AT TVF, WE‘VE BEEN DELIVERING REAL VALUE TO THE FOUNDERS OF MORE THAN 40 STARTUPS ACROSS FOUR FUND GENERATIONS SINCE 2007.
Brain
We are engineers, developers, scientists and business people – but we‘re all entrepreneurs. We meet you at eye level and do whatever is takes to help you achieving your goals. Strategy, product development, regulatory, hiring or sales – we use our hands and brains for you and your team to become successful.
Cash
Becoming the next category leader doesn‘t come for free. We fuel your ambition by investing early-stage venture capital. For a reliable long-term relation, we invest early and have a decent reach to support you on your journey. Our international network backs your later rounds.
PROXIMITY
Authentic early-stage investing takes a lot of work and time. We believe that real human-to-human interaction is the key to successful long-term relationships. We are here for you when you need us and at your site if you call for us. That‘s why we mainly invest in teams that we can reach within two hours.
Brain
We invest in startups, we can offer more than a money investment. That is why we always have a peer on our team who understands your customers, knows your market and feels you dealing with your challenges.
We want to be real value-add. Having a long VC history, we gathered a lot of experience in building successful companies. We support you hands on in all your challenges, organize workshops with experts and connect with our numerous partners.
Whether it’s first key hires, adapting corporate strategy, support with approval processes and reimbursement or setting up a sales playbook – we are familiar with the many challenges that you as startups face and help to overcome them more quickly.
Get to know usCASH
We are an early-stage VC dedicated to investing in technology companies that have the potential to enable or disrupt major industries. Our strategy centers on getting involved early, primarily focusing on Seed stages, with occasional Series A initial investments. We only invest in cases in which we are confident to take the lead, but we don’t always have to do so. We feel comfortable in strong consortia with other VCs and business angels.
Technology plays the keyrole in tackling the most pressing challenges of our time and in improving people’s working and living conditions. We work with the best entrepreneurial teams and visionaries, capable of crafting transformative technology. We are a b2b investor. Our focus spans across SaaS/software, IoT, digital solutions, medtech, biotech, new materials and greentech/cleantech. We invest in ventures with a convincing technology core providing strong competitive edge and serving important customers needs.
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STAGES
(Pre-) Seed | Series A
AUM
> 100 Mio. €
INITIAL TICKET
500k € - 2,0 Mio. €
MAX AMOUNT
6,0 Mio. €
Proximity
We are an ecosystem player, providing a strong regional presence and deep-rooted network. It‘s a crucial part of our mission to offer hands-on support and be there in person when we are needed. We want to keep our approach authentic and reliable. That‘s why we focus our investment activities within a rough two-hour reach from us – that‘s Rhineland area (Germany) and neighbouring Netherlands and Belgium. Given a strong fit and extra conviction, we’re open to investments across whole Germany.
The early stages are the period for a startup in which future success is defined. Finding product-market fit and an effective go-to-market strategy early are keys to market dominance. We‘re passionate about sharing our insights in that. The critical role of frequent social interaction cannot be overstated.
Network and access are among the most crucial offerings an investor can provide. We facilitate exclusive interaction wtih the established economy via the S-UBG Group, giving young startups access to their first potential customers or partners. The network includes over 150 SME companies resulting from 30 years of investment experience of S-UBG.
Success Stories
BLACK SEMICONDUCTOR
ELEVEAR
specter automation
EEDEN
Silexica
Taxy.io
Protembis
CUREosity
Hemovent
MOQO
BLACK SEMICONDUCTOR
🎉 Let’s elevate the future of semiconductors! 🎉
Black Semiconductor has secured an incredible €254.4 million in funding to revolutionize the semiconductor industry with groundbreaking graphene-based technology! This includes €228.7 million from the German federal government and North-Rhine-Westphalia under the IPCEI ME/CT program, alongside €25.7 million in equity funding led by Porsche Ventures, and Projekt A with participation from East Hill Equity – Managing Scania Growth Capital, Capnamic, NRW.BANK und uns TVF, joining seed round investors VSquared Ventures, Cambium Capital Management and Onsight Ventures. 🚀🙌
Founded in 2020 by Daniel Schall and Sebastian Schall, Black Semiconductor is pioneering a new way to build chip networks using graphene. These innovative chip networks will enhance data communication speed, improve energy efficiency, and significantly reduce manufacturing costs by requiring 60% fewer production steps. With this funding, Black Semiconductor is set to enable the first mass production of semiconductors based on graphene. 🎯🌍
We at TechVision Fonds are thrilled to be part of this journey, contributing to Europe’s strategic autonomy in key technologies. Congratulations to the entire Black Semiconductor team and all friends & partners involved! 🥳👏
More informations about BlackSemi: https://blacksemi.com
ELEVEAR
👂 Elevate your hearing! 👂
We are thrilled to announce that the Aachen-based DeepTech Startup Elevear has secured an investment from TechVision Fonds to fuel their mission of revolutionizing the audio technology landscape! Congratulations to Stefan Liebich, Johannes Fabry, Raphael Brandis and Elfed Howells on this success! 🎧💡
Elevear develops, integrates and licenses audio technologies for hearables. The market for hearables is growing steadily with a strong demand for distinguishing special product features. Elevear’s products aim to improve listening comfort, wearability, and natural communication to bring the user experience to the next level:
👉 𝗢𝗰𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿™ compensates for the so-called “occlusion effect”, which is the altered perception of one’s own voice and surroundings when you wear devices in or over your ears.
