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.

Expense management processes are still mostly manual, clunky, costly, error-prone, and extremely resource-intensive which creates an immense opportunity for software to revolutionize this segment within FinTech. In our extensive market work in the space, we felt Yokoy was clearly the only software-first company developing a comprehensive spend management solution for mid-market customers. We were impressed by their approach of deep integrations with existing IT stacks to create a single source of truth layer to become the financial operating system for SMEs. The strength of its product, combined with impressive year-on-year growth, an experienced management team, and very positive customer feedback makes us very bullish on Yokoy’s prospects to emerge as the market leader in enterprise spend management.

The founders of Insify have previously built and exited leading businesses in Europe. With Insify, we fell in love with the team’s vision to completely rethink SME insurance. They are building a fast, real-time and consumerized solution for SMEs which is based on advanced data and smart underwriting. Insify fits in perfectly with our deep hypothesis around the SME insurance space, which is dominated by legacy practices and ripe for modernization and disruption.

Achieving product-market fit around three years ago, Leapsome has since outpaced most of Europe's fastest-growing B2B companies despite being bootstrapped until the beginning of 2022. The founding team continuously impresses us with their excellent leadership and ambitious vision. Leapsome benefits from several megatrends that continue to fuel their growth: The mass adoption of remote work, the growing war for talent and the shift towards "purpose-driven" work. Companies struggle to attract, retain and motivate the best talent, and Leapsome will be their go-to solution.

Our investment decision into GetHarley was driven by the vision to build a venture at the intersection of telemedicine and dermatology re-defining distribution channels in this high-margin and fast-growing market.

A large part of knowledge work is search and retrieval of information, which can be highly manual, time-consuming and inefficient when it comes to surfacing the most relevant information for a particular task. At Visionaries, we want to invest in technologies that dramatically improve and speed up our ability to do this vital component of knowledge work. When we understood the power of Causaly’s AI-enabled technology to accelerate the drug discovery process (and discover new advanced treatments) by dramatically improving the productivity of researchers, we saw huge alignment with our broader thesis. Causaly is already having a huge real-world impact today and generating value for its growing customer base; Causaly is working with 12 of the top 20 pharma companies (including the likes of Gilead, Novartis, Merck).

Understanding work objectives and aligning those with company priorities and mission has become more critical than ever in our hybrid world. When teams see how their work is directly impacting and furthering their companies' goals and mission, they are more engaged, happier and aligned with each other. Quantive, led by one of the most stellar management teams we have come across, is the dominant leader in the OKR software industry, delivering a sophisticated product which has become the mission control for many of its customers.

Our investment decision for Ledgy was mainly driven by a) the strong founding team, b) the team’s vision to set a new standard for managing the equity of companies in Europe transparently as a single source of truth, given the complexity of the different legal structures within various countries in Europe, and c) the strong adoption of Ledgy across the board among leading startups.

Co-founders Hanna, Lisa and Franzi are singularly focused on breaking geographic barriers to transform how companies hire and how employees work. With its AI-driven software, they are reinventing international hiring by removing all the hassle, paperwork, and burden around the process. Rarely have we seen such high levels of customer delight with a software product, which is evident in the company’s impressive growth, with revenues growing 6x year over year and its customer base tripling at the time of our investment. We believe Localyze has all the ingredients to become a category leader in the global mobility space.

Driverless cars have been on the mobility agenda for years, even though fully autonomous cars are still only a concept. Nevertheless, moving cars in cities is more and more of a burden due to the pure increase in the density of vehicles. The Team’s vision behind VAY puts new lenses around this challenge. Building a remote-controlled teledriving infrastructure, Vay bridges the technology gap between Level 4/5 fully autonomous driving and today and proposes viable solutions to a wide range of use cases around teleoperation in the near future.

While checkout and payment experience reached new heights in the consumer space, bcommerce merchants still couldn’t offer fast and attractive checkout platforms for their buyers. Two enables merchants to maximise trade sales & buyer conversion with a “buy now, pay later” checkout experience. Andres Mjelde and his team are seasoned entrepreneurs working on merchant transactions for years with a full-scope understanding of the market and stakeholder incentives.

We believe re-inventing the enterprise B2B IT stack is the here-and-now opportunity in Europe as everything that can be digitised. There is no economic reason for any part of the value chain not to be digitized in the long run if there is potential to streamline and automate processes. From developer tools to vertical-specific applications, we expect software to power all areas of business. Existing software architectures are going to shift towards more modular, consumerized and integrated solutions. Industrial procurement is one of the largest under-digitized markets. Our investment decision in Tacto has been mainly driven by building a tool that re-invents procurement for SMEs by bridging the information asymmetry between the supply and demand side in a digital platform automating transactional workflows across the supply chain.

