Public Money Seeds It, Foreign Money Scales It: Venture Capital in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
Updated: Oct 28
Last updated: 28 October 2026 · By Jörn "Joe" Menninger, founder and host of Startuprad.io
Venture capital in Germany, Austria and Switzerland runs on three kinds of money that rarely sit in the same round. Public capital anchors the seed stage: High-Tech Gründerfonds, set up with federal money and KfW, told us in December 2020 that "we see ourselves as the most active seed investor", with over 890 million euros under management. Private funds raise from these public anchors, corporates and family offices, then lead seed to Series B rounds. The largest growth rounds now come from abroad: KfW Research reported that more than three quarters of the venture capital invested in German start-ups in the first quarter of 2026 came from outside the country. Exits are the weak link. Partech partner Simone Riva told Startuprad.io: "The reality is that in Europe capital markets are not ready to welcome tech IPOs, especially below 1 billion in, in valuation."
This page collects what investors said on the record on Startuprad.io, the dated fund and round figures from our coverage, and where to read next. It covers the investor side. For the founder's route from pre-seed to Series B, read Venture Capital and Startup Funding in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
How the money moves: four layers
1. Public anchors and limited partners
High-Tech Gründerfonds exists because private venture capital stopped after the dot-com crash. Its interview page notes that in 2004 only 20 tech startups in Germany received VC. Managing director Alex von Frankenberg told us the German government put 240 million euros into the first fund in 2005, KfW added 15 million and six large companies 17 million (Meet Europe's Most Important Seed Investor, December 2020).
That public layer has grown since. Germany announced a €1 billion fund of funds for German and European venture capital in November 2023. In June 2024 the HTGF Opportunity Fund added €660 million for growth rounds, with up to €30 million per company. In September 2026 the government and KfW started the next phase of the WIN initiative, aiming to mobilise more than €25 billion by 2030 and, for the first time, courting pension funds and foundations (September 2026 row in the table below).
Public money has a side effect that investors name openly. Riva described it in the second part of his interview: "If you have a lot of local domestic venture capital funds that are competing against themselves automatically and they are obliged to deploy capital in that country automatically, the average price of a given round is going up just as a, as an effect of competition." (European Venture Capital: Efficiency, IPOs, and AI Defensibility, June 2026)
2. Fund managers: what they say they do
Early-stage funds in the archive describe narrow, deliberate mandates.
Cherry Ventures, Berlin. Founding partner Filip Dames started the first fund with the partners' own money and close friends' capital, "much less than 10 m €", then raised an institutional fund of 150 million euros. His summary: "We invest almost exclusively in Europe." (2022 interview)
Planet A Ventures, Berlin. Fridtjof Detzner, Investor of the Year at the German Startup Awards 2023, runs a business team and a science team side by side: "Science has the power to say no to any deal." (2023 interview)
Picus Capital, Munich. Alexander Samwer co-founded it in 2015 after Rocket Internet. Per reported figures pending confirmation, Fund II closed at a €250 million hard cap in 2025 and Carlyle AlpInvest added €150 million in preferred equity in December 2025 (profile, August 2026).
In 2026 a new fund type appeared: dedicated defence and dual-use vehicles. Earlybird and the French investor AVP announced E2D, a €500 million growth fund, on 18 June 2026 (Startup News, June 2026). Lakestar closed its Resilience I fund on 17 July 2026 (Startup News, July 2026).
3. Rounds: who writes the large cheques
At seed, the money is mostly local. At growth stage, it is mostly not. KfW data reported in our Q2 2025 analysis put US-based investors at more than 30% of venture capital deployed in Germany that quarter. By the first quarter of 2026, KfW Research counted more than three quarters from abroad.
The 2026 rounds show who those investors are. STARK raised 500 million euros at a valuation of about 3.5 billion euros in June 2026, in a round led by Sequoia and Founders Fund. In July, Quantum Systems raised $1.2 billion at $8 billion from Blackstone, Airbus and Advent International, and Helsing raised $1.8 billion at an $18 billion valuation. Our July episode concluded that the lead investors in these rounds "are not traditional European VCs".
