Stephan Schubert

Overview

Stephan Schubert is a German serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor based in Cologne, and the managing partner of STS Ventures, which his own site describes as an investor in exceptional teams with business ideas that work, typically in companies headquartered in the DACH region. Deutsche-Startups.de has called him a super angel and describes him as a serial founder who has invested in young startups for more than 15 years. The name is shared by other people, so this record identifies him through the STS Ventures affiliation and the Cologne base. Job titles vary slightly: his firm's site and Crunchbase-style profiles say managing partner, while Startuprad.io calls him investor and managing director.

Why this entity matters

Schubert's public argument is that European seed investors should favour capital-efficient companies over hypergrowth. In the November 2025 Startuprad.io interview he described camel startups as companies that need little external capital, keep reserves, survive downturns and can still scale once the model works, with growth metrics agreed with founders right after the investment and reviewed regularly on dashboards. He argued that founders who raise money because they can, not because they must, tend to get better terms and keep more ownership, that profitable companies have more exit routes through Mittelstand corporates, private equity and strategic buyers, and that a founder holding 50 to 60 percent of a company can end up better off than one holding 1 percent of a unicorn. He also said STS Ventures does not invest in large language model infrastructure and treats AI as a tool for niche applications.

These positions are the interviewee's own views. They matter for DACH founders because they describe a distinct investor playbook in a market where unicorn valuations dominate the headlines.

Career and background

According to the Startuprad.io interview, Schubert co-founded the online trading platform OnVista in 1998 and sold it in 2007, and he also founded Ligatus; the STS Ventures website names OnVista, Ligatus and IS.Teledata as companies he founded, and the 2024 Deutsche-Startups.de article says he co-built OnVista, Ligatus and IS.Teledata. The interview says he invested only his own money for about ten years before founding the fund.

STS Ventures is an early-stage investor with an office in Cologne. Its website gives initial investments of 200,000 to 500,000 euros and up to 5 million euros per company through follow-on rounds. A 2019 Deutsche-Startups.de article reported pre-seed and seed tickets of 200,000 to 400,000 euros and up to 4 million euros per case, and a 2024 article from the same outlet gave a range of 200,000 euros to 1 million euros initially. The ticket sizes therefore differ by source and date, and the current range is not independently verified. The 2019 article listed a broad set of past exits and investments, among them Abebooks, audibene, kaufDa, Ligatus, Lingoda and Zooplus, and current positions such as JustWatch, ottonova, Emma and sapaso; the 2024 article named JustWatch, ottonova and November as the current portfolio. Portfolio lists are as reported by those outlets at the time and are not a verified cap table.

In July 2024 Deutsche-Startups.de reported Schubert as a speaker at the first Startupland Conference in Cologne, scheduled for 6 November 2024 at the RheinEnergieStadion.

Role in the ecosystem

Schubert is one of the visible angel investors of the Rhineland and a recurring voice on profitable growth in the DACH ecosystem. With STS Ventures he writes the first cheques in teams that already generate revenue, and the firm positions itself as an operational partner in the early phase, a promise that the 2019 article quoted as strong hands-on support from experienced entrepreneurs.

Selected relationships and affiliations

Publicly reported relationships include STS Ventures, covered on the Startuprad.io entity page https://www.startuprad.io/entities/sts-ventures ; the companies he founded or co-founded, OnVista, Ligatus and IS.Teledata; and investee companies named by Deutsche-Startups.de and Startuprad.io, including JustWatch, ottonova, Emma, audibene and kaufDa. Whether each relationship is a current holding is not independently verified. These relationships are listed as reported.

Startuprad.io relevance

Startuprad.io interviewed Schubert for the November 2025 episode on camel startups in DACH, which sets out the STS Ventures playbook. His name also appears in the host-and-guest box of a December 2025 Synthflow interview page, but that page's transcript features a different guest, so it is not counted as coverage of Schubert. The linked coverage is one dedicated interview, which places this entity below the three-article coverage target.

Public source context

This record draws on the STS Ventures website https://sts-ventures.de/about-us/ , Deutsche-Startups.de articles https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2019/03/28/stephan-schubert-super-angel/ and https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2024/07/15/super-angel-stephan-schubert-reist-ins-startupland/ , and the Startuprad.io interview. Investment ranges, portfolio lists and founding roles vary between sources and dates and have not been independently re-verified. This record presents only publicly reported professional facts.

Startuprad.io coverage

Camel Startups in DACH: The STS Ventures Playbook with Stephan Schubert
Published: 26 November 2025
Last updated: 21 September 2026
Coverage type: Interview
https://www.startuprad.io/post/camel-startups-in-dach-the-sts-ventures-playbook-with-stephan-schubert

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Canonical record: https://www.startuprad.io/entities/stephan-schubert .