Investor Profile: Fly Ventures

Fly Ventures is a Berlin-based seed-stage venture firm backing technical founders across European enterprise and deep tech. Founded in 2017 by Gabriel Matuschka and Fredrik Bergenlid, it presents itself as a deliberate boutique: small funds, a tight equal partnership, and a habit of investing in ideas "two or three years before anybody else cares". Before founding Fly, Matuschka opened and led the Berlin office for Partech, while Bergenlid came from Google.

The firm has raised three funds. Fund I (€35M) launched in 2017, Fund II (€53M) followed in 2020 — bringing total capital at the time to €88M — with backing from the European Investment Fund, KfW Capital and Axa Venture Partners. In December 2024, Fly announced Fund III (€80M), oversubscribed and closed in a single closing, a deliberately modest step-up that the firm says reflects its desire to stay a boutique.

Fly operates on an equal-GP model of four partners distributed across Berlin, London, Paris and Zurich: Matuschka, Bergenlid — formerly of Google, where he worked on Google Assistant — Matt Wichrowski (formerly with Entrepreneur First) and Marie Brayer. The equal-partner structure is core to the firm's identity: four partners with equal standing rather than a hierarchical ladder. The Paris base, added alongside Brayer, reflects the city's growing strength in technical talent.

At the inception stage, Fly writes cheques of €1M–€4M in rounds of €2M–€10M. Artificial intelligence accounts for roughly 45% of its investments, with vertical applications and industrial technology at 35% and developer tools and infrastructure at 20%. When it raised its second fund, the firm described a two-team approach combining commercial expertise with leading technical knowledge — built, in Matuschka's words, for founders "building complex, industry-defining technologies and selling it to large clients".

The portfolio includes autonomous driving company Wayve — which went on to raise a $1.05B Series C led by SoftBank — clinical-trials marketplace Inato, anti-money-laundering startup Salv, cybersecurity firm GitGuardian, and developer-tooling company GitButler, which raised a $17M Series A led by a16z. Other investments include Zurich-based Lakera, which protects enterprises from LLM vulnerabilities, and Orbital Materials, which is developing foundation models for materials science.

A useful signal for founders is what happens after the seed cheque: Fly says more than 60% of its portfolio companies go on to raise a follow-on round from US or tier-one European VCs. For technical teams in AI, industrial technology or developer tooling — particularly across the Berlin, London and Paris corridors — Fly is structured to be an early, deeply involved backer that prizes conviction over fund size.