Fly Ventures
Berlin, early, before the noise. Two operators, Gabriel Matuschka and Fredrik Bergenlid, studying a market that kept celebrating polish over proof, story over science. They built Fly Ventures to fund the kind of founders who would rather debug reality than decorate it. Not later, not safer, but first. First check, first conviction, first call when the idea still looks like a sketch on a whiteboard and the room gets quiet when you explain it. In a startup ecosystem that often rewards momentum over mechanics, that stance lands different.
Fly Ventures runs tight and deliberate. An equal-GP model with Gabriel Matuschka, Fredrik Bergenlid, Matt Wichrowski, and Marie Brayer, spread across Europe’s pressure points. Berlin, London, Paris, Zurich. Four vantage points, one bias: back technical founders solving problems that don’t fit in a tidy category yet. Fund III closed at $80M in 2024, following earlier funds, with a strategy that leans into inception rounds where signal hides inside complexity and most capital hesitates. This is not scale for the sake of optics. It is precision capital designed to move early inside the European startup ecosystem before consensus shows up.
The thesis is not dressed up. Day zero to seed. $1M–$4M into rounds that are still forming their spine. Enterprise, deep tech, AI. The kind of work where the moat is not marketing, it is math, data, and architecture. Internally, the mix tilts heavily toward AI, with meaningful weight in vertical and industrial tech, and a sharp edge in developer tools and infrastructure. The pattern is simple to say and hard to execute: technical depth multiplied by timing, before consensus prices it in and before the broader startup ecosystem knows what it is looking at.
You see it in the bets. Wayve, where end-to-end machine learning takes a swing at autonomous driving without the usual hardware baggage, now backed by a global syndicate after Fly stepped in at seed. Since that early move, Wayve has raised over $2B. Orbital Materials, where AI hunts for new materials like a prospector with a supercomputer, scaling from pre-seed into serious capital, with more than $66M raised. These are not obvious plays when they start. That is the point. Fly Ventures looks for the moment when a category is still arguing with itself, then places a wager that matures as the startup ecosystem catches up.
The way they work mirrors the thesis. They meet founders before the company exists, 6–9 months early, when the problem is still being carved out of first principles. The conversations are technical, not theatrical. Architecture, data pipelines, model choices, tradeoffs that will matter 18 months later when the market catches up. The goal is not to win a round. The goal is to build something that forces the next round to find you.
There is a quiet flywheel here. Early conviction attracts serious follow-on capital. Technical founders talk to other technical founders. Europe’s fragmented ecosystems start to feel a little more connected when one firm keeps showing up with the same signal: we understand what you are building, even when it is not obvious yet.
If you are building something hard, something that makes a room pause, Fly Ventures is already tuned to that frequency. If you want to work on those problems, their portfolio is where the action is. Wayve. Orbital. And the next set forming right now, somewhere between code, compute, and conviction.
Follow this firm. Study their founders. Track their plays.
