Contrary

Breega is one of the fastest growing VC funds in Europe with more than €500M AUM. We built Breega to provide founders with the help we wish we’d had. Breega propels pioneering and purpose-driven founders from idea into impact. We closed our first fund in 2015 and now have €500m AUM and 70 trailblazing portfolio companies. Crafted for founders by founders, we built Breega to provide start-ups with the help we wish we'd had. And we’ve created an investment proposition that’s purposefully designed. We call it full stack funding: providing capital and connections, expertise and experience, support and solidarity for entrepreneurs at every step of their journey. We invest across Europe through our 3 offices in Paris, London and Barcelona, focusing on pre-seed to Series B stage. We believe in a future where tech entrepreneurship has catalysed universal prosperity – so we decided to build a different kind of VC. Build by Founders. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we’ve been through the highs and lows of founding, failing, fundraising and flourishing. We built Breega to provide founders with the help we wish we’d had. For Founders. We wanted to “Bridge the Equity and Experience Gap” (hence the name Breega) – and fulfill the lack of operational expertise we saw in VC at that time. Breega began investing in 2015. We now have 70+ trailblazing startups in our portfolio. Our purpose today. To propel pioneering and purpose-driven founders from idea to impact.

In the start-up ecosystem, talent is everywhere but opportunity is not. Our mission is to correct that imbalance and level the playing field for founders in unusual places. We get involved: Whether it’s recruiting top talent, finding new investors or introducing potential customers, we directly assist founders with their most important priorities. We provide a platform: When you face a problem, it is the best to get the advice of someone who has been there. Over the years, we were fortunate to have met several of these people who managed to overcome serious hurdles We invest from experience: Our team are proven founders and operators in their own right, who bring that experience to the companies we back. We share the success: By distributing part of the overall fund profit, we ensure that when one of our companies succeeds, all of them benefit.

“10x Founders” is a new and innovative European venture company backing early-stage entrepreneurs on their journey of building global companies. Our partners are a team of very successful serial entrepreneurs and accomplished investors with an outstanding investment track record. We genuinely enjoy and are motivated by giving back to, supporting, and collaborating with entrepreneurs and their teams to create global leaders. At the same time, we have the ambition to establish a creative new venture fund that helps to bring European start-ups and entrepreneurship to the forefront of the European and global economy.

A check from us means your team buildout and access to A+ operator mentors has been accelerated in a significant way. We accelerate your trajectory in three specific ways. HANDS-ON RECRUITING PARTNER: We don’t just make one-off intros. We run searches, scope roles, and increase the relentlessness of our CEOs' recruiting game. INTROS TO TOP OPERATORS: We curate intros to best-in-class company builders as sounding boards, mentors, advisors to our founders. These are the most impactful operators of our time. INTROS TO TOP INVESTORS: A check from us means that you're one text away from access to the senior most partners at top Series A firms. Our relationships are backed by a decade+ of playing with the best in silicon valley. We aim to be the most impactful venture partner on your cap table. We don't take board seats and we think VC advice is way overrated. OUR ETHOS: Move the needle Get out of the way

Positive Sum helps founders build their companies and tell their stories. We devote time to meeting the most talented entrepreneurs and investors in the world, and we strategically deploy our network on behalf of our portfolio companies. What we look for in companies The creation of new businesses, especially those fueled by technology, can lead to Positive Sum outcomes: where companies, customers, and investors all win together. Our team searches for such companies, with the following criteria guiding our way. Life’s Work: We look for founders doing their “life’s work.” We always ask how the founding team came upon the problem they are solving and assess the alignment between that problem and their own path in life. We find that these founders tend to be driven and obsessive, they tend to build domain knowledge quickly, and they tend to be disagreeable, with their own clear point of view for how things ought to be. We love these qualities. Ultimately, we find that founders doing their “life’s work” become magnets for talent and have the perseverance necessary to survive and thrive in difficult periods. Synchronized Team: Speed is an unbelievable advantage for young companies. Teams that communicate well ship products faster. We look for smart and efficient team communication, chemistry, and the right mix of business and technical talent. Market Signal: We can evaluate teams directly, but markets help us evaluate products. We look for clear signals from customers that a given idea or product is valuable. We deeply respect a market signal even if we don’t yet understand what is behind it, but then seek to understand the customer’s motivation in a deep way. A Compounding Customer: The question “will customers use this product often, and will the product get better and more valuable as they do?” is at the center of our investigation. Products that get embedded in their user’s lives or workflows tend to be more defensible. Compounding has to start somewhere, and our experience suggests that companies focused on “one thing” early on maximize the odds they can do more things in the future, because the customer grows to love them for the original solution. Profit Persistence: We want to invest in companies that can earn enormous profits over time. The odds of this happening go up when 1) a business demonstrates (or we can foresee) positive unit economics, 2) the business model can scale with demand and 3) the product gets harder for others to copy as it grows. We look for all three components. Timing, Alignment, and Impact: We focus intently on why now is the right time to build this company. New technologies, changes in regulation, cultural shifts, and other enabling factors create opportunities for unnatural growth in a business. We always look for alignment between a company and the world at large. We also want great alignment between our two teams. We hope to have decades-long relationships with the companies we support, so the fit between Positive Sum and the founding team is paramount. We make fewer investments than many comparable funds so that we can be closer with portfolio companies and spend more time with each of them.

As a venture house, our mission is to clear the path for founders who build companies that matter. Our hybrid setup, comprising PSV Foundry, PSV Lab, and two unique venture funds, PSV Tech and PSV Hafnium, sets us free from adhering to a singular method. Rather we rethink existing ways and models to maximise our impact beyond any individual firm or investment. Together, we can punch above our weight.