Speedinvest

We're proud to share that Speedinvest is ranked in the top 1% of venture capital investors in EMEA and globally! Dealroom.co’s 7th annual Power Law Investor Ranking reviewed more than 22,000 investors worldwide (VCs, accelerators, CVCs, angel networks, and crossover funds) to determine who backs the most successful companies at the earliest stages. Speedinvest Highlights: ⦿ Top 1% of all funds at all stages, worldwide. ⦿ # 7 out of 1,528 EMEA-based Seed investors ⦿ # 15 out of 3,605 funds at all stages across EMEA These rankings aren’t based on the number of investments made, but real portfolio outcomes: Companies becoming unicorns, achieving $1B+ exits, and surpassing $25M and $100M+ in revenue. Special congratulations to our portfolio companies Bitpanda, Wayflyer, and Tide for being named to Dealroom’s Top 100 Thoroughbred list for crossing the $100M+ ARR milestone — a key driver of our overall ranking in all categories. With additional high-performing companies across all six of our core investment areas, we can’t wait to see where we land on next year’s list! Thank you to our incredible founders, LPs, partners, and teams across EMEA and beyond. We’re proud, humbled, and inspired to continue building the future of technology together. View the full Power Law Investor Ranking in the comments.

We’re thrilled to welcome Will Wells as a Partner at Speedinvest! Will joins our Deep Tech team with years of experience at Lightspeed and firstminute capital, where he worked closely with some of the world’s most ambitious frontier companies, including Proxima Fusion, Helsing, Mistral AI, Wayve, and SpaceX. A founder-turned-investor, Will previously built and exited Hummingbird Technologies – the pioneering AI platform that was the first to measure soil health from space – giving him rare operational empathy alongside his investment expertise. “We’re incredibly excited to have Will join our deep tech partnership,” our CEO & Managing Partner, Oliver Holle, said. “His founder empathy, big-picture thinking, and on-the-ground experience make him a powerful addition to our team, and to the founders we back." On our blog, Will shares how his journey shaped his investment lens and why he’s passionate about backing deep tech founders solving Europe’s toughest challenges in AI, energy, robotics, defence, and space. Link in the comments ⬇️

Our exclusive report on Germany’s corporate innovation gap, with Bits & Pretzels, was featured this weekend in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Despite German corporates investing over €90 billion in R&D each year, most still overlook startups as strategic partners. In “Wasted Potential,” FAZ’s Maximilian Sachse draws on our findings to explore why this disconnect persists and what can be done to unlock meaningful and mutually beneficial collaboration. The article and our full report are linked in the comments. Both include actionable steps for German innovation teams and CIOs ready to move beyond the current DIY mindset. As proud partners of the Bits & Pretzels CIO Summit, Marie-Helene Ametsreiter, Markus Lang, and Sophia Escheu will present the report and discuss the path forward with corporate leaders in Munich from September 29 to October 1. We hope you will join us in shaping the future of German innovation.

ARX Robotics and planqc are nominated among the 10 best Deep Tech startups in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland! As part of The Spark Awards by Handelsblatt and McKinsey, Munich-based ARX (modular, autonomous, unmanned ground defense systems) and planqc (scalable neutral-atom quantum computers) are being recognized for building technologies with the potential to redefine entire industries. Deep tech has always been a core focus for Speedinvest, so we’re thrilled to see founders Marc A. Wietfeld, Henrich Maximilian Wied, Stefan R., Alexander Glätzle, Sebastian Blatt, Johannes Zeiher, and their teams being recognized. Public voting is now open and will close next week. Cast your vote and support ARX and planqc on their journey to becoming the winner of this year’s Spark Award. (Link in comments)

Next week, our investors Alvaro, Deepali, Victor, and Julien will be in Copenhagen for TechBBQ, one of the Nordic region’s largest gatherings for founders, investors, and the wider startup community. Alongside meeting some of the region’s most promising founders, Álvaro and Deepali will also take the stage at Africa Day, part of the Nordic-Africa Startup Summit, to discuss the opportunities and connections between two dynamic startup ecosystems. We’re looking forward to insightful conversations and meeting great people on the ground. If you’re at TechBBQ, come and say hello.

From Europe to the USA: Pliant’s next growth chapter is officially underway. Pliant, the B2B payments platform, has started its expansion to the United States – a natural next step for one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs. Their mission: redefine how businesses manage payments at scale, from Europe to the world. That ambition is already getting noticed. In Visa’s Q3’25 earnings call, Pliant was highlighted as part of the conversation on the future of business payments. “Breaking into the US is no small feat in fintech. Pliant has the product depth and execution to make it work,” says Tom Filip Lesche, Partner with our Growth team. The company is now hiring early US-based roles as well as positions across Europe. If you want to help shape the future of business payments, click the link in the comments to apply for open roles.

There’s no science to scaling companies, but there are proven patterns of success that founders can follow. Over the last six months, we’ve interviewed some of Europe’s most ambitious founders in our Scaling at Speed newsletter, from CoachHub - The digital coaching platform and TourRadar to Yokoy, cylib, Opal, and Fertifa. Now, we’ve distilled the interviews into a single article highlighting the patterns that repeatedly emerged in every conversation and across all sectors and stages of growth: finding product-market fit, hiring early teams with intent, staying focused, and scaling sustainably. Our playbook, built from real founder experiences, with additional insights from our GP, Markus Lang, is now available on our blog. Link in the comments.

A 70-year-old meteorological assumption debunked and new predictive features for T-cell reactivity uncovered. All in just a few hours. For decades, the scientific community wondered whether machine learning could move beyond prediction to discovery, helping scientists to expedite research. Now, Jessica Rumbelow, Co-Founder and CEO of Leap Labs, and her team are publishing the proof. Discovery Engine, Leap’s general-purpose AI-based system, spots and explains data patterns 100× faster than expert teams. To test its range, Leap recently reran five peer-reviewed AI-for-science studies, from hepatitis diagnostics to ozone forecasting, and the technology matched or beat every result, surfacing fresh insights and discoveries the original authors missed. “It would take us one postdoc year to analyze this data, and [Discovery Engine] found something that we may never have found, that could be worth billions,” Patrick Hawbecker, a Project Scientist with the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, said of the results. With partners including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Meta, and UCL, Discovery Engine is now being unleashed on genomics, materials, and virology to drive the future of scientific discovery. Read more about the multiple scientific discoveries made possible by Leap on their blog linked in the comments.

Our July newsletter is here! Featuring insights from our team (Oliver, Andreas, Deepali, Marie-Helene), along with updates from Fertifa, wefox, ARX Robotics, Due, and more! Click the link in the comments to read & subscribe ⬇️

Europe’s industrial base is under pressure – but it’s also on the brink of a reset. Years of supply chain shocks, rising energy costs, and talent shortages have exposed just how fragile parts of Europe’s industrial backbone really are. But this moment also creates space to rethink things, from how we produce and power factories, to how we scale automation and bring industrial tech from lab to line. In our latest blog, Namratha Kothapalli and Alex Davis from our Climate Tech & Industrial Tech investment team spoke with founders, operators, and corporate leaders from companies like GOLDBECK, Tibo Energy Management Software, Prewave, and Field AI to understand what resilience really looks like on the ground and what’s still holding it back. If you’re working on industrial AI, robotics, energy systems, or advanced manufacturing, and want to understand the real-world barriers to scaling, this is the place to start. Link in the comments.