Europe's venture moment

"We have been around since roughly 20 years now. Redalpine is a rather conventional venture capital fund, one of the first funds in Europe…. meanwhile, we have grown into a multi-stage VC with a platform of funds. We're a sector agnostic investor, so we always want to invest at the forefront of where the disruptive changes are happening."

"It also illustrates very nicely the breadth of our investment scope, like from FinTech to media to AI to fusion technology in the energy space. And we have also invested in a company called Araris. It's a biotech platform company that we just sold in April this year for 1.14 billion US dollars to a Japanese acquirer."

"The stock markets have recovered from the change in interest rates in 2022, really big time, they're on all time highs. The private markets have not so much recovered…. a gap has opened since 2022. So the valuations overall of public equity is much higher than the valuation of private equity. That means there is a gap that is going to close and we see that happening now."

"Interest rates are heading down, meaning money is getting more available, money is getting more affordable…. since the public stocks are already on all-time highs, you can imagine that people start to diversify also into the private markets. Then, historically you can observe that in tougher environments, you usually have the best VC vintages."

"If you start a company, you can find your seed round and also let's say a normal series A, you can find the money in Europe. If you grow as a company and you raise larger rounds from 30 to 50 to 100, even to 500 million, usually in most of the cases, you don't find the money in Europe."

"There has been a study from Redstone. I think it's absolutely crazy to see in Germany, and I'm paraphrasing here, the German institutionals own about 0.2% of German startups, and American institutionals, pension funds, they have about 10% in those startups…. It should be the other way around."

"We ended up creating the Summit Fund, which is an evergreen structure. The beauty of it is it's semi-liquid. It can be kept in a bank account. You don't have any capital calls. You have compounding returns. From day one, you invest, you're 100% invested…. And it's also not a blind pool. You can check today what's the portfolio of the Summit Fund, and then you can decide if you want to invest or not."

"LPs complain about not having enough DPI…. the DPI itself is being generated by the GP of the fund when he or she sells a position. Then you have redemptions that go back to the LPs. In the situation of the Summit Fund, after a lockup period of three years, you as an LP can redeem."