Today marks the next chapter of Visionaries Club as we team up with Judith Dada to double down on our mission: building the leading venture capital firm of our generation by taking a radically different approach to investing and partnering with the world’s most ambitious founders.

Coming Full Circle

What started as a shared vision — to challenge the status quo of VC — now evolves into something even bigger. 

Robert and Judith first worked together on La Famiglia’s first fund, which Robert founded and continued to lead until 2025, and which Judith joined in 2017. Thanks to companies like Deel, Personio, Groq, Forto, Vay, Affinity and Arculus, the fund became one of the most successful of its vintage globally. We’re grateful that many of the founders Robert and Judith backed at La Famiglia are now LPs in Visionaries, sharing their experience and learnings to support the next generation of ambitious entrepreneurs. 

“Back then we were new kids on the block – hungry and with no respect for the status quo. From the start, we weren’t interested in just building another VC firm; we wanted to create something fundamentally different.” says Judith Dada.  

“Sometimes, achieving your best self and maximising individual growth requires taking different paths. We started something we are immensely proud of together. Since then we have both continuously built on this approach, sometimes serving as one another’s highly effective pacemaker — Judith as General Partner and co-leader of La Famiglia’s successive fund generations and myself as Co-Founder of Visionaries Club — each taking our own paths to refine what we believed VC should be. Now, we’re reuniting with a stronger conviction than ever to build something even more ambitious, together.” adds Robert Lacher.

Let’s face it: building lasting VC partnerships is hard. We at Visionaries don’t believe in massive platforms or bureaucratic teams that abstract us away from our raw work with founders. Championing divergent thinking is what the VC industry thrives on, but it is also what makes building high-performing and durable partnerships difficult. When you find that rare alignment, you know it’s time to double down.  

Visionaries 2.0: Manufacturing Serendipity

We refuse to do the same as everyone else in venture. We reject detached, high-level advice and theoretical playbooks. Instead, we believe in the wisdom of founders who’ve weathered the storms — sleepless nights, brutal obstacles, and game-changing moments. Through the luminaries we bring together at Visionaries Club, we create the uncommon room — where humility meets boldness, and ambition meets execution, with no compromises on integrity.

In short, we’re building the VC firm we always wished existed. One that operates with the agility, hunger, and risk-taking mindset of a startup. We don’t believe in bureaucracy, consensus-driven decision- making, or short-term incentives. For us, venture is about skin in the game. We don’t ‘spray and pray’ – instead we write meaningful checks, focusing on a small number of high-conviction investments. Because when you invest with deep commitment, you build something that truly endures.

Why Judith?

Building Visionaries Club is our life’s work, and the team we’re forming mirrors the founders we back: hungry self-starters with intellectual honesty, an obsession for excellence, and an unrelenting drive to win. Few embody this ethos more than Judith.

In the last several years, we’ve seen firsthand how she operates – Judith is one of the most authentic, energetic, talented and hard-working yet humble individuals in European VC. She has partnered with some of the continent’s most ambitious founders, including Hanno from Personio, Malte from Parloa, Julian and Bernhard from Ethon AI and Lennard from Langdock. But more than that, Judith is not just an investor. 

It is her entrepreneurial drive and joy of building that sets her apart. At a very young age, she played a pivotal role in shaping and growing one of Europe’s most successful seed-stage investment firms in record time as its co-leader and General Partner. We have great respect for this ability to operate.  

Now, as General Partner, she will lead Visionaries Club and its B2B funds alongside Robert and our wider leadership team, while Visionaries Club co-founder Sebastian Pollok continues to drive Visionaries Tomorrow, our industrial deep tech fund launched in late 2023, further strengthening our holistic approach to transformative innovation.

The time to build is now.

Europe is at a turning point. The geopolitical and economic landscape is shifting fast, and the future of GDP will be driven by technology. We’re just at the start of a multi-decade supercycle in AI, industrial transformation, and frontier technologies. This is our moment to lead.

But large-scale transformation won’t happen just by launching a few more startups. We need to connect Europe’s industrial heartland with the new generation of AI-first companies. Right now, Europe too often breaks at its borders rather than forming a deeply interwoven network of the most ambitious and effective individuals across industries. Our mission is to manufacture the serendipity that makes explosive momentum possible.

We are constantly energised by the founders already rewriting Europe’s startup playbook — UiPath from Bucharest, Bolt from Tallinn, Adyen and Miro from Amsterdam, Google DeepMind from London, Celonis from Munich, Pigment from Paris, Spotify or Lovable from Stockholm — and by the global leaders we’ve learned from, like Dario Amodei at Anthropic and Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn.

Some see competition as a threat. We see it as fuel. OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek — these aren’t reasons to step back. They’re reasons to push harder. Europe doesn’t need to replicate Silicon Valley. It can be something different and even stronger in its own way.

We believe the future isn’t given, it’s built. Rob and Judith spent years working toward something meaningful in venture — first together, then apart. Now, it’s time to become one team again at Visionaries Club.

Because there are moments in life when you compete. And then there are moments when you join forces to build something greater than yourself. This is one of those moments. 

Judith, we couldn’t be more excited to team up. To share the rallying cry we’ve started using as a team behind closed doors:

Europe, it’s time to dream out loud.