People at Expedite Ventures

We see the current VC landscape as problematic, favoring second and third time founders while neglecting the necessary mentoring and nurturing to make sure new generations of first time founders can emerge. Sometimes, great founders or great ideas are overlooked or do not receive the required attention, because they don‘t fit the „right profile", „aren't there yet“ or simply don’t have the right connections. That‘s where we step in: We favor first-time founders, women and immigrants. We truly think there are way too less women in tech — and we‘d like to contribute to change that. As many VCs in Europe and Angels are being run by business people, they intrinsically often favor e-commerce and service businesses. We find it problematic that tech founders don‘t get the necessary attention and understanding they deserve, because as we all know: „Software eats the world“. Therefore, our club strictly invests solely in software companies. Don’t get us wrong: (Smart) VCs are not our enemies but our friends — to help our ventures at later stages. We embrace cooperation with them and nurture our VC relations all the time. We actively work with them and help nurture companies applying at a VC who are not VC-ready yet: so we expedite them and bring them back into the deal flow of the VC world when it‘s the right time — and might keep a joint board seat, help with portfolio management and Tech Due Diligences to collectively help the ventures to grow further. In the end, we want to truly fulfill the promise many Angels and VCs do (but don‘t keep): We don’t just commit money but we rather behave like a hands-on co-founder — to avoid common pitfalls, may it be on company culture, product, tech, legal setup, or strategic steps. In a nutshell: we actively help founders and companies on their way to become VC-ready, based on fair terms for both sides. With our unique approach, we can help build better and more successful companies by not just committing capital but our know-how.

Thomas Witt

Angel Investor