Visionaries Club holds double close on <€80m

Founding partner Robert Lacher told Unquote: "We're trying to hard-cap the funds at €40m. After our first close, we have left some space in both funds to take a few more value-add investors on board."

Based in Berlin, the VC was founded by Sebastian Pollok and Robert Lacher. Pollok was previously an associate at E.Ventures in San Francisco and is a member of Cherry Ventures' advisory board. Lacher started his career at the Boston Consulting Group and later founded La Famiglia VC.

Pollok told Unquote: "We began fundraising from our investors and founder network around three months ago. Our first close was held on the 15 July 2019, so we're now going to start investing from our growth fund. We'll begin investing from our seed fund soon after the summer."

The funds' management fees, hurdle and carry rates are in accordance with market standards, and the funds are domiciled in Germany. Lacher told Unquote: "For our Growth fund, we're targeting 2.5-3.5x. With our seed fund, we're aiming for more than 3x, although this is a very volatile market."

The funds do not invest in series-A rounds due to the glut of VCs active at this stage. The firm plans to offers its founders the ability to choose large, high-profile European and US funds as a lead for funding, while the Visionaries Club funds co-invest with smaller equity cheques with the option to use its industrial LP network.

SNP acted as legal adviser.

Investors
LPs in Visionaries Club include numerous European founders, such as Hakan Koc, founder of Auto 1 Group; Jochen Engert and Daniel Krauss, founders of Flixbus; Johannes Reck, founder of GetYourGuide; Dominik Richter, founder of Hello Fresh; and Florian Gschwandtner, founder of Runtastic.

Other investors include the family offices of Markus Swarovski, Shravin Mittal, Felix Fiege, Christian Miele, Max Viessmann and members of the Siemens, Henkel and Bitburger families.

The founders of the firm have also invested their own money in the funds.

Investments
The funds will invest €500,000-1.5m in B2B businesses, taking 10% stakes in their companies. One fund will make investments in pre-seed and seed rounds, and the other will invest in series-B rounds.

Some of the areas the fund is looking at include sourcing and procurement platforms, modular production systems, warehouse automation, logistics platforms and digital after-sales software. Pollok told Unquote: "Our expected holding periods are three to five years for the Growth fund, and two to four years for the Seed fund." The Growth fund already has several deals in the pipeline.

People
Visionaries Club – Sebastian Pollok, Robert Lacher (founding partners).

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