With over four decades of experience in marketing, startups and cross-platform investment, Russell Buckley is an investment veteran. Through the years Buckley held roles such as advisor, chairman, director and partner, before turning his attention to investing. The industries Buckley concentrates on are mainly digital health, martech, adtech and fintech. Buckley is an avid investment blogger and considered as a thought leader in the industry. 

Early Years

Early in his career, Buckley worked as an intern at 3M in the office stationery department. He moved on to work as an account director at FKB, after which he took on the role of marketing director of ZagMe, a location-based marketing startup. Buckley then served as director of Unstatic, a mobile marketing company. The next step in Buckley’s career was to launch AdMob, an advertising network for websites that have mobile phone traffic. Buckley became the first European first-hire in a Silicon Valley company. AdMob was initially funded by Accell Partners and Sequoia Capital and was sold to Google a few years later for US$750 million. After leaving AdMob, Buckley started Ballpark Ventures, a modest funding firm. He also started working on a government initiative in which he was helping startups raise US$150 million in series A funding. In 2015 Buckley started Spring Partners with other like-minded angel investors. He also became a partner in Kindred Capital, a venture capital firm focused on the early-stage funding of UK-based companies. 

Location

Russell Buckley was born and schooled in the United Kingdom. He attended Charterhouse School in Surrey where he completed his basic education. Buckley then enrolled at Aston University in the West Midlands where he achieved a bachelor’s of science degree in managerial and administrative studies. Aston University is known as one of the UK’s leading universities for business and the professions. In later years Buckley joined the Executive Development Program at Singularity University in the US where he studied singularity, AI, nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, energy and networks. Buckley’s investments are now mainly focused on the UK.

Remarkable Investments 

In 2013 Russell Buckley made a personal investment in the seed round of LoopMe, a London-based company known for being the first to close the loop on brand advertising attribution for offline sales using mobile data and artificial intelligence. The total funding amount of the seed round was valued at US$500,000. In 2018 Buckley invested in the series A investment round of Farmstand through Kindred Capital. Farmstand is a London-based e-commerce food business that uses technology and physical locations to acquire online customers. Other significant investments include: Adludio, Appear Here, Ball Street, Blis Media, Constant Commerce, Depop, EyeQuant and Pronto.

Latest News

It was recently reported that Kindred Capital and Russell Buckley will be giving the founders it backs a share of fund profits. This will set in motion a so-called ‘equitable venture’ model that sees every founder in the portfolio effectively becoming co-owners of Kindred Capital. The idea was set into motion with the goal of helping the company secure premium deals while also giving each startup in the company’s portfolio an incentive to back one another.