Paua Ventures

Christian Buchenau is co-founder, managing director and partner, and has led the firm since its 2010 founding through the rebrand to SquareOne; he is registered as a managing director of SquareOne Management GmbH in Berlin alongside Georg Stockinger. Stockinger is a partner and the second managing director of the management company.

The current partnership also includes Federico Wengi and Felix Plapperer, who was promoted to partner. Below the partner line the team runs lean: Charlotte Baumhauer as investment manager, Pablo Karnbaum as analyst and Niels Denefleh as vice president of operations. The bench is Berlin-based and B2B-native, which matches a strategy of being first money in and then brokering the portfolio's first enterprise customers rather than competing on check size.

Paua Ventures was founded in Berlin in 2010 and now operates as SquareOne, having rebranded from the Paua name; the underlying legal entity remains Paua Ventures Verwaltungs GmbH. Its first institutional fund reached a $45 million first close, with a final close expected at about $65 million.

In June 2022 the firm launched its third fund at EUR 100 million, aimed at pre-seed and seed B2B technology across SaaS, enterprise software, Industry 4.0, robotics and machine learning. It writes EUR 200,000 to EUR 2 million per round and positions itself as the first institutional investor on the cap table, offering portfolio companies a first-customers guarantee that is unusual among European seed funds. Cumulatively the firm reports more than 69 investments. Its most-cited positions are Stripe and Pipedrive from the earlier Paua era, with Wandelbots and Carbon One among the newer SquareOne holdings. There are no SEC Form D filings, consistent with a Germany-domiciled manager raising from European limited partners.