Secjur presents a comprehensive solution to the growing problem of compliance, helping businesses to save hundreds of hours and several hundred thousand euros. The company already automates large parts of the manual labor associated with data privacy and information security compliance. With continuous integration with third-party applications and adding more governance and compliance topics to their offering, Secjur is at the forefront of the compliance automation revolution. The team of founders has a strong understanding of the pain points of compliance and have first-hand experience in technology and law which makes them ideally suited to tackle this problem. The ever-growing burdens and risks associated with compliance make Secjur a SaaS that will be an important asset for any company.

The highly complementary founding team has proven their execution capabilities in building Lamoda. With Uify, they formulated an extraordinary vision to revolutionise how business applications are created and used. This space is on a rapid growth trajectory, and Uify will be its champion.

Today, legal claims processes are inefficient, intransparent and frustrating for all parties involved. As a legal prodigy from the University of Cambridge, Ludwig (CEO and Founder of CourtCorrect) has made it his mission to digitise legal claims processes in their entirety. Using advanced AI models, CourtCorrect automates the process significantly. Its holistic digital infrastructure paves the way to a genuinely digital forum for dispute resolution.

Visionaries Club participated in December 2019 in a pre-emptive financing round alongside Atomico and a great syndicate of business angels including the Flixbus founders, Johannes Reck (GetYourGuide), Torsten Reil (NaturalMotion) and others. Arculus has already worked with some of the leading manufacturing companies across a range of industries to upgrade assembly lines of e.g. Siemens in robotics, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, Viessmann in logistics, and Audi in automotive. Based on this proven track record, arculus has been acquired by Jungheinrich AG in October 2021.

The founders of Pledge previously built some of Europe's leading fintech startups. They are now applying their knowledge of complex data infrastructure to carbon markets and have made buying and selling carbon removal as simple as an API. Pledge is applying much-needed automation and data streamlining to our planet's most pressing problem.

E-Commerce has advanced enormously in past years, and with it, we saw a digital reinvention of payments and consumer credit. But until now, there is no digitally-native way to protect products bought online. As former executives at SumUp, Groupon, and abracar, Sebastian, Orhan and Rupert are the perfect founders to take on this problem. The warranty extension market is a EUR 100 bn opportunity, and hakuna will be its digital champion.

Yet, teams need to be more aligned than ever before. Managing tasks productively, transparently, and collaboratively will be essential to successfully navigate this new work environment. Having already reinvented this category once with Wunderlist, we could not imagine a better-suited founding team for this challenge.

The three founders, Alexander Schwabauer, Denis Golovin, and Eric Marre spun out of the process and data science group of Professor van der Aalst from RWTH Aachen, also known as the "godfather of process mining". They continuously impress us with the speed and ingenuity with which they improve automaited. It won't be long before computers free us from mindless and repetitive work. Automaited will be critical to this digital automation revolution.

We believe in GetMomo's approach enabling real estate players to offer directly embedded solutions and break into a significant market opportunity by providing them, in a first step, with a deposit-replacement offering. The company was founded by Marcel Meitza who put together a team bringing strong unique market insights with backgrounds from BCG, Mozilla and Crypho.

The way we move around in urban areas has to change radically and last-mile delivery services are facing strong headwinds. Sustainability is a pressing challenge both on a unit economics level and from an emissions perspective. Cycle is leading the B2B Mobility-as-a-Service revolution by deploying specially manufactured electric vehicles tailored to the needs of grocery delivery companies, food delivery services and parcel logistics. Luis and Nik have built a unique operational execution engine supercharged by a powerful back-end software, putting them into a pole position to become the Europan leader in B2B e-mobility.

The mobile revolution has been spreading at lightning speed, also creating a multi-billion subscription market. While the possibilities around seamless mobile user experience are endless, scaling products on the infrastructure side remains a fundamental challenge for developers. Qonversion’s cross-platform SDK provides mobile teams with an exoskeleton to manage in-app purchases and user lifecycle management, putting revenue optimisation in the spotlight.

There is an incredibly high level of inefficiency in how thousands of eCommerce SMEs manage tax, accounting, and other compliance processes, especially in Europe. The first wave of e-commerce tools, such as Shopify and Amazon, has enabled anyone to become an entrepreneur and sell online. The second wave of tools provided additional infrastructure features geared towards the frontend, such as payment solutions, analytics, and A/B testing. We believe Taxdoo is a pioneer in the third wave of tools that will help SMEs address the complexity and automate key processes by becoming the leading financial operating system for the digital economy.

A vast share of essentially any type of knowledge work is finding and summarizing information. This is especially mission-critical for go-to-market teams of large enterprises, where winning contracts of six figures or more in dollar value depends on accurate and unique knowledge about their targets. Tactic helps teams increase revenue efficiency by identifying and automating manual workflows around go-to-market data, research, and insights. This saves time and increases conversion rates across the funnel. Combining Rudy's experience in sales and Jack's technical expertise in AI, Tactic has the potential to become the ultimate data automation platform globally.