10x Founders: A Deep Dive into Its Founding Team, Capital Network, Investment Portfolio, and Influence on Europe’s Startup Ecosystem

1. The core conclusion: what exactly is 10x Founders?

10x Founders is not a conventional VC firm built around a single celebrity founder. It is better understood as an institutionalized early-stage investment platform created by a group of European serial entrepreneurs, super angels, and former technology-company CEOs. Its core asset is not the judgment of one investor, but the combination of entrepreneurial experience, historical angel portfolios, Europe–U.S. relationships, co-investor networks, and founder-to-founder trust accumulated by several partners. When the firm publicly launched in 2022, its seven founding partners were Andreas Etten, Andrej Henkler, Claudius Jablonka, Felix Haas, Jan Becker, Jan Reichelt, and Robert Wuttke. Its first fund was approximately €160 million and was backed by more than 200 European entrepreneurs.

10x describes the model as “Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur.” That phrase explains the structure more accurately than the generic label “founder-friendly VC.” Many of its LPs are entrepreneurs; its investment partners are entrepreneurs; sourcing relies heavily on entrepreneurs and angels; and portfolio support is provided through entrepreneurs, CEOs, specialists, and other investors. In effect, 10x is trying to turn one of the least scalable assets in venture capital—a high-quality personal network—into institutional infrastructure.

As of August 2026, 10x describes itself as a “network-powered early-stage investor” connecting more than 300 entrepreneurs, VCs, and investors. Its website also says that the broader 10x founder ecosystem has accumulated more than 350 startup investments over the past decade, while its About page refers to more than 350 startups and over 700 founders. These figures include substantial pre-10x personal angel activity and investments associated with the broader 10x ecosystem; they should not be interpreted as 350 investments made by the €160 million Fund I itself.

The cleanest way to understand its asset base is therefore to separate three layers.

The first is fund assets: Fund I, Fund II, their equity positions, follow-on rights, and eventual exit proceeds.

The second is historical investment capital: the founders’ previous investments in companies such as Adyen, Delivery Hero, TIER, and Volocopter, many of which predate 10x Founders.

The third is influence capital: more than 200 entrepreneur backers, roughly 50 super angels/fellows, a 300+ member network, co-investor relationships, events such as Bits & Pretzels, and the 10x Founders Summit. This layer may ultimately be harder to replicate than the brand or website itself.

2. The firm did not begin from zero: its real prehistory is “entrepreneur → super angel → VC”

10x Founders did not suddenly materialize in 2021. Its real prehistory lies in figures such as Andreas Etten, Felix Haas, Jan Becker, and Robert Wuttke using proceeds and credibility from earlier entrepreneurial careers to reinvest in the next generation of technology companies, eventually forming the broader 10x Group super-angel ecosystem. The firm itself summarizes this evolution as “from entrepreneurs to super angels to early-stage investors.”

That trajectory matters. The conventional venture-capital career path is often finance or consulting → investment analyst → partner. Many of the central 10x figures instead followed a path of operating companies → founding companies → serving as CEO → exiting → angel investing → managing institutional capital. Consequently, their claimed differentiation is not financial engineering but firsthand experience with recruiting, fundraising, product failure, international expansion, boards, acquisitions, and subsequent startups. The firm's own website explicitly acknowledges that some ventures built by its team failed while others became highly successful.

Around April 2021, the seven founders began systematically investing through what became the 10x Founders structure. By the time the €160 million fund was publicly announced in May 2022, it had already completed roughly 28 investments with approximately 220 co-investors. The fund had therefore been investing and testing the network for about a year before its public launch.

The capital base was distinctive. €160 million was a substantial size for a newly public European pre-seed/seed/Series A fund, while the marketing anchor was not one giant financial institution but more than 200 entrepreneurs pooling capital. Sifted framed the logic well: Europe had produced a growing population of successful technology founders with liquidity, and pooling their money created far greater firepower and access to deals than isolated angel investing.

