Second Time Around: The Repeat Founders

The growing maturity of the European tech ecosystem is evidenced by a wave of repeat founders featuring in the Euro Seed 50. Having built and successfully exited their first companies, many founders are going at it again, especially given the opportunities that AI presents. A founder’s track record is often one of the most important investment criteria at the seed stage.

The US has a long history of repeat founders so the fact that so many repeat founders appear in the Euro Seed 50 points to a narrowing of the gap between the 2 ecosystems.

Euro Seed 50 founders that have already achieved significant outcomes include:

• Dash0 - Mirko Novakovic co-founded codecentric and Instana

• Everyday - Olivier Le Bas co-founded Homa Games (raised $164m)

• Zauber - Erik Muttersbach co-founded Forto (raised over $500m)

• Jack&Jill - Matthew Wilson co-founded Omnipresent (raised $137m)

• Nexos AI - Tomas co-founded Nord Security ($3bn valuation) & Hostinger

• Polar - Birk Jernström co-founded Tictail (acquired by Shopify)

• Ameba - Cedrik Hoffmann co-founded Valoreo (acquired by Razor Group)

• Integral - Lukas Zoerner co-founded Penta (acquired by Qonto)

Within this list, some very experienced founders are rebuilding AI-native iterations of business models they previously had success founding with, including:

• Erik Muttersbach @ Zauber (former Forto founder)

• Olivier Le Bas @ Everyday (former Homa games founder)

The geographic distribution of the Euro Seed 50 is largely in line with European investment trends with the UK (19), France (10) and Germany (10) dominating the list, followed by the Nordics (5). 

Spain is emerging as an exciting ecosystem with three companies making the Euro Seed 50 (Afori, Cala AI and Omnia). According to Sifted data, VCs pumped over €1bn into 95 Spanish startups in Q1 2025, a 184% increase on the same period last year. We are seeing both ‘recycled’ local talent build (i.e. Omnea’s founder, Daniel Espejo, was former Iberia GM for Klarna), as well as very experienced founders moving to Spain (e.g. Fabian Wesemann at Afori).

Over the years, we have seen employees from Europe’s technology giants building the next generation of startups. Data from Accel and Dealroom last year revealed that Spotify, Klarna and Zalando are the biggest nurturers of new startup founders, producing 181 companies across Europe and Israel between them. 

Could Palantir be the next big founder factory for Europe? In the US, the founders of the likes of Anduril and Affirm famously cut their teeth at Palantir. The Euro Seed 50 includes five companies whose founders previously worked at Palantir. Palantir is renowned for its high bar for talent, flat leadership structure and forward deployed engineering which focuses on customer outcomes, not software. So, it's perhaps no surprise that it’s an ideal breeding ground for next generation founders. 

Euro Seed 50 founded by former Palantir employees:

• Ankar - Co-founder, Tamar Gomez, was formerly a Deployment Strategist, while Co-founder, Wiem Gharbi worked in Product & Strategy at Palantir

• Arondite - Co-founder, Will Blyth, led UK Defence Strategy at Palantir

• Conduct AI - Founders Jan Philipp Haas, Henry Thompson and Philipp Hoefer all held roles at Palantir 

• Fern Labs - Founders Ash Edwards, Alex Goddijn and Taylor Young all held technical roles at Palantir.

• Frontier Health - CEO and co-founder, Rachel Finegold was previously Healthcare Lead at Palantir.