Jeanette zu Fürstenberg: Investing In Smart People

Since 2013, Jeanette zu Fürstenberg has been active in the start-up scene. In the autumn of 2016, she launched her first fund, which included 31 young companies. As she comes from a family that, with the company Krohne Messtechnik, is the typical German Mittelstand enterprise, she wanted to enrich the economic environment with digitised business models of young founders. Meanwhile, the Berlin-based venture capital company has raised assets worth more than 350 million euros.

Young companies as well as established Entrepreneurs

La Famiglia is a beneficial concept for all stakeholders. Investors benefit from early access to new technologies; founders gain capital and close contacts with potential customers of their newly developed technologies. Every name is itself a success story, like the young companies Celonis, Palantir, and Skype, or long-established companies such as Oetker, Voith, Burda, Viessmann, or Siemens. Former head of Deutsche Telekom, René Obermann, tells the Handelsblatt: “Jeanette invests in smart personalities rather than in power-point presentations with the typical consulting language.”

The PhD economist knows the importance of communication and the exchange of ideas. Every year in the early summer, she organises a conference called YNow in Heiligenberg Castle, near Lake Constance, overlooking the Swiss Alps. This creates networks that later lead to effective cooperation. Thus, La Famiglia serves as a trusted access platform, creating unique relationships between the old and the new world and creating real, differentiated leverage on capital.

Supporting European Clusters

Before establishing her own venture fund, Jeanette zu Fürstenberg worked for a major European investment fund, a financial institution for the provision of finance to SMEs. Therefore, she is focused on financing young European technology start-ups in their early stages. Its objective is to build bridges between them and the established European industry in order to give both sides new strength and, above all, to create European resilience. 

“If you’re thinking about starting a company in Europe, you need more muscle to tie the ecosystem together. Europe has a distributed talent base across many cities and universities. Compared to the U.S., where you have talent clusters like Silicon Valley, this lower degree of concentration of talent creates a higher bar for creating a densely interconnected ecosystem,” she is quoted in the blog of Applied Intuition, an US vehicle software supplier. 

The successful female risk investor swears European strength. “What excites me is that we are now seeing a lot of talent returning to Europe. While the epicentre for the commercialization of AI is likely still located in the U.S., we are seeing a growing trend of talent coming back to Europe, also because they are eager to build towards European sovereignty and resilience.”

Founder and art Promoter

The 41-year-old, four-time mother is also a founder. With her husband Christian, who runs the family office of the Fürstenbergs, she is engaged with young artists through her foundation. They help with scholarships, workshops, and finance exhibitions. Jeanette zu Fürstenberg is also active at Code.org, a non-profit organisation that aims to “make computer science an elementary part of school education.”

Recently is La Famiglia joining forces with the much larger US investor General Catalyst, which is one of the largest venture capitalists in the USA and has invested in Airbnb and fintech Stripe, among others.”The merger is a step of conviction,” said Jeanette zu Fürstenberg recently to Handelsblatt. The goal is to make La Famiglia, which she manages, more powerful.