German VC Visionaries Club is trimming its investment team to become a “GP-led” firm as it gears up for its next fund expected later this year, general partner Rob Lacher announced on Tuesday.
In a blog post, Lacher says he will lead the firm’s investing with partner Venkat Kondragunta.
Judith Dada, who began as a general partner at Visionaries last year, joined portfolio company Langdock as co-CEO last month and will remain a senior partner at Visionaries.
The announcement follows exclusive Sifted reporting last week that at least two of the firm’s investors, Robert Jäckle and Marton Sarkadi Nagy, are leaving their full-time partner roles, with another investor mulling an exit.
Jäckle and Nagy told Sifted last week they will be taking on more entrepreneurial roles at Visionaries, with Jäckle adding they will “complement the full time investment team” going forward. It is unclear what these new roles will entail.
It's also unclear how many other investors at Visionaries will remain in full-time investment roles for the new fund. According to Visionaries’ team page, it counts Johann Butting, Sahar Meghani, Sandra Tur Mayor and Isabella Yamamoto as partners or junior investors.
Lacher did not respond to a request for comment on the future of the other investors.
The ‘concentration model’
According to Lacher, the AI era is streamlining not only startups but VC firms, too, into what he’s calling the “concentration” model.
“Founders increasingly look for a direct line into the people who have operated at the frontier as they optimise for speed, distribution, geopolitical connectors, policy influence, operator access and compute,” he says in Tuesday’s blog post. “AI now does the ‘standard’ diligence work VC firms built teams and analytical edge around.”
He adds the ambition for Visionaries is to build a “more AI-native VC firm” for its upcoming fund.
Visionaries was founded in 2019 by Lacher and Sebastian Pollok, and has backed buzzy startups including vibe-coding giant Lovable, frontier AI lab Black Forest Labs and agent startup N8n.
AI impacting VC firms
Visionaries isn’t the only firm to make personnel changes owing to the AI era. Earlier this year, Austrian VC Speedinvest cut 10% of its team in an effort to “become more lean and effective,” managing partner Oliver Holle told Sifted at the time.
He singled out AI as an area where the firm needed to invest more internally, adding “it’s completely ridiculous how much manual work still goes on in the back office of a fund.”
As AI models become more sophisticated, VCs are increasingly using the technology to outcompete rivals to the best deals.
Revolut founder Nik Storonsky’s AI-powered VC firm QuantumLight, which claims to be the world’s first systematic VC, is one example.
It’s built its own proprietary model to track 700k VC-backed companies, and is reportedly in talks to target $500m for its second fund after closing its first in May last year at $250m.
