The estab­lish­ment of an opti­mal investor mix is indeed a process rather than an achieved state and in many cases is never com­pleted, as the opti­mal investor mix changes as a com­pany pro­gresses through var­i­ous devel­op­men­tal phases. In the early stages of a company´s devel­op­ment, when the enter­prise is rapidly devel­op­ing and fre­quently rein­vent­ing itself, it is absolutely nor­mal and usu­ally quite healthy for the investor base to evolve as well.

To achieve an opti­mal investor mix, one key ingre­di­ent is hav­ing an abun­dance of investors from which to select the ideal part­ners. We are con­fi­dent that our net­work of co-investors and our abil­ity to attract new investors to our Investee-Part­ners is a valu­able asset for founders and entre­pre­neurs who part­ner with us. The vast major­ity of our funds require the par­tic­i­pa­tion of pri­vate investors on a pari-passu basis with our invest­ment, and this require­ment has for­tu­itously led to the devel­op­ment of a var­ied and pow­er­ful net­work of pri­vate co-investors, includ­ing other insti­tu­tional ven­ture investors, fam­ily offices, busi­ness angels, cor­po­rates, etc.

Because bm|t is for­tu­nate to have this broad and diverse set of co-investors, entre­pre­neurs who part­ner with us can gain access to investors who offer a healthy mix of cap­i­tal, expe­ri­ence, advice, addi­tional net­works, resilience and ver­sa­til­ity. We have found that a key ele­ment in main­tain­ing a healthy investor mix is includ­ing investors who have diverse sources of cap­i­tal and vary­ing invest­ment philosophies.

While hav­ing investors with dif­fer­ing under­ly­ing views or man­dates can be chal­leng­ing and stren­u­ous, it is gen­er­ally an advan­tage for a com­pany, espe­cially when the investor mix is struc­tured and bal­anced appro­pri­ately. For exam­ple, we believe it is extremely wise for entre­pre­neurs, even those who are able to attract suf­fi­cient pri­vate cap­i­tal at an early stage, to have an intel­li­gent mix of pri­vate and pub­lic cap­i­tal. Impor­tantly, these two investor groups often have a low cor­re­la­tion in their access to capital.

Gen­er­ally, pri­vate investors are less vul­ner­a­ble to reg­u­la­tory or polit­i­cally-dri­ven changes than pub­lic funds. Con­versely, pub­lic investors are less likely to reduce their invest­ment appetite (and in some instances actu­ally increase it) when broader macro­eco­nomic chal­lenges emerge.

The Corona pan­demic over the past two years has, for many of our Investee-Part­ners, cer­tainly demon­strated the value of hav­ing pub­lic investors, as bm|t was able to access addi­tional cap­i­tal in the form of two new funds (Thüringer Zukun­ft­fonds & Thüringer Zukun­ft­fonds II) in the midst of a cri­sis period. We man­aged these funds with a very sim­i­lar approach to our stan­dard funds, and were active in deploy­ing cap­i­tal to ensure our Investee-Part­ners´ promis­ing devel­op­ments were not unduly com­pro­mised due to the pandemic.

In fact, Q4 was a remark­ably pro­lific quar­ter of invest­ment activ­ity for us and capped off a record-break­ing year, which we detailed in the fol­low­ing press release:

› A record year 2021 for bm|t’s Investee Partners

We look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing to work with all our val­ued Investee-Part­ners and Co-Investors in the impor­tant quest of estab­lish­ing an opti­mal investor mix that cat­alyzes and pro­pels busi­ness suc­cess,

Your bm|t Team