Nerds and Pioneers
We back founders who are building for industries they’ve actually worked in. Not people who read a market report and spotted an opportunity, but insiders who know the workflows, the internal politics, the procurement cycles, and the unwritten rules.
We call them expert founders. Or Nerds And Pioneers.
The NAP DNA
We look for three things, in combination – usually across a founding team:
Industry expertise. You know how to fix the problem and exactly who will buy the solution. You have the trust networks to secure design partners and first customers in months, not years.
Technical depth. Architects capable of building deterministic systems of reasoning, not just prompting APIs. You write the kind of engineering a compliance officer or plant manager can actually sign off on.
Talent gravity. Pioneers who attract the top 1% of engineers based on vision and execution, not just salary.
This combination is rare. In verticals like mining sustainability, greenhouse automation, or shop-floor AI, there might be only 3 to 5 credible founding teams in all of Europe. That scarcity is what makes the opportunity defensible, and it’s what makes identifying these founders early the most important thing we do.
What this looks like in practice
Max Fischer, Deltia – visited 350+ factories, spent 9 years selling to factory managers. Mechanical engineering from ETH/Caltech. Now building shop-floor automation deployed at ABB, Viessmann, Bosch, and Continental.
Anastasia Kuskova, be-Sirius – 10+ years in the mining and metals industry, Senior Deputy at the WEF’s Mining and Metals group. Now building an AI sustainability twin deployed at ArcelorMittal and FLSmidth.
Jack Fitzsimons, Oblivious – PhD in Machine Learning from Oxford, researcher at NASA JPL, ML leader at three companies. Now building confidential computing infrastructure for regulated industries.
Kirk Donohoe, Grand – built payments company WhenThen and sold it to Mangopay, then 2 years as CPO post-acquisition. SVP at Mastercard, 10+ years in payments across 5 companies. Now building an agentic payment platform.
Flavio Alario, Logistica OS – 11+ years leading product and operations at DHL. Previously founded Fliit, a last-mile logistics platform funded by Maersk, exited to Choco. Now building logistics agents.
Meet them all in companies.md.