Visionaries Club, a B2B-focused new venture capital business in Europe, has secured two micro funds totaling €40 million, with a pre-seed/seed and Series B focus, respectively. The venture capital firm was established by Sebastian Pollok and Robert Lacher, with offices in Berlin.
While working as a venture capitalist at e.ventures in San Francisco, Pollok launched Amorelie, which Pro7Sat.1 Media Group was bought in 2018 for a valuation of over $100 million.
Lacher is noted for making early investments in companies like Personio, FreightHub, Coya, Asana Rebel, and OnTruck. Lacher was a founding member of La Famiglia. Visionaries Club intends to invest in B2B firms across Europe with two funds, one for pre-seed/seed and one for later-growth stages.
Can you be more specific about the seed fund Please be more explicit about the number of checks you write, the firms, technology, business models, and B2B industries you are concentrating on?
Many successful European business people who are LPs in the Visionaries Club include Hakan Koc (Auto 1 Group), Jochen Engert and Daniel Krauss (Flixbus), Johannes Reck (GetYourGuide), Dominik Richter (Hello Fresh), and Florian Gschwandtner (Runtastic).
Investors in the funds include the families of Siemens, Henkel, and Bitburger as well as Markus Swarovski, Shravin Mittal, Max Viessmann (Viessmann Group), Christian Miele, and Felix Fiege (Fiege Logistics).
The company Visionaries Club, founded in 2019 by partners Robert Lacher and Sebastian Pollok, focuses on two key areas: tools that support remote working and the digitization of the enterprise supply chain, which includes everything from sourcing to sales (consider process mining unicorns like UiPath and Celonis and digital freight forwarder Sender).
The purchase now, pay later trend that was “quite in vogue” last year, as well as B2B payment stacks—since “there’s no PayPal for B2B yet”—excite Lacher as well.
The Visionaries Club is also researching SaaS for small enterprises, which is “the most neglected market internationally for software,” according to Lacher. It has already financed organizations including the HR technology behemoth Personio and Taxdoo, which provides automated services for tax compliance.
What’s Visionaries Club’s Track Record?
Last May, Visionaries Club closed two $85 million funds (one pre-seed and seed; the other a growth fund). With its new €150 million seed fund and €200 million early growth fund, it is now repeating this strategy on a larger scale.
According to Lacher, having two micro funds provides Visionaries some flexibility. It can lead and co-lead seed investment agreements of €1 to €5 million (the average ticket size is €2.5 million) from the seed fund as per O’Heartechcrunch.
Additionally, it may co-invest in Series B rounds with sizable multi-stage VC funds thanks to the growth fund, freeing it from having to face off against them. With an average ticket value of €7.5m, Visionaries Club typically invests €5–10m in growth-stage firms.
Its portfolio includes B2B unicorns including TrueLayer, Personio, and Choco (software for restaurants and suppliers) (open banking infrastructure).
Some of Europe’s best founders, like Hanno Renner of Personio, Dominik Richter of HelloFresh, and Daniel Dines of UiPath, support Visionaries.
German family offices that work for businesspeople including Felix Fiege, Selina Stihl, and the families behind Dr. Oetker, a multinational manufacturer of baking goods, and Bitburger, a brewery, have also made investments in the funds.
Despite being a small venture capital firm, Visionaries Club has a good track record of B2B investing. Five of its 32 portfolio businesses are unicorns, and several of them, like Taxdoo, Yokoy, Pigment, and Leapsome, are on the verge of attaining a $1 billion valuation.
It also offers an intriguing USP: It is supported by well-known digital entrepreneurs as well as family businesses from the old economy, both of which can provide founders with invaluable B2B knowledge.
The London startup and venture capital ecosystem, however, has seen an increase in entrepreneurs.
We believe that the startup and venture capital community will make every effort to ignore Brexit and continue to see this as a collaborative European endeavor: We promise to work toward it whenever we can!
Faqs
Before relocating to Berlin, consider the following seven things:
It’s not easy to find a place to live in Berlin. Anyone can find a suitable home in one of the twelve districts. Adopt the Berlin Schnauze as your own. being aware of Berlin’s cost of living.
Particularly popular with young professionals, Berlin has a lot to offer for someone looking to move to a city with a strong economy, good job prospects, and plenty of culture and nightlife. Berlin might be the ideal location to enjoy a higher standard of living because of its surprisingly low cost of living.
Unquestionably, Berlin is among the best cities in Germany to live in. For expats, residing in Berlin is a fantastic alternative. The city is full of incredible nightlife, fantastic food, fantastic art, and so much more. The ex-pat community is huge, it’s very inexpensive for a major city, and the prospects are limitless.
