Jelle Prins

Angel investor; Co-Founder, Cradle.bio; Co-Founder, Operator Exchange

Reviewed Updated Aug 5, 2026

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Location Amsterdam, Netherlands

Last Verified Investment New Dawn Bio (Pre-Seed) — Jun 4, 2026

Social @jelleprins.com

Stage Focus

pre-seed seed

Sector Focus

biotech climate-tech fintech design-tools ai impact

Background

Jelle Prins is an Amsterdam-based designer, operator, and angel investor. He joined Uber in 2008 — reached by the founders while he was arriving in New York for graduate studies at NYU — and became the first employee to build the ride-hailing app, designing the original passenger and driver experience ¹². He left Uber early and later returned in 2014 when Uber acquired his Amsterdam-based company Moop, an acquisition that seeded Uber’s first engineering office outside San Francisco; he ultimately grew that Amsterdam office to more than 300 people and served as Director of Product Design (EMEA and APAC) before departing on April 30, 2020 ¹³⁷.

Between and after his two Uber stints, Prins worked on the first apps for Booking.com and CataWiki, and helped design the Netherlands’ national COVID-19 contact tracing app (“CoronaMelder”) ¹⁴¹⁰. In 2021 he co-founded Cradle.bio, an Amsterdam/Delft-based AI-for-protein-engineering company with Stef van Grieken, Elise de Reus, Harmen van Rossum, and Eli Bixby; Cradle has raised more than €100M from Index Ventures, Kindred Capital, and IVP and was named MT/Sprout Startup of the Year 2024 ²⁸¹¹.

His investing began alongside his operator career. In August 2020 he co-founded Operator Exchange, a European angel collective of ~40 founders/operators, together with Micha Hernandez van Leuffen (Fiberplane), Robert Gaal (Quest), and Stef van Grieken (ex-Google, Cradle) ⁵⁶⁹. Operator Exchange writes individual checks up to €50,000 and syndicates up to €500,000, positioning itself as an operator-led answer to European seed funding ⁵⁹.

Stated Thesis

Prins and his Operator Exchange co-founders publicly frame their approach as wanting to “be the investor that we would go to for funding” — early-stage capital combined with hands-on operator experience across product design, team-scaling, fundraising, and customer acquisition, with a stated one-week response time on inbound decks ⁵⁹. Aggregator profiles describe Prins’s personal focus as pre-seed and seed rounds in Europe and North America, with themes around energy transition and impact investing ⁶.

Inferred Thesis

Small verified sample — 4 publicly confirmed personal or Operator-Exchange-linked investments. Percentages are not reported; qualitative patterns only.

Stage: every verified check has been pre-seed or seed ⁵⁶¹²¹³.
Geography: portfolio skews Europe (UK and Netherlands), consistent with his Amsterdam base and Operator Exchange’s Dutch center of gravity, though Operator Exchange notes it has funded startups in London, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco ⁵⁹.
Sector pattern: the verified deals cluster into two buckets — (a) founder/investor infrastructure and design tools (Odin, Framer, Stark) and (b) biotech / climate / impact deeptech (New Dawn Bio) ⁵¹²¹³. This is consistent with his own operator résumé: product design at Uber, protein engineering at Cradle.
Co-investor patterns: on Odin’s £2.4M / $3M seed he co-invested alongside Haatch (lead), O’Shaughnessy Ventures, Material V, IPQ Capital, Sarah Drinkwater, Omid Ashtari, Dorothy Chou, Matt Penneycard, and Kirsten Connell ¹². On New Dawn Bio’s €2.1M pre-seed he joined CapitalT (lead), Norrsken Evolve, and Ontdekkers Group ¹³¹⁴. Both rounds pair him with European operator angels and specialist deeptech/climate funds — not with traditional US megafunds.
Check size: aggregator data lists a range of $50K–$1.5M per personal check, consistent with the €50K–€500K individual/syndicate structure at Operator Exchange ⁵⁶.
Notable gap vs. stated thesis: the “energy transition / impact” framing on aggregator profiles is only partially borne out — most verified checks are in software or biotech tooling rather than energy per se, with New Dawn Bio (cultured wood) being the clearest impact/climate deal.

Sample-size caveat: aggregator sources list additional undisclosed deals (Crunchbase notes four investments; CB Insights notes four; Tracxn notes two ⁶¹⁵¹⁶). Portfolio breadth below what the aggregators claim; treat the pattern above as directional rather than statistical.

Portfolio

Company	Year	Stage	Source
Framer	pre-2020	early	Operator Exchange founders describe having “individually invested in companies like Framer” prior to launching the collective ⁵
Adelee	2020	early	Named as one of Operator Exchange’s first four investments ⁵⁹
Origin	2020	early	Named as one of Operator Exchange’s first four investments ⁵⁹
Stark	2020	early	Named as one of Operator Exchange’s first four investments ⁵⁹
Walter (Walter Living)	2020	early	Named as one of Operator Exchange’s first four investments ⁵⁹
Odin	2023	Seed ($3M / £2.4M)	Prins listed among six named angels in Odin’s May 10, 2023 seed round led by Haatch ¹²
New Dawn Bio	2026	Pre-Seed (€2.1M)	Prins listed as participating angel alongside CapitalT (lead), Norrsken Evolve, and Ontdekkers Group ¹³¹⁴

Additional investments — Rise, GsmBD.co — appear on aggregator profiles ⁶ but could not be independently confirmed with a primary press or round announcement source and are therefore excluded from this table pending verification.

In Their Own Words

On joining Uber and the value of being early:

“I might have a good track record when it comes to joining companies at the right time, but I don’t have a good track record when it comes to leaving companies at the right time.” — Jelle Prins, “I Joined Uber 11 Years Ago. I Quit Last Week, Again.”, OneZero, May 7, 2020 ¹

On leaving Uber the first time:

“I left Uber pretty quickly. That was probably the worst financial decision of my life.” — Jelle Prins, interview in IO+, 2024 ²

On why AI now matters as much as mobile once did:

“With AI, I had that same instinct I had in 2007 when the iPhone came out: this changes everything.” — Jelle Prins, TechInformed, May 23, 2025 ¹¹

On the ambition behind Cradle (and, by extension, the kinds of companies he backs):

“If we are successful, there are a million companies that are all going to solve a piece of the climate problem.” — Jelle Prins, IO+, 2024 ²

On learning-driven career choices:

“You don’t build a network. Gaining experience at different companies is much more educational.” — Jelle Prins, IO+, 2024 ²

“It’s enjoyable to be the smartest in a room, but you don’t learn a fuck from it.” — Jelle Prins, IO+, 2024 ²

On culture as an early-stage priority:

“At Uber, values were codified a bit too late. Some of those early traits drove innovation, but they also contributed to well-publicised issues.” — Jelle Prins, TechInformed, May 23, 2025 ¹¹