Skåne Startups had the pleasure of speaking to Michael Rager, Managing Director at DTCP in the Growth Equity team about how to raise growth capital.
DTCP is an autonomous investment management group investing in growth equity and digital infrastructure. The firm has raised more than $1.0bn from corporate and institutional investors. We believe that the convergence of communication networks and devices with the internet is creating more wealth, disrupting more businesses, and unleashing more innovation than any force in the history of technology. We invest behind our belief of the great benefit to society of ubiquitous connectivity and a fully digitized society.
DTCP is an autonomous investment management group, majority-owned by its management team and backed by Deutsche Telekom. The firm has raised more than $1.0 billion from corporate and institutional investors to invest in growth equity and digital infrastructure.
DTCP’s growth equity team is a global SaaS investor. They invest out of the Fund II Vintage 2018, which is their second fund of $350 million. DTCP growth equity invests up to $30 million in venture and growth capital in predominantly B2B SaaS companies in Europe, USA, Israel and South Korea. In each of these regions, they have local teams to ensure that they provide the best means to connect their entrepreneurs in the relevant ecosystem there.
They are very proud of their portfolio, both the ones that have already exited, as well as the ones that they are still working with. Typically, DTCP likes to get engaged at Series B or later and can invest all the way through the pre-IPO round. For example, LeanIX is a company from Germany in which they invested in Series B in 2017, whereas for Fastly, they led the pre-IPO round back in 2018.
Our featured investor for this event is Michael Rager who holds a diploma in business economics from the University of Regensburg. He joined DTCP from Bauer Venture Partners. He has helped build a behavior retargeting company in Germany, called Xplosion Interactive, in the mid-2000s and was the Senior Manager Product & Business Development. They scaled Xplosion Interactive to roughly 100 people and got acquired by Interactive Media, a Deutsche Telekom company. The company is still up and running.
In this Investor Fireside Chat, Michael shared his knowledge on how startups can get funding outside the big hubs, what an entrepreneur should consider when she does investor due diligence, when and why you should approach a VC early in the process. Michael said that:
When I started in VC, it was a built custom that companies came to your office to pitch. It's been a while. Because as you say, there is no shortage of potential funding. Good companies are aware of that.
He also talked about DTCP’s Flightpath valuation framework, what DTCP offers as a VC, and what they expect to see in a startup to invest.
As a VC, you try to build a relationship with the company you invest in and with the founder for a longer period of time. If the founder said I'm going to reach that target within 12 months, and you talk to him 12 months later, you can see how close s/he is actually. So you get a feeling for how reliable is that planning.
The discussion was hosted by Martin Backlund Business Developer in Invest in Skåne, Erik Larsson, Portfolio Manager and Tech Investments at LU Holding AB, Fredrik Josefsson, Head of Entrepreneurs and High Growth at SEB, and Zhenni Liang Managing Director of Skåne Startups.
During the Investors Fireside Chat, 6 startups from Sweden pitched to DTCP.
Vanja Samuelsson, Founder and CEO at Qoitech, creates the most effective developer tools for energy optimization of battery driven products. They've been on the market since July 2017, formed as a spin-off of Sony Mobile with happy customers from 40+ countries, from makers to Fortune 500 companies.
Ulf Gerold, CEO of Hyker Security, a majority owned spin-out from Saab Ventures. They believe in protecting data rather than infrastructure over the whole lifecycle. True Full Lifecycle Encryption is enabled by our technology which could be built into IoT solutions, web applications and other solutions where trust and integrity is of importance in a cloud environment.
Stefan Borg, CEO of SiB Solutions, was founded by a number of experts in logistics and technology who for more than 25 years saw the same problems repeated in all companies and logistics tasks. By combining proven technology, such as video, with cutting-edge technology such as AI, IIoT and intelligent video analysis, we have made it possible to both remedy and prevent these problems.
Rasmus Persson, Co-Founder & CEO of Homepal AB, a data platform that collects data from different systems, transform and makes it consumable in your chosen software. Homepal's vision is to simplify innovation through accesible data. It doesn't matter what technical skills you have, you should be able to use data regardless. With Homepal, you don't have to worry about data anymore
Johan Nilsson, CEO of Connectitude, an AI-based SaaS that makes after-sales profitable for industrial machine builders and OEMs to secure sustainable innovation, by brickwalling pirates through loyalty. A connected world requires a new attitude - #connectitude
Anders Oskarsson, CEO of Abstraktor, it offers a radical new approach to testing complex systems and functionality with protocol-based communication.
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