Authors: Pietro, Rory and Sitar

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Hey Connect Community,

We’ve kicked off the year by taking a moment to look back and reflect on 2024… And what a year it was.

More Product Founders Joined Connect 😍

As a venture generalist and product specialist fund, we’ve welcomed eight new founding teams across Fintech, Enterprise, AI, Vertical Networks and Consumer. We’re thrilled (and a little proud 😉) that these amazing product founders chose Connect to lead their round!

• Hans, Rita and Ben, who have built Torg: Where retail & wholesale buyers find and connect with 100,000+ verified food & beverage suppliers in Europe.
• Ed and Olivia, co-founders of Tuza: The digital exchange for card acquiring services, starting with transparent price comparison.
• Ed, Spencer and Zack, who’ve built Cloud Capital: Helping companies gain visibility, predictably and control of their cloud spend.
• Phuc, Mikael and Arthur, who are behind Neverless: A crypto investment platform for the masses that came out of stealth mode at the end of 2024.
• Johan and Nino, co-founders of Steep: A BI platform for the modern data stack.
• Teo, Amaury and Nico, co-founders of Ogment: Autonomous AI workforce for HR processes.
• Stealth: A female-founded solution in consumer fintech with awesome PLG and network effects.
• Stealth: A solution rethinking social networks, aiming to do what video did for phone calls, building a better space for groups.

Portfolio Growth 🔥

We’re all in from the start: high conviction, high commitment. We partner with founders as early as possible - often at inception. We're always blown away by the founder journey - going from a deck and a few lines of code to a fully-fledged, breakout business. The momentum in our portfolio throughout 2024 only fuels our excitement for what lies ahead...

We were the first believers and led the Pre-Seed round in Oyster, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world was forced into remote working. In 2024, the company continued its outstanding growth and raised further capital at a $1.2B valuation, confirming its unicorn status, just a few years after launching. Big kudos to Tony and the whole team.

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We were Day Zero Investors in TrueLayer, way back in 2016. Europe’s largest bank-to-bank payments network, TrueLayer experienced fantastic growth in 2024, expanding their offering to e-commerce with customers including RyanAir, Just Eat and many more that will go live this year. Co-founders Francesco and Luca are living proof of what the Product Founder mindset entails - and what it means to obsess about user centricity, whilst also designing for defensibility.

We backed Deepstash in 2020, leading their Seed round. Vlad and Dan were strongly opinionated that the problem people have with learning is not understanding new ideas, but how people take notes and remember them. Their unique insights have led Deepstash to grow a multi-million revenue business that achieved an exceptional 900% YoY growth last year, with their app reaching top 10 in the US app store charts. The best bit is that the team did all this only having raised a Seed round - a huge achievement.

We co-led the Seed round for Aikido, a developer-first, all-in-one security platform, towards the end of 2023, alongside our friends over at Notion. Only nine months later, the team secured $17M in Series A. With its smart bundling approach, dev-centric design, and focus on serving the underserved, the team has achieved 800% YoY growth in 2024. Kudos to the best product founders in G̶h̶e̶n̶t̶ Europe, Willem, Roeland and Felix, who are moving at astonishing venture velocity.

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Introducing the Toggle 👀

In 2024, we evolved our brand and fortified our purpose by doubling down on our core vision: backing product founders who are uncompromisingly determined to win through their products. Their distinct DNA defines and differentiates them from other company builders, which is why they need a venture firm that understands the power of product, aligning with their vision and increasing their odds of success.

‍The Toggle is a symbol that represents how we stay actively connected with founders and help them realize their vision. It’s a perfect reflection of our mission to be the catalysts for the next generation of product founders in the software realm.

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In Good Company 🙌

Being in good company is an essential part of bringing our mission to life, and 2024 was no different. We loved working with both new and familiar VCs on some of our portfolio's follow-on rounds.

From our Product Summit, Built by Few (fka Loved by Many), to our annual meetup at the Llama Bar in Shoreditch, and our chance to disConnect in Italy for our Founder’s Retreat -  we’ve been in good (no, great) company this year.

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A big moment for us in 2024 was when Molten Ventures joined Fund I. Already an LP in our latter funds, we were delighted to extend our partnership with this fantastic team. As seed fund managers, one of our top priorities is creating early liquidity options for our LPs, and in today’s constrained IPO and M&A market, secondary transactions are a way for LPs to capture returns ahead of typical exit timelines.

Here’s to 2025! 🥂

The people we work with continue to inspire us, and we’re more excited than ever about the opportunities ahead. In 2025, we will continue to be product-first champions, empowering product founders across Europe to solve difficult problems on an epic scale.

The Connect Team