- NewSchool VC has closed its debut fund at €10 million, hitting the target it set at a 6.1 million euro first close last September.
- The Belgian fund has made 32 investments, including Warren, Ravical and Alice, with three more in its pipeline.
- NewSchool was the most active investor in Belgium in the first half of 2026, a year in which Belgian startups raised €1.1 billion, up nearly sixfold on the same period in 2025.
Christophe Morbee spent years writing angel checks before he decided a spreadsheet of side bets wasn’t a strategy. Now his structure has a name, a target hit and 32 companies on the board: NewSchool VC has closed its debut fund at €10 million euros, reaching the goal it set at a 6.1 million euro first close last September.
Around 50 investors back the fund, including six family offices, among them The Millers Office, alongside Belgian entrepreneurs such as Willem Delbaere and Roeland Delrue of Aikido Security, Jean-Louis Van Houwe of Monizze, and Luc Coopman of Cobofisk. Morbee has put in 25% of the fund’s capital himself.
“I invested as an angel for years, but felt it was time to build a real structure around it. I love entrepreneurship, investing, and sharing what I know about marketing, sales, HR and finance with founders. That’s what led me to launch a full-fledged fund,” Morbee said.
From besox to a venture fund
NewSchool’s investment thesis grew out of besox, the Belgian payroll and HR administration company Morbee built into a business with 110 employees and revenue heading toward €15 million this year.
Besox’s roughly 4,000 SME customers now also serve as a warm introduction channel for NewSchool’s portfolio companies seeking early customers.
It shows up in where the money has gone. Of NewSchool’s 32 investments, 75% are Belgian, with the rest spread across Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, France and the UK.
The portfolio includes Ravical, the Ghent-based AI agent platform for professional services firms that raised €7.3 million from Lakestar, and Warren, the workplace pension fintech that followed its €3 million pre-seed with a €10 million seed round led by Motive Ventures. NewSchool also co-led the €1 million pre-seed for Alice, the Ghent legaltech, alongside Seeder Fund, and backed Spotable, Cashfeed, Donna, Dalton, Feedelity and Exhibitly.
Its most recent bets stretch outside Belgium: Talentir, a Vienna-based content monetization startup, and a French company NewSchool describes as Outline.
NewSchool isn’t alone in betting that small, founder-run vehicles beat generalist mega-funds at the pre-seed stage. In Belgium, Pitchdrive closed its fourth fund at €60 million after turning away roughly €25 million in excess demand to stay deliberately small, and Henchman founders Jorn Vanysacker and Gilles Mattelin raised a €12 million fund, 100IN, to write 100 checks of €100,000 apiece. Berlin’s seed+speed tripled its target to close at €90 million for European B2B and enterprise software.
A crowded field of small, opinionated funds
“Europe is an engineer’s continent, with technically strong teams. What’s often missing is someone who takes charge of go-to-market, sales and storytelling. That’s where we focus, alongside the capital we provide. There’s still enormous room to automate old industries. We see plenty of opportunity there for the years ahead,” said Morbee.
Whether that operator-led model scales beyond a single GP’s Rolodex, or whether NewSchool needs to formalize into a larger team as it raises a second fund, is the question that will determine whether this is a repeatable strategy or a one-time trick of good timing and a well-connected founder.
