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