The timeline can be compressed as follows.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Etten, Wuttke, and Becker entered the first generation of European internet businesses through Lycos, Scout24, and online dating, while Haas gravitated toward software entrepreneurship and Reichelt toward research software.

During the 2000s and 2010s, companies such as Amiando, be2, Mendeley, and Scout24/FriendScout24 scaled or exited, allowing several founders to become increasingly active angels.

During the 2010s, new nodes emerged: IDnow, Ada Health, enmacc, Kopernio, Leblon Capital, Plug and Play Munich, and Bits & Pretzels. What had begun as individual professional relationships evolved into a multidimensional entrepreneurial network.

In 2021, seven founders institutionalized those angel networks as 10x Founders.

In 2022, the approximately €160 million Fund I was publicly launched.

In 2024, founding GP Claudius Jablonka left to join deep-tech investor Leitmotif.

In 2025, 10x began the first closing of Fund II, and Rupert Schäfer stated at year-end that the second fund had already made 13 new investments.

By 2026, Fund II and its investment categories were formally disclosed in 10x’s legal documentation, demonstrating that the organization had progressed from a seven-super-angel coalition into a more institutionalized second-generation VC platform.

3. Family and early-life background: public evidence points more clearly to an early position in Europe’s digital economy than to family wealth

Reliable public information on the parents, family wealth, family businesses, or exact social class of the seven founders is limited. The available English-language record focuses overwhelmingly on education, operating careers, entrepreneurship, and investing; it would therefore be inappropriate to characterize the group as wealthy heirs, conventional middle-class founders, or entirely self-made without stronger evidence.

What can be established is that several of them entered Europe’s internet economy unusually early. Etten was already active in the internet industry in the 1990s; Wuttke moved from Bertelsmann to Lycos Europe and experienced its 2000 IPO; Becker also began at Lycos before Scout24; Haas developed a strong interest in software, engineering, and aviation; and Reichelt identified product opportunities in the inefficient workflow of researchers dealing with large quantities of academic literature.

The most verifiable common formative factor is therefore historical rather than familial. Collectively, the founders experienced several successive technological eras: Web 1.0, European internet platforms, SaaS/mobile, digital identity and health technology, and eventually AI/deep tech. Their investing approach is the product of several technology cycles rather than one boom, and that long operating history has become a central element of the 10x brand.

4. Education: a mix of engineering, economics, sociology, history, information systems, and entrepreneurship

Felix Haas has one of the clearest technical backgrounds. He studied at ETH Zurich and Stanford and earned an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich. His publicly stated interests include software design and aviation. That technical foundation helps explain a career moving from online event software at Amiando to digital identity at IDnow rather than purely media-oriented entrepreneurship.

Jan Becker studied economics in Freiburg and Paris. At the same time, he competed at a professional athletic level and became a ten-time German gymnastics champion. More significant than the sporting anecdote is the operational consistency that followed: Lycos → Scout24 → CEO of FriendScout24 → Ada Health/enmacc.

Robert Wuttke has an unusually broad academic profile. He studied in Hanover, Trento, Bielefeld, Paris, and at MIT and holds a PhD in Sociology and a Master’s degree in History. His professional career nevertheless moved through Bertelsmann, Lycos, Benchmark Capital, and online dating—an archetypal first-generation European internet-management profile rather than the computer-science-founder template common today.

Jan Reichelt studied Business Administration at WHU, the University of Bath, and LUISS Rome, as well as Business Information Systems at the University of Cologne. Mendeley was motivated by the difficulty researchers faced managing large collections of PDFs, citations, and shared knowledge, and Reichelt’s career repeatedly returned to information retrieval, knowledge work, research software, and digital workflow infrastructure.

