In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.
In this article, we talked to UVC Partners, a Munich- and Berlin-based venture capital fund. We decided to get in touch with UVC due to their interesting B2B focus, many successful investments in the past and their proximity to the Technical University of Munich.
Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?
UVC Partners: UVC Partners is a leading Munich and Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm with over €225 million under management. We partner with European technology-based B2B start-ups and focus on industrial technologies, enterprise software, as well as mobility solutions. Investment ticket sizes range from €0.5 to €4 million initially and up to €15 million in total per company.
FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio – and why?
UVC Partners: In our broad portfolio, we have many future technology and market leaders like FlixMobility, Konux and TWAICE Technologies.
FLIXMOBILITY:
FLIXMOBILITY is a Munich based mobility startup, founded by BCG alumni and supported by the entrepreneurship centers of LMU and TUM. UVC got early in touch with the startup in 2012 before market entry. Together with HV Capital, UVC was the first institutional investor in the company by providing seed financing in 2013. Thereafter, UVC was an active board member and supported the founders finding and defending valuable market positioning, while the valuation increased from €8.6 million to over €1 billion today.
KONUX:
Konux is a leading German AI scale-up, improving the network availability for railway operators. The founders graduated from TUM and were supported on different levels by UnternehmerTUM. The team participated in our TechFounder accelerator program and received the Manage&More Scholarship. Together with the US top-tier investor NEA, UVC participated in Konux’s Series A financing round in 2016 and helped the start-up to build a high profile organization as well as attract follow-on investments, resulting in a total funding amount of over $51 million.
TWAICE:
TWAICE is a promising provider of predictive analytics software for lithium-ion batteries. The founders were PhD students at TUM and signed up in UnternehmerTUM’s entrepreneurial education. UVC was an important sparring partner for the young team at a very early stage and built up a close relationship with the founders. The initial investment was made in August 2018 by UVC with Speedinvest as a co-investor. As chairman of the board UVC played an active role especially in introducing strategic partners and customers. Through hands-on introductions to established companies, we significantly accelerated the market entry and helped TWAICE to attract top talents as well as follow-on capital from top-tier investors.
FO: Why should a family office invest in UVC as LP?
UVC Partners: We enjoy the preferred partnership with UnternehmerTUM, Europe’s leading center for startups and innovation. Through this ecosystem, we provide startups with a unique platform to accelerate their growth. UVC can leverage a network of over 1,000 corporate partners and 5,000 students per year at UnternehmerTUM, and thus can uniquely provide first customers and top team members and employees to start-ups. This is very attractive to founders and gives UVC a strong advantage to win competitive deals. By leveraging our engineering and entrepreneurial backgrounds, with 70+ years of combined venture and startup experience, we grow great ideas into great businesses – and deliver high returns. UVC has a deep understanding of how to grow and scale B2B start-ups. Our UVC I performance already is ranked in the top quartile of European VC funds.
FO: Thanks for your time!
Headquarter: Munich, Germany
Website: https://www.uvcpartners.com
