Shamillah is a Partner at Dawn Capital, where she leads the firm’s investments in AI, infrastructure and automation, and has become a go-to name across the European AI ecosystem. She has led early investments into several AI category leaders including Runware and Blackwall.

I started my first business when I was twelve years old. It was a pretty high margin business. I got free local snacks from my grandmother and resold them to my classmates. In Uganda, where I grew up, that did not feel unusual. Entrepreneurship was everywhere. Many dinner conversations I had growing up were really board meetings, and I realised very early on just how hard it is to build and then to run a business.

That early proximity to operators is how I am wired to work with founders today. Every time I invest in a company, I consistently ask myself where pressure is building inside the organisation, and more importantly, what I can do to relieve it. The work I am proudest of usually happens between board meetings - helping close a critical hire, unlocking a customer relationship, reframing a product decision at exactly the right moment.

It was that kind of partnership I wanted when I joined Dawn from SoftBank Vision Fund, where I started my investing career a decade ago. I wanted to work with founders earlier in their journey, when the category is still forming and an extra pair of hands can meaningfully change the trajectory.

At Dawn, I back founders who stay close to hard problems long enough to see what others miss. Problems that are technically difficult, operationally messy or hidden beneath the surface of how work gets done. These founders tend to be ahead of the market in seeing something nobody is talking about yet, often because they’ve lived with the problem. With Runware, it was the conviction that the economics of inference were about to be rewritten. With Blackwall, it was the bet that agents would fundamentally reshape the web and its underlying infrastructure.

I lived on four continents before settling in London. That drive for novelty didn’t go anywhere though, it just changed shape. These days it looks like a stack of books by clear thinkers working through hard problems, and inching closer to my mission of visiting every country in the world (I’m just at 51!).

Shamillah joined Dawn in 2020 from the SoftBank Vision Fund, where she helped launch the London office. Earlier in her career, she built data products for Fortune 500 companies at Bain & Company, and also founded a labour-matching startup in the B2B space. A Yale graduate (Economics, Mathematics & African Studies, Honours), Shamillah was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and Business Insider’s 34 Rising Stars of European Tech.