Claudius Jablonka’s educational history is closely tied to technology-entrepreneurship education. German startup sources report that he studied Management & Technology, spent time at UC Berkeley, and later completed doctoral work at LMU Munich on startup internationalization strategy. More importantly, he was deeply involved in CDTM, the interdisciplinary Technology Management program supported by TUM and LMU Munich, whose curriculum emphasizes trend research, product development, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Public sources conflict on Andrej Henkler’s education. Crunchbase and NFX identify Sciences Po, while a 2026 startup-investor database lists WHU. The exact educational record is therefore inconsistent in public sources / cannot currently be confirmed. What is far clearer is his later role building Leblon Capital and investing across U.S. and European technology, particularly deep tech.

Andreas Etten’s public record contains extensive operating and investing history but much less systematic information on formal degrees. For understanding his career, his experience at BCG and with Scout24, Online Personals Group, Ada, enmacc, and FLEX Capital is substantially more informative.

English Translation: The Seven Founders, Their Companies, and the Network of Assets

5. Andreas Etten: the figure who most resembles a serial company builder turned capital allocator

Etten did not begin as a venture capitalist. Before joining BCG, he had already started a fashion-trading business in Italy and France, after which he entered the internet industry in the 1990s. His subsequent operating history includes Online Personals Group, FriendScout24/Scout24, Ada Health, Market Makers, and a period as chairman of ImmobilienScout24 from 2001 to 2004.

A recurring theme in his entrepreneurial career is digital transaction infrastructure. Online dating, marketplaces, digital health, energy trading, and software may appear unrelated at the sector level, but each moves inefficient offline information or transactions into software-enabled platforms. 10x characterizes his interests as marketplaces, paid on-demand models, digitized value chains, SaaS, and enabling technologies.

Etten later co-founded enmacc, a digital platform for professional OTC energy trading, and became involved in creating FLEX Capital, which is not primarily an early-stage VC but a private-equity investor focused on profitable German software and internet Mittelstand companies. His capital-allocation career therefore spans startup equity → venture investing → growth/buyout private equity.

10x states that before co-founding the firm, Etten had made more than 100 digital and technology startup investments since 2007 and had experienced over 30 exits. Those figures represent his personal historical record rather than Fund I performance, but they explain his central role in the relationship architecture of 10x.

Within the organization, Etten is therefore less a media-oriented celebrity GP than a link between serial company building, corporate governance, mature-software investing, and early-stage angel capital.

6. Felix Haas: the strongest combination of technical founder, event platform, and ecosystem connector

Haas first established himself as a software entrepreneur. His early flagship company, Amiando, developed online event-management and ticketing software; he served as founder and CEO before the company was sold to XING. He later became co-founder and Executive Chairman of identity-verification company IDnow.

IDnow is an important part of Haas’s economic and strategic position outside 10x. The company became a significant European identity-verification platform and was backed by institutional investors including Corsair Capital. In March 2025, IDnow announced that Corsair was increasing its previous minority investment into a strategic majority investment; Haas was still publicly identified as Co-Founder and Executive Chairman.

Haas is therefore not simply a former entrepreneur who has completely migrated into VC. He continues to occupy three roles simultaneously: company founder/governance figure, venture investor, and ecosystem organizer.

His other major influence asset is Bits & Pretzels. 10x identifies him as Host & Chairman of the event, while the firm uses the Bits & Pretzels VIP lounge as one of its annual community-building environments. It is better understood as dealflow infrastructure than as a simple conference side project: founders, investors, and entrepreneurs repeatedly meet in a high-density offline setting that reinforces the 10x relationship graph.

Haas has also advised the German Vice-Chancellor on the Young Digital Economy and was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. His contribution to 10x therefore combines technical-founder credibility, policy access, a major founder event, and European startup connectivity.

7. Jan Becker and Robert Wuttke: two archetypal routes from European Web 1.0 operators to super angels

Jan Becker began his career at Lycos Europe, later joined Scout24, and became CEO of FriendScout24. That period matters because Scout24 was one of the defining platforms of early German internet commerce. Becker’s subsequent involvement in Ada Health, Online Personals Group, and enmacc retained the same broad pattern of platforms and digitized industry workflows.

