We at bm|t  have also joined the ranks of many (if not all) VCs in com­mu­ni­cat­ing clearly about this changed envi­ron­ment to our Investee-Part­ners and work­ing closely with them to assess appro­pri­ate steps and the best paths for­ward. How­ever, we cer­tainly should all remain cog­nizant not to let fear itself pre­vent us from achiev­ing impact­ful progress and con­vert­ing on value-cre­at­ing opportunities.

In many ways we feel some­what (although cer­tainly not entirely) insu­lated from the imme­di­ate dif­fi­cul­ties many are expe­ri­enc­ing and believe that the start-up ecosys­tem in Thürin­gen will, for many rea­sons, prove to be quite robust rel­a­tive to other inno­va­tion invest­ment ecosys­tems. Firstly, we have not rid­den the big ven­ture wave of the last 10–15 years so high as most of the well-known inno­va­tion geo­gra­phies. The val­u­a­tions and the round sizes never over-extended so that the often exis­ten­tial threat of larger down-rounds is not pro­nounced here. Sec­ondly, the Thürin­gen inno­va­tion ecosys­tem is very focused on B2B mar­kets such that large mar­ket­ing expen­di­tures, that may now prove to have much lower impact than was orig­i­nally planned, are nearly non-exis­tent. Fur­ther­more, the region´s focus on deep-tech gen­er­ally has been accom­pa­nied by longer-term plan­ning and con­ser­v­a­tive, largely tech­no­log­i­cal-mile­stone-based cor­po­rate devel­op­ment, so that very few com­pa­nies are caught off-bal­ance by the recent macro developments.

With gen­er­ally smaller financ­ing rounds (due to lower burn-rates) focused largely on value-cre­at­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments, which often have a spe­cial strate­gic appeal to longer-term focused investors (includ­ing fam­ily offices and cor­po­rates), we believe Thüringen´s top inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies will con­tinue to receive the nec­es­sary fund­ing to progress and grow in most cases. In fact, as you can read in this Newslet­ter, our Investee-Part­ners closed sev­eral seven-fig­ure plus rounds in Q2 – a strong val­i­da­tion of this view.

We would like to con­clude with an impor­tant acknowl­edg­ment: no mat­ter the state of the world, and in some cases dri­ven even faster by tur­bu­lence, the need for inno­va­tion in order to con­tinue to advance human­ity and pro­tect the planet will remain extremely high. In this essen­tial way, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

Your, con­tin­u­ing to push for­ward, bm|t Team