United Founders is a new venture fund that aims to strengthen Europe’s deeptech and the emerging tech scene of the continent from the ground up. More than 100 experienced entrepreneurs and operators from all over Europe have united to make it happen. The pre-seed and seed-stage fund has attracted its initial €30 million and is looking to raise €80 million within a year.
What separates United Founders from the normal venture-capital pattern is its origin in the creator community. The group of people who have not only started their own ventures, gone through tough markets, and grown companies globally but are also the ones who have now built the initiative, is the main driver behind the project. 26-country founders including Quantum Systems cofounder Florian Seibel, Rohlik CTO David Pavlik, and planqc’s Alexander Glätzle have pledged not only the money but also their time and guidance. About one-third of these supporters have invested in the fund, thus, it is entwined deeply with the entrepreneurial journey.
The fund is under the leadership of Vít Horký, the founder of Brand Embassy that was acquired by the US software group Nice in 2019, and Jakub Havrlant, the founder of Rockaway Capital. The two have onboarded a core team of ex-entrepreneurs who are strategically located in the main regional markets such as the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and Central Europe. Their decentralized manner of working is deliberate – instead of managing the business from the main hub, United Founders tries to get real local impressions while giving early-stage founders from less prominent markets the same opportunity to develop their ventures.
They all have firsthand experience of the startup hurdles that come with finding product-market fit, dealing with regulatory issues, or even attracting the right technical talent. Besides that, the group can also count on the support of a mentor network drawn from fields like quantum computing, cybersecurity, enterprise software, medtech, and healthtech. Among the leading figures are former Avast CTO Michel Pechoucek, ex-Johnson & Johnson and Google executive Alissa Hsu Lynch, and Mews cofounder Richard Valtr.
The maximum amount United Founders wants to put into one startup is €1 million. It is a startup in hardware innovation, dual-use technologies, and medical technology that they will focus on. Their initial moves indeed reflect this focus. One is Israel-based Wonderful, which is making easy-to-use software to help businesses do customer-facing operations better. Another is Every Health, a German healthtech startup developing solutions with strong global application potential. Both demonstrate the fund’s conviction that European founders are capable of delivering deep technical value that can compete globally.
The fund founders define their objective as a revival of the kind of collaborative spirit that Silicon Valley has long been known for – but being based firmly in Europe and not copying it. What underpins their work is not to create the success of a handful of individual stories but to help the rise of the new ecosystems. United Founders, by coupling money with mentorship, wants to address the problem of fragmentation which has been a handicap for European startups and, in turn, encourage founders to grow their businesses in the continent rather than going to US or Asia for their next step.
United Founders is not the only one playing on the changing field of Europe’s technology scene. Project Europe – a venture that was started by leaders from Mistral and Klarna to support new entrepreneurs – is just one example showing that there’s a strong desire for change, led by founders. All these movements send out the same message: in order to raise new billion-dollar companies and to be able to compete globally, Europe has to nurture its own startup DNA.
“No European tech company has gone beyond a €100 billion valuation in the last 50 years,” noted General Partner Vít Horký. “Our big dream is that Europe produces its own trillion-dollar giants just like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and Meta.”
That hope was supported by Tony Kypreos, Managing Partner for the UK and Entrepreneur in Residence at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering.
“Such a once-per-cycle moment of transformation calls for a new kind of venture model, and United Founders is responding to that need across Europe,” he said.
New fund’s momentum is a sign of renewed determination among the builders of Europe: that the wave of the next global tech giants can and should be from the continent.