Dozens of executives from European tech scaleups have backed a new venture firm built on the thesis that people who have scaled billion-dollar companies know which founders can do it again.
For years, the criticism of European venture capital has been structural: too few firms willing to write large cheques, and too little operational experience on the other side of the term sheet. A new fund announced this week is trying to address the second part of that problem.
Operator Circle, a newly formed venture firm, has launched with backing from dozens of senior executives who have built and scaled European tech companies, among them Enzo Wälchli, the former chief commercial officer at Swiss robotics scaleup ANYbotics, who joins as general partner.
The fund’s thesis is that operators, people who have lived through the specific chaos of growing a European tech company from Series B to exit, are better positioned than career VCs to identify which founders have the tools to build at decacorn scale.
The exact fund size was not disclosed at the time of publication.
The operator-to-VC transition is not new in the US, where firms like Andreessen Horowitz built their early reputation partly on the credibility of former founders and executives on the partnership. In Europe, the model has taken longer to gain traction, partly because the exit ecosystem that produces experienced operators at scale is younger, Europe’s first generation of decacorns only emerged in the last decade.
What Operator Circle is betting on is that this generation is now large enough to matter. The executives backing the fund bring direct experience from companies that navigated the specific challenges of scaling in fragmented European markets: multilingual sales, multi-regulatory compliance, and a talent ecosystem that, while improving, still cannot match Silicon Valley’s depth in every sector.
Whether operators make better investors than analysts is a thesis the data does not cleanly support in either direction, plenty of great operators have made mediocre investors, and vice versa. What the model does provide is pattern recognition at close range: the ability to recognise the organisational stress fractures that appear at 200 employees but not at 20, and to spot the founders who have thought through those problems before they arrive.
Operator Circle’s launch is a bet that the right guide through it looks less like a partner in a suit than someone who has already made the climb.