He co-founded and invested in Ada Health and has served on the boards of OPG and enmacc, which he also co-founded. Compared with Haas, Becker has a lower public-media profile and more closely resembles a classic operator-investor, combining operating experience, boards, company formation, and investing.

Robert Wuttke followed a different path: large corporation → first-generation internet company → exposure to elite U.S. venture capital → startup CEO → super angel. He began at Bertelsmann, rapidly became Managing Director for DACH at Lycos Europe, experienced its 2000 IPO, later became an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital, and then co-founded online dating company be2, where he served as CEO for approximately ten years.

The Benchmark period is particularly significant. It allowed Wuttke to see companies simultaneously from the perspective of a European operator and a top-tier Silicon Valley venture firm. 10x says he subsequently spent substantial time in Silicon Valley and sourced roughly 60 angel deals for the 10x ecosystem.

His practical role within 10x is therefore closest to a bridge between transatlantic deal sourcing and long-term super-angel experience.

8. Jan Reichelt, Claudius Jablonka, and Andrej Henkler: three complementary sources of network advantage

Jan Reichelt’s defining startup is Mendeley. The platform addressed literature management, citations, paper sharing, and researcher collaboration and built a large academic-user community. Elsevier/Reed Elsevier acquired Mendeley in 2013; press reports at the time said it had around 2.3 million users. The purchase price was never uniformly confirmed by the parties; reports ranged as high as roughly £65 million, so a precise sale value should not be treated as established fact.

After the Mendeley era, Reichelt co-founded Kopernio with Ben Kaube, aiming to give researchers legal one-click access to articles already covered by institutional subscriptions. Clarivate acquired Kopernio in 2018. Reichelt then became Managing Director of Web of Science while remaining involved with Kopernio; 10x states that the Web of Science business for which he was responsible represented more than $250 million in revenue.

Reichelt’s strategic asset is therefore not merely two startup exits. It is a deep network spanning research software, global academics, universities, publishers, and information-services companies, diversifying 10x beyond German internet, e-commerce, and consumer platforms.

Claudius Jablonka was closer to an ecosystem architect. He spent years working with and leading CDTM, which became an important talent node for companies and founders associated with Personio, Forto, Monzo, TIER, Trade Republic, and others; he later served as chief of staff at a fast-growing e-commerce company and helped establish Plug and Play’s Munich presence.

At 10x, his role was particularly valuable in converting a group of experienced individual angels into a fund that could raise institutional-scale capital, recruit employees, manage processes, and scale systematically. When announcing his departure in 2024, Jablonka described 10x as having built a €160 million fund backed by more than 200 entrepreneurs, around 50 fellows, and more than 70 investments.

In 2024 he joined Leitmotif as a GP. Leitmotif is more explicitly focused on industrial transformation, deep tech, and the sustainable economy, suggesting that Jablonka’s investing interests migrated from broad founder-led seed investing toward industrial deep technology.

Andrej Henkler represents yet another network: personal capital combined with Silicon Valley angel and deep-tech investing. He has operated Leblon Capital since 2011. The firm publicly describes itself as a long-term investor in mission-driven founders, preferring early rounds while maintaining a strong interest in deep tech. Leblon’s own portfolio materials name companies such as Palantir, Zipline, Evernote, SimScale, Quantum Systems, Energy Robotics, and cylib, among many others.

Henkler’s importance to 10x is the addition of a particularly strong U.S. and angel-investing dimension rather than reliance solely on the German startup ecosystem. His precise current position at 10x is less clear: the current official team page does not list him, while some investor databases still call him a Senior Venture Partner. His exact current operating role therefore remains inconsistent across public sources / cannot currently be confirmed.

