Project A is one of the leading venture capital companies in Europe with offices in Berlin, Munich, and London. Established 10 years ago, it has garnered over 600M USD in assets under management. Project A is managed by Rainer Berak, Dr Fischer, Dr. Florian Heinemann, Uwe Horstmann, ThieDrander and Dr Anton Waitz.
Project A supports its portfolio companies such as Trade Republic, Kry, sennder, WorldRemit, Spryker and Voi, and with a team of over 110 in-house experts in themes such as software and product development, business intelligence, brand, design, marketing, CRM, sales, venture development, or recruiting.
Project A Fourth Pre-Seed Funding
This fourth fund at $375 million is said to be the largest in the company’s history – bringing the company’s total assets under management to $1 billion.
General partner and co-founder of Project A Uwe Horstmann said in a statement:
“Closing the fourth fund is a major milestone in our company history as it marks the 10-year anniversary of Project A successfully supporting founders all over Europe … We are continuing to expand our operational VC model to have our functional experts directly support our portfolio companies in scaling their business and their technology. “operational VC” model includes more than 140 functional experts who support its portfolio companies”
Project A recently confirmed its plans to expand its private equity co-investment practice and will invest up to $80 million in private equity deals, at the “growth” end of the market, after it built a portfolio of 11 private equity co-investments.
Horstmann reacting to the impending economic downturn, was asked what the feeling was amongst Project A’s LP hackers, he said:
“It varies between investors of course, but I’d say most of our investors were expecting this at some point. The big institutional investors e.g., the U.S. are also somewhat experienced in that — they’ve been around for quite a while. We share a view that we need to prepare our portfolio for a potential rough time ahead in terms of the funding environment, but it’s actually a great time to do new investments: The fundamental positive trend in the European ecosystem is intact, and we do investments with a 6-10 year time period in mind anyway”
I also asked what new directions the fund would take: “We’ll continue to operate two strategies: (a) early stage venture (pre-seed to Series A) and (b) private equity co-investments. Both strategies are based on the 140+ full-time operational expert team that we run — which to our knowledge is unique in Europe. While we could have made this fund much larger, we felt this size is the right one for us as it allows us to build an exciting portfolio all over Europe and across different industries and verticals — all while allowing us to invest even more per company,” he said.