Riva's view on when to take this money is stage-dependent: "when you are small, let's say sub 10 million in revenues or even 5, I think you have no choice but just scaling aggressively." (When Should European Startups Raise VC?, June 2026)
4. Exits: the weak link
In the German VC barometer for the first quarter of 2025, IPO sentiment fell 17.8 points to -28.9, far below the overall climate indicator of -2.1. Fundraising sentiment fell to -11.0. Exits do happen at seed scale: HTGF reported more than 20 a year in 2020. July 2026 brought large announced deals, including Uber's offer for Delivery Hero, but our July episode separated announced value from realised liquidity: capital recycling depends on the pending deals actually closing.
Market data from Startuprad.io coverage
Every row comes from a dated Startuprad.io article. Different data providers (KfW, Tracxn, Crunchbase, EY) count differently, so figures from different rows are not additive.
Coverage date | Country | What | Figure | Source |
Dec 2020 | Germany | High-Tech Gründerfonds | Over €890m under management; about 600 seed investments; 20+ exits a year | |
Dec 2022 | Germany | Cherry Ventures funds | First fund "much less than 10 m €"; institutional fund €150m | |
Nov 2023 | Germany | Federal fund of funds | €1bn for German and European VC funds | |
Jun 2024 | Germany | HTGF Opportunity Fund | €660m; up to €30m per company | |
Jul 2024 | All three | NGP Capital report, Q1 2024 vs Q1 2023 | Germany +3.9%, Switzerland -19.8%, Austria -75.8% | |
Jan 2025 | Germany | Full year 2024 (KfW dashboard) | €7.4bn across 1,407 deals; AI €1.8bn across 75 deals | |
May 2025 | Germany | VC barometer Q1 2025 | IPO sentiment -28.9; fundraising sentiment -11.0 | |
Jul 2025 | Germany | Q2 2025 (KfW dashboard) | €2.4bn in 208 rounds; €4bn in H1; US investors above 30% | |
Jul 2025 | Germany | Fund closes, June 2025 | Project A Fund V €325m; Picus Capital Fund II €250m; Green Growth Fund €160m final close | |
Jul 2025 | Austria | Fonds Zukunft Österreich | €140m to be paid out in 2026; €50m reserved at the time | |
Nov 2025 | Austria | Calm/Storm Ventures | €30m health-tech fund closed | |
Nov 2025 | Switzerland | Flexion Series A | €43m; DST Global Partners and NVentures led, redalpine participated | |
Dec 2025 | Switzerland / Austria | Growth rounds | CHF 172m into Swiss growth-stage startups (Startupticker); refurbed €50m | |
Jul 2026 | Germany | June 2026 rounds and funds | STARK €500m at €3.5bn; Isar Aerospace €270m Series D; E2D €500m fund | |
Sep 2026 | Germany | July 2026 rounds and funds | Helsing $1.8bn at $18bn; Quantum Systems $1.2bn at $8bn; Proxima Fusion €411m at €2.4bn; Lakestar Resilience I $300m | |
Sep 2026 | Germany | Foreign share (KfW Research) | More than three quarters of Q1 2026 VC from abroad; WIN target above €25bn by 2030 |
Germany
Germany is the largest of the three markets: the KfW dashboard counted €7.4 billion across 1,407 deals in 2024 (reported January 2025). AI took €1.8 billion of that across 75 deals. In the first half of 2025 the total reached €4 billion, with two new unicorns in the second quarter. The money has since moved towards hardware. In June and July 2026 the largest rounds went to defence, space and fusion companies in and around Munich: STARK, Isar Aerospace, Quantum Systems, Helsing and Proxima Fusion. Our June 2026 episode also cited Tracxn data of $4.04 billion across 188 equity rounds through June 2026, 20.7% below the same period in 2025. The country's open question is ownership: with three quarters of early-2026 money coming from abroad, who holds the upside when these companies exit?
Austria
Austria's figures are small and volatile. The NGP Capital report we covered in July 2024 showed Austrian venture funding down 75.8% in the first quarter of 2024 against a year earlier. Public money is part of the answer: in our June 2025 news we reported that Fonds Zukunft Österreich planned to pay out €140 million in 2026, with only €50 million reserved at the time. Specialist funds are forming in Vienna: Calm/Storm Ventures closed a €30 million health-tech fund in autumn 2025. On the company side, refurbed closed a €50 million round to accelerate European expansion, with a push into the UK (November 2025 deep dive).
Switzerland
Switzerland is small in total and large per head. The same NGP Capital report put Swiss venture funding at $247 per capita, close to the UK's $305, while Swiss volume fell 19.8% in the first quarter of 2024. Our news coverage since then shows robotics and AI rounds out of Zurich: Flexion's €43 million Series A in November 2025 drew DST Global Partners and NVentures, NVIDIA's venture arm, with redalpine participating (November 2025 news). ANYbotics passed €127 million and Ecorobotix €128 million in total funding (October 2025 deep dive).
