, and opens the most differentiated part of her thesis.
→ She's spoken at SuperReturn Venture 2026 and Impact Week Barcelona 2025, so current-events references to climate tech and impact investing will land; stale 2021-era ESG talking points won't.
→ Don't treat InspiringFifty, The New Girl Code, and Project Prep as one generic 'diversity initiative' — they are three distinct projects with different audiences and outputs; naming the right one shows you did the work.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on VCVolt — she built a data-driven VC team assessment platform on top of running a fund, which is a pointed bet that most VCs are pattern-matching on founders rather than actually measuring team quality.
Reference Overstory and the SuperReturn Venture 2026 appearance — forestry technology and drone-based climate monitoring is a specific and unusual corner of climate tech, and her willingness to put it on a mainstream VC stage says something about her conviction.
Mention Project Prep — a novel for young girls co-created with an award-winning children's book author is a deliberate, long-form commitment, not a tweet campaign, and it sits at the intersection of all three of her public initiatives.

Discovery questions

VCVolt applies data to team assessment — how has that framework changed which founders you back compared to what a purely pattern-matching approach would have produced?
CapitalT sits across software, AI for Climate Tech, and Future of Work — do those verticals share a common team profile you look for, or do you underwrite them differently?
You've been building InspiringFifty, The New Girl Code, and Project Prep in parallel with the fund since at least 2018 — at what point did the initiative work start to directly affect deal flow or LP relationships?

Avoid

Don't conflate her three public initiatives into a single 'diversity work' bucket — she has built them as distinct projects with different audiences, and treating them as interchangeable signals you haven't looked closely.

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