futurepresent emerges from stealth with $300M Fund I to back AI across infrastructure and industry

After more than a year of quietly investing, German-US VC firm futurepresent is emerging from stealth with Fund I totalling $300 million.

The firm is being built as a deliberately small partnership with a flexible mandate, arguing that founder relationships matter more than platform scale.  The firm has already invested in 14 portfolio companies with an investment strategy that includes Pre-Seed/Seed and concentrated-growth investments.

futurepresent  is backing companies across three areas:

AI for the Physical World: the portfolio includes General Intuition https://www.generalintuition.com/, which is building a world model for spatiotemporal reasoning

Applied AI in Complex Industries: portfolio includes Skalar, a fully autonomous tax and audit provider, alongside Afori and inca, which are rebuilding different parts of the insurance value chain with AI

AI Infrastructure: portfolio includes Isidor, where futurepresent led the Pre-Seed round for vertically integrated data pipelines supporting reinforcement learning and model training, and Slide, where the firm recently participated in the Series B for modern IT infrastructure for  Managed Service Providers in the AI era

The team also sees its footprint across the US and Europe as a core advantage, staying close to both markets while linking the two ecosystems for globally minded founders.

The partners come to futurepresent after a decade helping build venture funds across both multi-stage and specialist firms, and are now establishing the firm as repeat founders and investors.

According to Thomas Lueke, Partner, futurepresent, the best founders choose people and relationships over any platform feature. 

“We deliberately architected futurepresent as a small partnership maniacally focused on building relationships with founders.”

Johnson Yang, Partner, futurepresent, shared: 

“Our intention is that each founder we work with gets to build a genuinely authentic relationship with our whole team, that lasts from the earliest stages through scale.”