English Translation: Capital Structure, Assets, and Business Model

9. What the firm actually owns: fund assets must be separated from influence assets

The core financial assets directly managed through 10x are its venture funds, not every historical company created by its founders. Official legal disclosures identify at least 10x Founders Fund GmbH & Co. KG and 10x Founders Fund II GmbH & Co. KG, together with corresponding U.S. feeder entities. Those U.S. entities invest entirely through LP interests in the relevant funds rather than investing directly in portfolio companies.

Fund I’s legal strategy is to build, hold, manage, and eventually divest equity and equity-related investments across software, AI, data, robotics, platforms, marketplaces, consumer, and hardware businesses containing software components. Initial investments are primarily in pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds.

The website currently describes initial checks of roughly €500,000 to €2.5 million, with a “significant part” of the €160 million Fund I reserved for follow-ons, potentially allowing the firm to support its strongest companies through the pre-IPO stage. Another page contains older language beginning at €250,000, suggesting minimum check size may vary over time, by transaction, or by fund stage.

Fund II is not merely a copy of Fund I. 10x’s 2026 legal disclosures specify a more concentrated set of areas: Robotics, Automation & Infrastructure; Data, AI & Cloud Computing; Planetary Resilience & Sustainability; and B2B/SaaS & Platforms. The trajectory therefore suggests a shift from broad generalist technology investing toward AI, automation, infrastructure, and industrial resilience.

Companies and organizations such as IDnow, enmacc, Ada Health, FLEX Capital, Leblon Capital, Bits & Pretzels, Mendeley, Kopernio, and be2 should not be described as subsidiaries of 10x Founders. They are businesses, platforms, or investments historically founded, managed, owned, or associated with individual partners, and their economic ownership is distinct from the 10x fund entities.

What differentiates 10x is its second category of assets: non-financial network capital.

First is the entrepreneur LP network: Fund I was backed by more than 200 entrepreneurs.

Second is the super-angel/fellow layer: there were 48 fellows in 2022, while the current website says the organization is backed by more than 200 entrepreneurs and around 50 super angels.

Third is the co-investor graph: approximately one year after inception, 10x had already invested alongside about 220 co-investors.

Fourth is the physical community layer: the Bits & Pretzels VIP lounge, an annual 10x Founders Summit for roughly 150 selected network members, and portfolio roundtables all serve to turn weak relationships into stronger ones.

Fifth is reputational capital created by the partners’ histories with Scout24, Amiando, IDnow, Mendeley, Ada, be2, enmacc, and other companies, giving them a form of founder trust that is harder for purely financial investors to reproduce.

10. Capital relationships and partners: the LP base is itself part of the product

In traditional funds, LPs often remain largely invisible. 10x instead turns “backed by entrepreneurs” into part of its public positioning. That matters because an entrepreneur LP can contribute not only capital but also dealflow, sector advice, introductions to customers, participation in later rounds, and mentorship.

One of the most distinctive mechanisms at launch was the Fellows system. In 2022, 10x had 48 business-angel fellows who did not necessarily invest in the fund but contributed expertise and could choose to co-invest. If a fellow originated a transaction, 10x said it could match an investment of approximately €10,000–€100,000 while the original lead retained the full upside on the angel’s own investment.

This effectively capitalized the angel-scout network more strongly than a conventional referral-fee model. Strong angels could retain their economics while benefiting from the firepower of a €160 million fund, while 10x expanded sourcing at relatively low incremental cost.

Its co-investment network is correspondingly broad. For battery-recycling company cylib, 10x invested alongside World Fund, Vsquared Ventures, and Speedinvest in an earlier round. In cylib’s €55 million Series A in 2024, Porsche Ventures and World Fund co-led, with Bosch Ventures, DeepTech & Climate Fonds, NRW.Venture, 10x Founders, and others participating.

