Earlybird Digital West Welcomes 3 Partners in the Investment & Investor Relations Teams
Earlybird Digital West is excited to announce three new Partners: Andre Retterath, Paul Klemm, and Vincenzo Narciso. Each delivers a strong focus that elevates our investment and investor relations team, enabling us to back extraordinary founders and startups. In welcoming them to the Partnership, we highlight their backgrounds and unique contributions to our firm’s success and evolution.
As an active VC, we ensure our investment team stays highly involved with our portfolio companies. We take this quite seriously and Andre and Paul have demonstrated this type of dedication to our Digital West portfolio. We are delighted to promote Andre and Paul from within, both of whom have spent several years with the firm.
Dr. Andre Retterath focuses on enterprise software with a particular interest in developer, data and productivity tools, alongside AI-centric products and robotics. Since joining in 2018, Andre has led investments out of Earlybird Digital West and serves on the boards of next-gen AI powerhouse Aleph Alpha, industrial inspection platform Energy Robotics and synthetic data company Mostly AI, among others. Moreover, Andre played an important role in our investments in digital insurer Getsafe and static code analysis company DeepCode, which got acquired via a share deal by Snyk.
Andre conducted his PhD on the topic of “Machine Learning and the Value of Data in Venture Capital’’ at the Technical University of Munich and has been leading the development of Earlybird’s data-driven sourcing and screening platform “Eagle Eye”. He has become a key opinion leader, writing and speaking extensively about how an augmented approach to data in venture benefits both startups and investors.
Since joining Earlybird in 2017, Paul Klemm has had a strong focus on product-led B2B SaaS companies, both on infrastructure and application side. Among other portfolio companies, Paul has been supporting the founders and serving on the boards of messaging company HiveMQ, cloud engineering simulation company Simscale, Remberg, a startup building an extended customer relationship management system and edyoucated, a platform for skill-based learning and development. In the course of his regional coverage of the Nordics, it was Paul who connected with open source cloud data platform Aiven back at Slush in Helsinki before their Series A, accompanying the founder team along their impressive journey, most recently marked by an Series D valuing them as a triple unicorn.
Together with Fabian Heilemann, Paul co-coined the phrase “The Power of and,” signifying the potential intersection of financial returns and positive environmental impact. Paul spearheads Earlybird climate impact initiatives and has become increasingly active in SpaceTech, supporting European champion Isar Aerospace. Paul has been an extremely adept investor with wide and deep deal-sourcing. He is a closing expert — providing coaching and enabling the Digital West Investment team to continue developing.
As of June 2022, Vincenzo Narciso has joined the Digital West team as a Partner, responsible for Investor Relations. Vincenzo brings over 20 years of industry experience both as a Limited Partner and as an Investor Relations professional at several blue chip alternative firms including The Carlyle Group, Rhone, UBS and Adveq/Schroeders. While new to the team at Earlybird, Vincenzo has known our Co-Founders & Partners Hendrik Brandis and Christian Nagel since 2005 when he was responsible for the global Venture Capital program at Swiss Re. Vincenzo’s industry expertise, deep network, and strategic leadership skills mark the beginning of a new exciting chapter in the development of the Earlybird Digital West franchise.
With these promising changes in place to bolster our core teams, Fabian Heilemann transitions into a Venture Partner role, contributing to Earlybird’s deal flow and network sharing. Fabian is now fully focusing on his impact investing activities.
Earlybird’s Digital West team has now expanded to 31 people and recently opened an office in Paris, France. Despite a sentiment of ‘holding back’ affecting some investors, the team at Earlybird Digital West continues to deploy capital in support of current and new portfolio companies. We just completed the first close of the Growth Opportunity V Fund which has a target of 300 Million EUR, deploying more support for Aiven, Getsafe and Upvest. This shows our active commitment to later stage investments. We also continue to invest in promising new startups, on the back of the recent closing of our DWES Fund VII at the cap of 350 Million EUR — identifying and backing early stage winners across Western Europe.
Here’s to more growth ahead at Earlybird! 🌱
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