The target group is especially attractive as in many cases there is nothing to replace (e.g. Personio targeting greenfield/MS Excel). We strongly believe in the category of a new generation of lean software tools empowering micro SMEs, as it is the most underserved category regarding professional software, while at the same time the largest and fastest-growing market in terms of numbers of businesses. At the same time we believe HR to be one of the most underserved software categories to empower the most important asset of every single company: Its people who are the key source of each company’s value creation.

We strongly believe in a new generation of tools empowering micro SMEs. It is not only the most underserved segment regarding software but also the largest and fastest-growing one regarding the number of businesses. This trend is fuelled predominantly by the remarkable pace of e-commerce development, allowing micro SMEs to easily start and expand their business by selling through Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and a wide array of other platforms. Our investment decision has thus been underlined by the market opportunity of creating a “single source of truth” for all backend processes and the founding team’s insane conviction of building the product bottom-up based on the needs of their customers.

Our investment decision into Pigment has been driven by our core hypothesis of digital tools empowering the decentralization of work. We believe work is getting increasingly digital, distributed, and more complex meaning that people need better tools to do their jobs. After the popularity and unbundling of highly verticalized solutions, e.g. Notion, Zoom, Slack, G-Suite, Trello / Asana, Affinity, Miro, Evernote, etc. now the focus lies on achieving full frictionlessness. Workflows that used to be executed inefficiently with multiple isolated tools can now be integrated, automated, or replaced with a more efficient single tool.

We believe the global food supply chain will be online by 2030 and Choco will be its operating platform building a global sustainable food system. Our investment decision for Choco was mainly driven by the team’s vision to re-invent global food supply chains in the long run, by owning the transaction volume and stakeholders and thereby unlocking the relevant data for the first time and stop food waste and loss on a global scale. Thereby choco is transforming a $1T+ industry.

It is rare to see that a single product can radically change the way millions of people work. Andrey and his team started working on an online whiteboard from a warehouse a decade ago. Over the last few years, this project evolved into the vision of building arguably the most indispensable collaboration platform for modern teams, including product, design, engineering and various others. Miro is the most critical puzzle piece in the re-bundling of collaborative future of work & productivity in the years to come.

Small businesses often struggle with the time-consuming task of handling payments - sifting through invoices, reconciling accounts, and managing multiple payments. These administrative tasks divert valuable resources and time away from growth and innovation. Accounts payable and accounts receivable are two areas where we continue to see significant digitisation and automation potential. This is what Apron was built for: radically changing the way businesses handle payments. Apron's platform streamlines and automates payments, turning what was once a time-consuming process into an intuitive experience. Its seamless integrations and simplified payment workflows are unlocking valuable resources, boosting cash-flow, and giving time back to small business owners.

Open banking is fundamentally revolutionizing today's financial landscape. By allowing banks to share their data with third-party providers securely through APIs, it has drastically increased transparency and allowed customers control over their finances in a way that was never before possible. Money can be moved at a fraction of the cost, securely, much faster, and much more conveniently, with a vastly improved consumer experience. We strongly believe open banking payments will become the default way to pay online and TrueLayer is leading the charge to make this happen with its open banking platform.