Transactions of this type illustrate that 10x’s role is often not to “win a startup alone,” but to act as an organizer and connector within a high-quality cap table. On its network page, the firm highlights commentary from Flix founders Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert, and André Schwämmlein specifically praising its ability to help portfolio companies construct strong cap tables.

The website also features network participants or testimonials from figures including Lea-Sophie Cramer, Niklas Plath, Florian Huber, David Nothacker, Markus Dickhardt, and Daniel Dippold. Their presence on the network or testimonial pages should not be interpreted as proof that every one of them is an LP; the publicly available material is insufficient to reconstruct a complete LP roster.

11. Business model: not “content monetization,” but the conversion of social capital into venture returns

The primary economics remain conventional venture capital. 10x raises LP capital, acquires minority equity or equity-related exposure in startups, reserves capital for follow-on rounds in the strongest companies, and eventually seeks capital appreciation through acquisitions, secondary sales, IPOs, or other exits. Its legal documentation explicitly describes the fund’s purpose as building, holding, managing, and divesting a portfolio.

The actual management-fee rate, carried-interest structure, GP commitment, minimum LP subscription, and individual carry allocations are not sufficiently disclosed publicly. It would therefore be inappropriate to assume that conventional “2% management fee / 20% carry” economics apply exactly to 10x.

What is unusual is the way the organization attempts to improve the inputs of the standard VC model.

Deal sourcing is expanded through a 300+ network, 200+ entrepreneur backers, super angels, and the founders’ historical networks.

Selection draws on the judgment of former operators and founders rather than relying entirely on databases. Sifted reported that the team believed network-based sourcing created more value than a purely data-driven model.

Syndication uses a large graph of angels and VCs to construct subsequent cap tables.

Portfolio support is delivered through experienced founders, sector specialists, investors, and portfolio roundtables.

Follow-on economics benefit from the deliberate reservation of a meaningful portion of Fund I for companies that prove themselves over time.

Its underlying flywheel can therefore be summarized as:

successful entrepreneurship → wealth and credibility → angel investing → larger founder network → better dealflow → institutional fund with greater firepower → improved access to strong startups → better connections to later-stage capital → exits produce another generation of founders and LPs → the network becomes stronger.

In that sense, what 10x sells to a founder is not merely a €1 million check. It is a compressed map of European entrepreneurial relationships.

English Translation: Turning Points, Outcomes, Criticism, and Current Position

12. The most important strategic decisions and turning points

The first major decision was for several of the founders to keep recycling entrepreneurial proceeds into technology companies rather than simply becoming corporate executives or retiring after their first successes. Etten’s angel activity from 2007 onward, Wuttke’s Silicon Valley sourcing, Henkler’s Leblon Capital, and Haas’s continued involvement in IDnow and Bits & Pretzels progressively turned investing from a secondary activity into a central professional identity.

The second decision was to institutionalize personal networks. Sifted’s account of the origin of 10x is particularly revealing: Reichelt argued that founders’ access to the right investors depended excessively on chance, while angels could spend years building the credibility and network needed to enter the strongest rounds. 10x was designed to systematize that process.

The third was to enter the market with a relatively large €160 million fund rather than beginning as a small micro-fund. That allowed the group to graduate from angel checks in the tens or hundreds of thousands of euros to institutional initial investments of roughly €500,000–€2.5 million, with additional follow-on capacity.

The fourth was to invest across Europe and the United States rather than remaining a German-only investor. The firm currently describes itself as backing founders in Europe and the U.S. and says it has partnered with founders from more than 14 countries.

The fifth turning point was Claudius Jablonka’s departure in 2024, representing the first clearly visible change at the founding-GP level.

The sixth was Fund II. Following its first closing in 2025, Rupert Schäfer said the fund had already made 13 new investments that year, including Lyceum, qado, Songscription, Harper, Noah, Arlequin AI, Way, and mimic. Legal disclosures subsequently formalized a more focused sector architecture around AI/cloud, robotics/automation, planetary resilience, and B2B/SaaS.