👉 𝗜𝗱𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗼𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 reduces the noise floor of miniature microphones to the level of expensive studio microphones.
👉 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 compensates for head rotation for all audio content, regardless of the audio source.
Welcome Elevear to the #TVF-Family! We are very much looking forward to conquering the audio market together! 🚀 🎧 More informations in our press release
specter automation
What are the first three things that come to your mind about construction sites?
Probably something like:
– machines
– scaffolding
– bricks
The last thing that pops into your head is probably – digitalization. The construction industry is one of the largest industries in the world but unfortunately also one of the least digitized. On most of the world’s construction sites, a piece of paper, pencil and phone are still the critical tools for coordination and planning. Building Information Modeling (BIM) generates large amounts of data in the planning phase of buildings and links it to the building model. However, 96% of this data is not transferred to the implementation phase, the actual construction phase. Site managers and foremen no longer have access to the data or it simply remains unused. As a result, construction projects take up to 20% longer, cost up to 80% more and there is a lot of waste.
THIS is exactly what specter automation wants to change. The specter team has developed an innovative software that puts a 3D model of the building to be completed at the center of construction site coordination. All important information from the planning phase can be accessed by site managers and foremen by clicking on a component in the 3D model – work steps, material quantities as well as time and cost information. The goal is to bring the entire construction site ecosystem onto specter’s platform in order to control the construction site in the future in a data-driven way.
We are sure that solutions that make construction more efficient, sustainable, faster, cheaper and more digital are needed more than ever – especially in Germany.
Together with great business angels and strong investors like LBBW-VC and xdeck VC, we accompany the team of specter automation on its exciting journey to the fully digitalized construction site.
Click here for the press release: PM final specter EN
EEDEN
What do you think of when you think of sustainability, environmental protection and the circular economy? Most people certainly think of air and road traffic, energy management, building renovations or vegan lifestyles.
What many people don’t realize is that millions of tons of old clothes end up in our oceans, forests and as waste gas in our atmosphere every year, not in 2nd-hand stores, due to “trends” such as fast fashion. At the same time, cotton farming destroys soils, consumes vast amounts of water and takes up land for food cultivation. Cotton agriculture has now reached its peak.
Luckily, there are startups like EEDEN that will use innovative recycling processes to turn trash back into high-quality clothing for millions of people. We are incredibly proud to have you in our portfolio and to be able to help shape this journey. In the interest of all of us – good luck and keep up the good work, Reiner Mantsch, Steffen Gerlach and team!
Many thanks also to our co-investors High-Tech Gründerfonds with Dr. Nik Raupp and Markus Hölzl, who believe in this story and dare to invest in a startup that will build plants and move millions of tons of old clothes.
Click here for the press release: https://bit.ly/3Ohamsq
Silexica
Automated identification of parallelism in sequentially programmed source code and its automatic mapping to Multi-Processor-System-on-a-Chip (MPSoC). Who is supposed to understand this? Max Odendahl and Johannes Emigholz, the founders of Silexica! And we do – at least enough to start a joint project.
When Max and Johannes wanted to get started as a spin-off from RWTH Aachen University, the search for investors was not easy. Today everyone is calling for deeptech, but when it really gets “deep”, you often still stay alone with your startup. Luck, coincidence or systematic networking: We joined together with DSA Invest as seed investors. Because we have computer scientists on board. Even those who understand compiler construction, abstract syntax graphs and undecidability problems. But probably nobody wants to elaborate on that here.
In any case, we were able to work together really well. Discussing product and sales strategies, looking at different market segments (e.g. automotive) and finding better solutions for software developers as users of the Silexica toolset.
Silexica made the flip to the US with us. They also participated in the German Accelerator in Silicon Valley and made really big financing rounds with Merus Capital and EQT. And us – except that our contribution got smaller and smaller over time.
Unsurprisingly, Silexica was then bought by Xilinx, which now belongs to AMD, one of the largest chip manufacturers in the world. And we are convinced that this technology is just starting…
Taxy.io
You probably have to know each other well since your school days to see the digitization of tax and legal advice as a hip topic for a tech startup. Like Sven Peper, Daniel Kirch, Steffen Kirchhoff and Sven Weber. After all, they saw it that way in 2018. And somehow, the tax and legal consulting market has probably seen that it also needs to become more digital. That’s why many well-known law firms and accounting firms are already among taxy.io’s customers, including “big fours.”
