After more than a year of operating quietly, a German-US venture firm, futurepresent, has emerged from stealth with a $300 million debut fund. It has already backed 14 companies, combining early-stage bets with selective, high-conviction growth investments.
Fewer layers, closer relationships with founders, and faster decisions
futurepresent is intentionally structured as a four-partner team. The partners are Thomas Lueke, formerly of Cherry Ventures; Johnson Yang, formerly of General Catalyst; Jan Rettel, a former public tech hedge fund manager; and David Meiborg, formerly of First Momentum Ventures.
The partners bring over a decade of experience across multi-stage and specialist venture firms. Now stepping in as both operators and investors, they’re applying that experience to build something more focused and founder-aligned.
Rather than building a large platform with sprawling teams, the firm is betting that access, trust, and consistent engagement matter more. It’s a model that leans heavily on direct interaction with founders, especially in the earliest and most formative stages of a company’s journey.
Backing AI where it meets the real world
The fund’s strategy is sharply defined around three areas where AI is reshaping industries.
The first is AI for the physical world. One example is General Intuition, which is developing AI agents for spatial reasoning, trained on video game data and designed to operate in robotics and autonomous systems, moving AI capability decisively beyond the screen.
The second area focuses on applied AI in complex industries. Here, companies like Skalar are rethinking tax advisory for SMEs through automation, while Afori and Inca are rebuilding parts of the insurance stack with AI at the core..
The third pillar is AI infrastructure. futurepresent has backed Isidor, leading its pre-seed round to support vertically integrated data pipelines for reinforcement learning and model training. It has also participated in Slide’s $70 million Series B, a business continuity and disaster recovery platform built specifically for managed service providers as they navigate the AI era.
With roots in both the US and Europe, the firm operates across two of the most important innovation hubs globally. Founders building global companies can tap into networks, talent, and markets on both sides of the Atlantic.
