Zaya Kadyrova, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Aspire11: Unlocking Europe's pension money for tech growth

Aspire11 invests European pension money into some of the world's biggest private tech companies, unlocking capital that's historically stayed on the sidelines. Its first fund raised €500m, and backs both early-stage VC funds and late-stage tech companies such as Revolut, Databricks, ElevenLabs and Vinted.

Zaya Kadyrova is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Aspire11. She believes much of the value created by Europe's biggest tech companies currently goes to US pension funds, and is trying to change that by putting pension money directly into companies at that scale.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel. Check them out here: https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

Chargebee: https://www.chargebee.com/events/beelieve/london/2026

SurrealDB: https://surrealdb.com/

Airwallex: https://www.airwallex.com/uk?utm_source=other&utm_medium=partner_referral&utm_campaign=v01_emea_multi_ib_dg_prtmk_mofu_scalingeurope

Lovable: https://lovable.dev/

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction0:20 - What Aspire11 does
1:31 - Why pension funds matter for venture
4:37 - Why Europe's pensions have stayed on the sidelines
8:51 - Tribes: backing the next generation of fund managers
12:07 - Why Aspire11 backed Revolut, Vinted and Eleven Labs
15:14 - The case for investing in Databricks
18:22 - How the fund is driving demand from young savers
19:35 - How Aspire11 wins access to the best deals