Who would have thought? We, for example. That’s why we were the first VC investor to invest in taxy.io and built the bridge for further VC investments. And it’s really hip to see how AI can filter out the right content from the mass of tax laws and cases for specific clients and use it to make tailored offers. Thus it was easy to find a few early customers in our network.
Since then, we have been in constant exchange. About the advantages and disadvantages of on-premise installations compared to cloud-based solutions, about virtualized development teams and how remote work actually works properly, about business models and B2B contracts, and about strategy. For example, whether to offer dedicated tooling for the property tax reform in Germany or not. You should! Because then you’ll have several hundred more law firms in your customer base.
Maybe tax returns will even be fun at some point. Just before it either fits on a beer mat or is completely automated.
Protembis
It is very gratifying that minimally invasive surgical methods for serious conditions are being developed and tested more and more frequently. This also includes minimally invasive aortic valve replacement, one of the most common heart surgerys in Germany. But as is often the case when something is new, not all side effects are recognized right away. During aortic valve replacement, for example, it is quite common for calcium deposits to break loose in the vessels during the procedure, reaching the brain and causing severe damage. 9% of the patients suffer a stroke, many damages are less striking, but lead to later secondary diseases such as dementia.
Problem recognized – but what now? Karl von Mangoldt and Conrad Rasmus, the founders of Protembis, have an idea! A filter is needed that keeps the dissolved particles out of the brain arteries and thus prevents damage to the brain. This is the birth of ProtEmbo®, a catheter-placeable filter, permeable to blood but a barrier to all dissolved particles.
We are a bit proud that together with Coparion, Abiomed and other investors we were able to finance the clinical trials for an approval of ProtEmbo® in Europe. So far, all results are promising. Thus an important innovation – minimally invasive aortic valve replacement – will also be a safe innovation for patients. Is there also a short form for this? Yes: Restore the heart. Protect the brain. The Protembis claim is the essence of this story.
CUREosity
What do you do when family members are affected by diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Down syndrome or paraplegia and you are not statisfied with the therapy options for your family patients, neither in quality nor in quantity? You found a company that solves this problem. That’s what Thomas Saur, Stefan Arand and Marco Faulhammer did in 2018.
The idea: transfer highly targeted therapeutic knowledge tailored to patients into VR glasses. This way, patients with neurological, neurodegenerative or musculoskeletal diseases receive a completely new, constantly available and highly motivating access to effective therapy.
The solution and the management team, which has been further strengthened with Caesar van Heyningen, convinced us so quickly and comprehensively in 2021 that we were eager to work together.
And that is what we are doing now. With over 30 highly motivated CUREosity experts from the fields of physiotherapy, medicine, software and game development as well as sales and marketing. The team is already bringing CUREO from Düsseldorf to many clinics and rehab facilities in the DACH region. The feedback is almost overwhelming and gives us courage!
And we bring a lot from our long established MedTech network to accelerate the journey to the European VR therapy market leader. Reimbursement, regulatory affairs, internationalization: we do what we can. Matter of the heart.
Hemovent
ECMO has been around since the 1970s. And it is an extremely important technology for supplying oxygen to people with lung damage. So it’s good to see founders like Christof Lenz and Dr. Oliver Marseille, who founded hemovent in 2013, rethink such an important technology and ultimately revolutionizing it.
Smaller. Lighter. More gentle on the sensitive blood that has to flow through it. And: completely without electricity. The system draws its energy solely from oxygen pressure. That is unique.
And when such a system becomes smaller, lighter, cheaper and more independent, it often opens up to other areas of application and gives more patients access to a technology that is vital to their survival. For example, patients with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), whose numbers are increasing worldwide.
So it’s no surprise that our partnership couldn’t be for life – the successful exit was unstoppable, so to speak. We are happy to stay on the ball and continue to follow this story, because it is far from over.
MOQO
Serial entrepreneurs have a good reputation with investors and should not be confused with serial offenders of a another type. Michael Minis and Markus Harmsen once started with tamyca in the field of private peer-2-peer car sharing. They then sold the resulting platform, and after a detour via fleetButler finally took off with MOQO as a software platform for mobility sharers of all kinds. Now it doesn’t have to be cars – but it can be. In addition, scooters, wheels and everything else that can be used to get from A to B faster.
And as is often the case when you start something new in the market, you first make a few detours. Who are the customers? Maybe companies that want to offer Car-Sharing for their workforce? Housing associations that want to avoid parking regulations? Municipal utilities that want to set up their own Car-Sharing services in the wake of electromobility?
With hardly any of our startups have we discussed strategy so intensively, reinvented ourselves again and again, conceived and wrestled with each other, and also tried one way or another and discontinued it again. Finally, with negotiation and contract expertise, we were then able to help secure crucial deals for MOQO.
And the result: MOQO is on its way to become Europe’s largest software platform provider for mobility sharing. Since Flinkster, Europe’s largest car-sharing provider, recently also started using MOQO, Michael and Markus are unstoppable. And we’ll be damned if we’re going to change that.
