Visionaries Club Slims to 2 Partners for AI-Native Fund
28 Jul 2026
German venture firm Visionaries Club, founded in 2019, is restructuring into a GP-led firm ahead of its next fund, expected later in 2024. The investment team is narrowing to two lead partners — Rob Lacher and Venkat Kondragunta — as the firm repositions itself as a more AI-native VC.
What's changing
Robert Jäckle and Marton Sarkadi Nagy are stepping down from their full-time partner roles as part of the shift. Meanwhile, senior partner Judith Dada joined portfolio company Langdock as co-CEO last month but will remain a senior partner at Visionaries — an arrangement that keeps her operator experience connected to the firm's network.
Lacher, who will lead investing going forward, framed the move as a response to changing founder expectations. He said founders increasingly want direct access to people with frontier operating experience, prioritizing speed, distribution, geopolitical connections, policy influence, operator access, and compute — rather than a larger team structure. He also said AI now performs the standard diligence work that VC teams previously built their analytical edge around.
Visionaries Club has backed startups including Lovable, Black Forest Labs, and N8n.
Part of a broader pattern
The restructuring lands amid similar moves across European VC. Austrian firm Speedinvest cut 10% of its team earlier this year. And AI-native competitor QuantumLight — founded by Revolut's Nik Storonsky — has built a proprietary model tracking 700,000 VC-backed companies, closed its first fund at $250 million in May last year, and is reportedly targeting $500 million for its second fund. The report cites QuantumLight as a comparable example of AI-powered firms competing on tooling rather than headcount.
What's unclear
Several details remain undisclosed: the target size of Visionaries Club's next fund, the specific reasons behind Jäckle's and Sarkadi Nagy's departures beyond the restructuring itself, exactly how "AI-native" investing will be operationalized in practice, and the firm's total headcount before and after the cuts. No comment from the departing partners is included in the available reporting.
Why founders should care
For founders raising in Europe, this signals a plausible shift toward leaner, partner-led VC structures where AI handles routine diligence and human bandwidth is reserved for high-value judgment calls, operator connections, and speed. If this trend continues, founders may increasingly interact with smaller, more senior teams — likely gaining faster decisions and more direct partner access, though possibly at the cost of the broader diligence and portfolio-support bandwidth that larger teams provide. It's also reasonably likely that AI-native positioning becomes a competitive differentiator among funds, meaning founders may want to ask prospective investors directly how AI tools are integrated into their diligence process — and how much human judgment still sits behind the numbers.
Risks to watch
- A smaller partner team could mean less bandwidth for due diligence and ongoing portfolio support.
- The departures of senior partners may reflect internal strategic disagreements or restructuring pressure not fully disclosed.
- Heavy reliance on AI for diligence risks introducing blind spots if not paired with sufficient human judgment.
- Rising competition from AI-native firms like QuantumLight could pressure smaller funds to further differentiate or consolidate.
Sources differ on the underlying reasons for the partner departures, but no conflicting facts were found across the single source provided.