What the archive shows across interviews
The domestic layer is relationship capital; the growth layer is global. Cherry started with friends' money; HTGF answers founders directly. Von Frankenberg's line in the interview summary: "I reply to every email, even if it just says, 'Yo, we should talk.'" At the other end, the 2026 growth rounds came from Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Advent International and Google, according to our July episode.
Investors disagree on hardware. Detzner argued in 2023: "So we need to invest in hardware in order to build and change processes in our industry, in the world industry, otherwise we won’t do it." The summary of Riva's 2026 episode records the opposite view: hardware companies with manufacturing plants should often avoid growth-stage venture capital. The July 2026 rounds suggest both are partly right. Hardware got funded at scale, but mostly by investors who are not classic venture funds.
Dependence on foreign capital grew fast. In 2020 the fix for missing seed money was domestic and public. By Q2 2025 US investors supplied more than 30% of German VC; by Q1 2026 more than three quarters came from abroad. Companies mostly stay put, though. Our Capital Gravity episode cites a Joint Research Centre study of 16,595 European venture-backed startups: the confirmed relocation rate is 3.3%. What moves is the parent company and the leadership.
Angels think in outliers. Carsten Kraus, Germany's Business Angel of the Year, described the pressure behind early bets: "You always fear missing the one hidden gem that becomes the next Facebook or OpenAI" (interview, May 2025).
Where to go next
Guides one level down
Investors behind tech in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: who the funds, family offices, angels and corporate investors are, with profiles. Start here for investor types; this page does not repeat them.
How VCs make decisions: how funds source, check and vote on deals.
Fund formation and LP relations: where fund money comes from and how managers raise it.
Portfolio value creation: what investors do after the term sheet.
Angel investors and family offices: private money before and beside the funds.
Seed funding: the stage where HTGF and Cherry operate, and our most-read funding guide.
Series A and B funding: the stage where foreign lead investors start to appear.
Exit and IPO pathways: why trade sales dominate and IPOs stay rare.
Trackers and related hubs
Funding news and rounds: the round tracker behind several rows in the table.
Startup news and market signals: every monthly news episode, our main source for fund closes.
Startuprad.io Knowledge Center: all guides.
Investor episodes to start with
Simone Riva (Partech): both parts of his interview are linked in the sections above. They are the most direct talk on the record about overfunding and exits.
Alex von Frankenberg (HTGF): how the public-private seed model was built.
Filip Dames (Cherry Ventures): from own money to an institutional fund.
Fridtjof Detzner (Planet A): a fund where scientists can veto deals.
Alexander Samwer and Picus Capital: from Rocket Internet to evergreen early-stage capital.
Go-to-market execution and revenue operations → Go-to-Market & Revenue Operations
Questions people search for
How large is the German venture capital market?
The KfW dashboard counted €7.4 billion across 1,407 deals in 2024, and €4 billion in the first half of 2025. Germany's VC investment equalled 0.18% of GDP in 2024, above the EU-27 average of 0.16% (2024 comparison).
Which investors fund AI and industrial deep tech in Germany, Austria and Switzerland?
Our news coverage names the leads round by round. Examples: DST Global Partners and NVentures led Flexion's Series A with redalpine participating; Sequoia and Founders Fund backed STARK. For a structured view of investor types, see Investors behind tech in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Which investors have spoken on Startuprad.io?
Among others: Simone Riva (Partech), Alex von Frankenberg (HTGF), Filip Dames (Cherry Ventures), Fridtjof Detzner (Planet A) and angel investor Carsten Kraus. The episode list above links each interview.
Where can I follow Swiss venture capital rounds?
Our monthly news episodes cover Swiss rounds and fund moves; start with the funding news tracker.
Sources and method
Every figure on this page comes from a dated Startuprad.io article linked in the table or text. Where our own articles disagree, we name the gap rather than pick a number. Quotes are copied from the linked episode pages. We review this page after each monthly news episode.
About the author
Jörn "Joe" Menninger is the founder, host and editor-in-chief of Startuprad.io, based in Frankfurt am Main. He has interviewed founders and investors since 2014, with 1,700+ podcast episodes across the franchise, and spent more than 15 years in management consulting before that.
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