More than 100 founders and operators from companies like drone maker Quantum Systems and grocery delivery unicorn Rohlik have come together to back a new pre-seed and seed fund dedicated to AI and deeptech founders across Europe.
Dubbed United Founders, the fund has closed a first €30m and plans to hit a final target of €80m in the next 12 months.
Founders and operators from 26 countries, including Quantum Systems cofounder Florian Seibel, Rohlik CTO David Pavlik and Alexander Glätzle, the cofounder of quantum computing startup planqc, have committed to mentoring the founders backed by the fund. About a third (31) have also invested capital in the fund.
United Founders will write cheques of up to €1m for AI and deeptech startups in Europe, with a focus on hardware, dual use companies and medtech. The fund has already backed Israeli startup Wonderful, which builds customer-facing AI agents, and German healthtech Every Health.
A pan-European fund
United Founders is the brainchild of Vít Horký, the founder of Czech B2B startup Brand Embassy, which was acquired by US enterprise software company Nice in 2019. Horký teamed up with Jakub Havrlant, the founder of Czech asset manager Rockaway Capital, to launch the fund.
Horký and Havrlant, who are both general partners, set up a team of partners — all of them former founders — now operating in the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
They also gathered a community of seasoned founders and operators across Europe willing to mentor emerging startups in the region.
“We all shared the same observation: there aren’t enough connections between different European countries. Everyone has their own little ecosystem,” says Maxime Paradis, the fund’s managing partner based in Paris and Zurich.
“The idea was to create a sort of pan-European mafia of successful entrepreneurs who are willing to give back time and money to the new generation of entrepreneurs.”
The fund’s members includes computer scientist Michel Pechoucek, previously the executive director of Cisco and CTO at Avast, as well as Alissa Hsu Lynch, a former exec at Johnson & Johnson and Google, and hotel management unicorn Mews cofounder Richard Valtr.
Boosting European tech
Paradis says United Founders’ members will support entrepreneurs with finding and accessing funding, talent and customers across Europe.
The objective is to enable better connections between European tech ecosystems and help founders overcome the challenges of fragmentation.
“We want to find ambitious entrepreneurs with lots of potential and help them scale in Europe, without needing to go to the US,” says Paradis.
The initiative comes a few months after a host of founders from Europe’s top tech companies including Mistral and Klarna launched “Project Europe”, a new scheme to invest in and mentor young European entrepreneurs.
