Speedinvest’s new €190 million seed-stage fund is ‘investing on conviction’

Speedinvest, a seed-stage VC headquartered in Vienna with offices in London, Berlin, Munich and San Francisco, recently disclosed a new €190 million fund that brings the firm’s total assets under management to more than €400 million.

Its remit remains largely the same: Speedinvest broadly targets fintech, deep tech, marketplaces, industrial tech, digital health and consumer tech startups, writing first checks between €50,000 and €1.5 million. Meanwhile, the VC has set aside €100 million of the fund for follow-on investments in its most promising portfolio companies.

A few days before the new fund was unveiled, I put questions to Speedinvest’s CEO, Oliver Holle (picture right), to dig deeper into the firm’s remit and investment thesis, and to learn more about how a VC hailing from Austria routinely punches above its weight.

TechCrunch: Speedinvest is a pan-European seed fund investing in tech companies, writing initial cheques from €50,000 up to €1.5 million but also with the capacity to follow at Series A. Can you perhaps be more specific with regards to the types of founders and startups you look for, and what key indicators are important for businesses that are so early?

Oliver Holle: Speedinvest prides itself on its conviction-driven, founder-centric investment style. What this means is that we are ready to go earlier than most seed-stage funds, based on less measurable traction metrics or KPIs. We have our own pre-seed practice focusing on writing small checks between €50-250,000, which is pretty much pre-everything, except for the founding team.