This marks the transition from “a fund created by seven well-connected angels” toward a long-term venture franchise with a second fund, professional investment staff, explicit sector architecture, and institutionalized portfolio infrastructure.

13. Its strongest result: not one individual exit, but the scaling of Europe’s founder-to-founder capital recycling model

At the institutional level, one of 10x’s most impressive achievements was aggregating more than 200 entrepreneurs into a first fund of approximately €160 million. This demonstrates that European technology successes such as Delivery Hero, Scout24, Adyen, and others have created enough founder liquidity for a Silicon Valley-like process of recycling entrepreneurial wealth into the next generation of startups.

The current 10x homepage says the historical and current investments of its six core partners over a 16-year period include 16 unicorns, more than 40 notable exits, and eight IPOs. The About page has elsewhere used a figure of 15 unicorns. Because different pages use 15 and 16, and because these numbers represent an aggregate historical partner track record, they should not be described as “16 unicorns created by 10x Fund I.”

This distinction is essential. Names such as Delivery Hero, Adyen, TIER, and Volocopter demonstrate the founding partners’ pre-existing networks and investing records; they provide credibility to the fund, but they are not equivalent to Fund I DPI.

One important investment from the actual 10x era is Magic. The 10x portfolio identifies Magic as a 2022 pre-seed investment. In August 2024, the AI coding company raised $320 million from investors including Eric Schmidt, CapitalG, Atlassian, Sequoia, Jane Street, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross, taking total funding at the time to nearly $465 million. By 2025, Business Insider reported a valuation of approximately $1.58 billion, placing the company in unicorn territory.

Another strong example is cylib, which illustrates the firm’s expanding European deep-tech capabilities. 10x participated in an €8 million seed extension and later in a €55 million Series A in 2024, alongside a cap table that included Porsche Ventures, Bosch Ventures, World Fund, and DeepTech & Climate Fonds. The company commercializes battery-recycling research developed over many years at RWTH Aachen, making it a useful example of 10x’s expansion from pure software into climate and industrial technology.

However, the most important measures of a VC fund’s ultimate financial success—Fund I DPI, TVPI, net IRR, gross IRR, and realized cash distributions—have not been publicly disclosed in the official material reviewed. It is therefore possible to evaluate portfolio quality and network growth, but not to make a precise independent judgment about Fund I’s realized financial performance.

14. Negative information, criticism, and failures: fund-level issues must be separated from historical founder-company controversies

The first structural issue is network diversity. At launch in 2022, only seven of the 48 fellows were women, or roughly 14.6%. For a network that aims to connect the next generation of European founders, that represented a substantial gender imbalance in its original angel/fellow pool.

The second is the tension between systematizing access and creating an elite closed network. 10x argues that founders should not have to depend on random personal connections to reach the right investors, yet its solution is itself an exclusive community of selected investors, entrepreneurs, and operators. Sifted reported in 2022 that 10x planned an online platform accessible to members of this private community. One reasonable inference is that the model reduces friction after a founder enters the network, but does not automatically eliminate the question of who gets access to the network in the first place.

A third controversy comes from Jan Reichelt’s history with Mendeley. Mendeley had become closely associated with open science and easier sharing of academic knowledge, so its 2013 sale to major commercial publisher Elsevier triggered criticism from researchers worried about the future of its open-access ethos and the use of user data. That controversy concerned the strategic direction of the acquisition and the philosophy of open science; it was not a finding that Reichelt had committed legal wrongdoing.

A fourth issue relates to be2, historically co-founded by Robert Wuttke. In 2019, the Danish Consumer Ombudsman strongly criticized certain be2 subscription-marketing practices, including insufficiently clear automatic-renewal information and difficulties experienced by consumers attempting to cancel, and asked Luxembourg authorities to act. This was a regulatory assessment of the company’s practices in that period; the public material does not establish that Wuttke personally designed or directed the specific 2019 practices.

