# Visionaries Club Visionaries Club is a Berlin- and London-based early-stage venture capital firm with approximately €600M in assets under management, investing across Europe through flagship seed and early-growth B2B software funds alongside an industrial deep tech fund called Visionaries Tomorrow. Founded in 2019 by Robert Lacher and Sebastian Pollok, the firm has backed companies including Personio, Miro, Pigment, Lovable, Black Forest Labs, N8N, Choco, 11x, and Xentral. ## Founding and structure Robert Lacher co-founded Visionaries Club after leaving La Famiglia VC, the seed fund he had co-founded in 2016. Before venture capital, Lacher was a Boston Consulting Group consultant and founded AMAZE, a fashion platform he sold to Zalando in 2016. He studied engineering and business at RWTH Aachen, Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Harvard. Sebastian Pollok, the other co-founder, came from an e-commerce founding background. The firm operates three fund vehicles: the €150M Seed Fund II for earliest-stage investments, the €200M Growth Fund II for early-growth rounds, and the Visionaries Tomorrow Fund focused on industrial deep tech and climate technology, led by Pollok. In March 2025, [[Judith Dada]] joined as General Partner, reuniting with Lacher after the two had worked together at La Famiglia. Dada and Lacher lead the software and B2B funds. Additional partners Sahar Meghani and Marton Sarkadi Nagy were promoted with the second fund generation. ## The LP model Visionaries Club's most distinctive feature is its limited partner base. Rather than raising from traditional institutional investors (pension funds, endowments), the firm built its LP community from two groups: Europe's unicorn founders and established industrial family businesses. The founder LPs include the people behind UiPath, Miro, Wolt, Flixbus, Supercell, Zalando, Mollie, Spotify, Personio, Adyen, HelloFresh, and Skype. The industrial family LPs include Swarovski, Miele, Mittal, Haniel, Stihl, and members of the Siemens family. This structure serves a dual purpose. Founder LPs provide deal flow (they see what other founders are building), operational advice for portfolio companies, and credibility with new founders evaluating term sheets. Industrial family LPs provide access to traditional European industries — manufacturing, logistics, consumer goods — that B2B software companies need as customers. The thesis is that Europe's competitive advantage lies not in competing with Silicon Valley on consumer tech but in digitizing the continent's deep industrial base, and that the people who run those industries should be directly connected to the companies building the software. The model also reflects a particular theory about European capital formation: that the continent's VC ecosystem can bootstrap itself through founder reinvestment rather than depending on American institutional capital. When Personio's Hanno Renner or HelloFresh's Dominik Richter invest in the next generation of founders through Visionaries, it creates a self-reinforcing European capital cycle. ## La Famiglia connection Both Lacher and Dada describe Visionaries as something of a "La Famiglia 2.0." La Famiglia VC was founded in 2016 with a similar thesis — connecting tech founders with European industrial families — but operated at a smaller scale (~€40M first fund). When La Famiglia merged with [[General Catalyst]] in 2024, the independent European identity was absorbed into an American mega-fund structure. Both Lacher (who had already left to found Visionaries in 2019) and Dada (who departed General Catalyst within months of the merger) effectively reconstituted the La Famiglia approach at larger scale under the Visionaries banner. This trajectory — European fund builds thesis, American firm acquires, key people leave to rebuild independently — is itself a pattern in European VC that the vault tracks through the [[EU Deeptech Ecosystem]]. ## Portfolio and investment focus Visionaries invests primarily in B2B software, AI infrastructure, and increasingly in defense-adjacent founders. Notable portfolio companies include Personio (HR platform), Miro (collaboration), Pigment (business planning), Lovable (AI coding), Black Forest Labs (image generation AI behind the Flux model), N8N (workflow automation), Choco (food supply chain), 11x (AI sales agents), and Xentral (ERP for SMBs). Through the Tomorrow Fund, the firm also invests in industrial deep tech and climate technology. Dada has publicly stated that "every fund has the responsibility" to take defense-sector founders seriously, connecting Visionaries to the broader European defense-tech rearmament wave. La Famiglia was an investor in [[Helsing]], Europe's most valuable defense AI company. ## KB significance Visionaries Club matters for the vault as the clearest example of the European VC model that explicitly positions itself as an alternative to American capital dominance. The LP structure — founder money reinvested into the next generation, industrial families providing market access — represents a theory of European tech sovereignty that operates at the capital formation level, not just the policy level. If the thesis works, it demonstrates that European tech can fund itself. If it doesn't — if the next generation of Visionaries portfolio companies ultimately exit to American acquirers or raise American growth capital — it illustrates the structural gravity that pulls European innovation toward U.S. markets. The La Famiglia → [[General Catalyst]] → Visionaries arc is also a useful case study in the recurring pattern of American consolidation of European VC: build locally, get acquired, key people leave, rebuild independently, repeat. ## See Also - [[Judith Dada]] — General Partner, European sovereignty advocate - [[General Catalyst]] — the American firm that absorbed La Famiglia - [[EU Deeptech Ecosystem]] — the broader European technology landscape - [[Helsing]] — European defense AI, previously backed by La Famiglia (pre-Visionaries) - [[Daniel Ek]] — Helsing chairman, parallel European tech-sovereignty figure - [[Defense Tech Ecosystem]] — the U.S.-focused counterpart ecosystem