Venture Lead CEE, Berlin

Meet the team at EQT Ventures. Built by former founders and operators, with bases in Stockholm, London, SF, Berlin and Paris.

Venture Lead with CEE focus, Berlin, full-time

EQT Ventures is a multi-stage, multi-sector fund whose mission is to support ambitious founders on their journeys to global success. Founded six years ago in Stockholm, we’ve spread out to offices in San Francisco, London, Paris and Berlin.

In addition to our investment team, who are former founders and operators, we have a deep bench of operational talent in marketing, engineering, design, data science, finance and scaling to support entrepreneurs. At the same time, we’re disrupting the very industry we work in: we’ve built an internal machine learning platform called Motherbrain to scout the world for great startups before anyone knows about them.

We are one of the largest VC firms in Europe with €1.2bn AUM, we have made investments into over 100 companies — adding 28 new ones to our portfolio in 2021 alone. We are immensely proud of the companies we work with including Wolt, Einride, Handshake, Moralis Web3 , Luko, or Cleo to name a few.

Our team is proud to be united by our operator backgrounds and entrepreneurial mindsets, where we know any collaborative team to stronger than an individual. We like to conduct business in a transparent, personal and respectful manner - think “co-founderesque” if you like. Our decisions are always guided by a high moral compass and strongly believe it’s our duty to use our influence for a positive impact where we can.

We’re now looking to bring on a Venture Lead with a geography focus on Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) to our Berlin office

You’ll work in our investment team on deal work, sourcing and evaluating new opportunities with a focus for Central and Eastern European markets. With your experience in fast growing startups, this opportunity will allow you to shift gears and try out what it’s like to invest in companies rather than running them yourself.

We’re not after specific education requirements (some of our partners are self-taught and university dropouts). Having said that, we believe you are a people’s person with a strong passion for tech and open for crazy ideas. Since the odds are almost never stacked in a venture capitalist’s favour, you’ll rely on your innate curiosity, ability to learn fast and high risk appetite to confidently strive ahead. A big plus if you also have a technical background.

As a Venture Lead (CEE) at EQT Ventures you will

• Meet and evaluate early stage and scale up companies. Move from a high level-analysis phase to a deeper understanding of what the opportunities ahead are, and how a specific company can help be a part of the solution. With time, you’ll also have the opportunity to build sector expertise.
• Create lasting relationships with Founders in the CEE region, regardless if EQT Ventures invests or not. We strongly believe that informal and transparent dialogue to Founders is the best way to help long term.
• Understand what kind of teams, products, companies have the potential to solve important problems which could present themselves as attractive investment opportunities. Over time you’ll hone your instincts to know when to walk away from a deal not worth making too.
• Collaborate with the rest of the EQT Ventures team in putting together the best internal team to help and assess the Founders we meet. You understand that we are generalists with an information disadvantage, but that our strength comes from leveraging our team to study up and make high-quality, data driven decisions.
• Drive the investment process forward independently, and enjoy the mix of working alone and with colleagues. The process can be ambiguous at times and is always evolving.

A successful Venture Lead is energised by meeting people to discuss problems, ideas and the future. You’ll assess founders and companies on a potential match with an eye on creating a lasting collaboration.

As a Venture Lead you will champion these founders internally as we discuss potential investments in the greater team, and combine passion with analytical insight to build an investment case.

Besides a fluency in English, we welcome any other relevant tongue to the Central European and Eastern regions, as well as German.

Update | May 2022

We’ve put this role on a short hold until further notice. We’ll be opening applications again in a few weeks. Please feel free to get in touch with mia@eqtventures.com for any role related questions in the meantime. We’re excited to get to know you soon.