A fifth issue is founder and partnership evolution. 10x publicly launched with seven founding partners in 2022; Claudius Jablonka clearly left in 2024. The current homepage refers to “our six partners,” while portions of the Network/About pages still refer to “7 experienced entrepreneurs.” The current formal Team page includes five of the original founders—Etten, Haas, Becker, Reichelt, and Wuttke—but not Henkler. This indicates that different pages have not been updated in perfect synchronization and that partnership structure should not be inferred from any single marketing number.

A sixth limitation is not a scandal but a lack of full financial transparency. Public materials disclose fund size, themes, portfolio companies, and network scale, but not audit-level Fund I performance, individual founding-partner ownership, carry allocation, the complete LP roster, or the final size of Fund II. As a result, the public can easily confuse “partners historically invested in many unicorns” with “the current fund has already achieved equivalent returns.”

The firm itself acknowledges that its founders have experienced failures. Its About page explicitly says that some of their ventures failed while others became highly successful. Rather than claiming an uninterrupted success record, 10x uses those failures as part of its argument that its partners understand the realities faced by founders.

15. The position in 2026: 10x has entered a second, more institutional phase

As of August 26, 2026, the original founders still listed on the official Team page are Jan Reichelt, Felix Haas, Jan Becker, Andreas Etten, and Robert Wuttke. The investment organization now also includes professionals such as Jessica Lieber, Rupert Schäfer, Julian Wachtel, and Nico Schoenenberger, alongside separate finance and operations personnel. The practical implication is that investment execution is becoming less dependent on the personal bandwidth of the original founders and more institutionalized.

Claudius Jablonka left in 2024 and is now a GP at Leitmotif, where he continues to focus on industrial deep tech.

Andrej Henkler remains active through Leblon Capital, although public sources do not present a fully consistent picture of his current operational role at 10x.

Felix Haas remains deeply associated with both IDnow and Bits & Pretzels. Corsair Capital’s 2025 majority investment in IDnow illustrates that Haas continues to occupy an important company-governance and European-technology-network position outside the fund.

Etten continues to connect the ecosystem to FLEX Capital, enmacc, digital transaction platforms, and long-term software investing; Becker contributes the Scout24/Ada/enmacc operator network; Wuttke contributes Silicon Valley angel sourcing; and Reichelt contributes research-software, information-services, and serial-founder networks.

The firm currently says its network includes more than 300 top entrepreneurs, VCs, and investors. Its annual Founders Summit brings together roughly 150 selected members for two days; the network also uses Bits & Pretzels and portfolio roundtables. The website reports a portfolio-founder NPS of 82. Because that NPS is self-reported by the firm, it is best understood as a founder-satisfaction signal rather than an independently audited metric.

Fund II and its 2025 first close are particularly important indicators of institutional durability. Many celebrity angel syndicates disappear after one cycle; raising a second fund, adding professional investors, and refining an investment thesis indicate that 10x has begun crossing the boundary from a coalition of individual brands toward an enduring organizational brand. The final size of Fund II is not sufficiently disclosed publicly to justify a precise figure.

The most accurate description of 10x Founders’ real-world position is therefore not “Europe’s largest VC,” nor an old-line institutional franchise, nor a fund built around one superstar GP. It is better understood as:

a founder-led early-stage VC created when Germany’s and Europe’s first and second generations of internet entrepreneurs began institutionalizing their personal angel networks, entrepreneurial experience, and transatlantic capital relationships.

Its defensibility does not primarily come from a proprietary AI screening engine or sheer assets under management. It comes from who takes its calls, who introduces their best companies to it, who is willing to co-invest with it, and which ambitious founders are willing to place it on the cap table at the earliest stage. That is the key to understanding why 10x Founders exists, why it was able to assemble a €160 million first fund, and whether it can ultimately become a durable European venture-capital franchise.