Fly Ventures

Fly Ventures is run by two managing directors, named in the German commercial register entry for Fly Ventures Management GmbH: Gabriel Matuschka and Fredrik Bergenlid. The firm keeps a deliberately small partnership and publishes no larger bench, consistent with a first-check fund that writes the earliest institutional cheque and leaves subsequent rounds to others.

The stated mandate is unusually pointed about what the pair look for: founders everyone wants to meet but nobody dares to invest in, working on problems that are technically hard, commercially non-trivial or largely unmapped. In practice that has meant backing management teams at Wayve in embodied AI for self-driving, 9fin in debt market intelligence, DeepL in machine translation, Parloa in voice AI, Wandelbots and NavVis in industrial robotics and spatial capture, Orbital Industries, and zymtrace in GPU and CPU workload optimization. The firm operates from Monbijouplatz 2 in Berlin and invests across Europe rather than from a single national base.

Fly Ventures raises in Europe, so its capital does not appear in SEC Reg D filings: an EDGAR search for the name returns no matching filer. The management entity is Fly Ventures Management GmbH, registered at Monbijouplatz 2 in Berlin-Mitte and recorded at the Charlottenburg local court under HRB 172105 B with VAT ID DE 304742182.

Its most consequential limited partner is public rather than private. Fly Ventures is supported by InnovFin Equity, with financial backing from the European Union under the Horizon 2020 financial instruments and the European Fund for Strategic Investments, set up under the Investment Plan for Europe to widen access to financing inside the EU. That anchor fits the firm's remit as a first-check investor in technically hard European companies.

Fly measures itself on follow-on rather than fund size, stating that its companies have raised more than $3 billion in subsequent funding and that over 60 percent raise a follow-on round from a US or tier-one European firm. Recent marks include Wayve's Series D at an $8.6 billion valuation, 9fin's $170 million Series C at $1.3 billion, Orbital's $50 million Series B led by Plural, and GitButler's $17 million Series A led by a16z.