AUXXO wants to influence how founding teams are formed with a new European matching platform

AUXXO has closed its second Female Catalyst Fund at €33.3 million, up from €19 million for its first vehicle. But the Berlin-based fund is adding another tool to its strategy: a pan-European platform designed to connect founders with potential co-founders, with a particular focus on encouraging the formation of gender-diverse teams. ENTREPRENEUR FIRST, ANTLER and Y COMBINATOR have already made founder matching part of their sourcing strategies. AUXXO is now applying the same logic to gender-lens investing: instead of simply selecting startups that fit its investment thesis, it wants to help create more of them.

For years, the underrepresentation of women in venture capital has primarily been treated as a capital-allocation problem. Female founders raise less funding, fewer funds invest in them, and women also remain underrepresented among those making investment decisions. The response has therefore been to create specialised funds, business angel networks, support programmes and initiatives connecting founders with investors.

AUXXO belongs to this generation of investors. Its Female Catalyst Fund II invests in European startups with at least one woman among the founders, who must hold at least 20% of the shares owned by the founding team. Diversity therefore directly defines its investable universe.

But with the Founder Matchmaking Platform launched alongside the closing of its second fund, AUXXO is moving one step further upstream in the entrepreneurial chain. It is no longer simply deciding which teams to finance, but seeking to intervene at the point when those teams are being formed.

In other words, after the funding gap, AUXXO wants to address the founding gap.

The imbalance begins before the first funding round

The funding gap has not disappeared. According to DEALROOM, European startups with at least one woman among their founders accounted for 8% of European venture capital investment in 2016. That figure has risen to 11.2% in 2026. They raised $8.5 billion in 2025 and $5.1 billion during the first half of 2026. Progress is visible, but their share of venture investment remains far below their potential weight in the economy.

Looking only at funding rounds, however, means observing the problem relatively late in the process.

By the time a startup sits down with a venture capital fund, much of its architecture has already been determined. Which experienced employee decided to leave their company and become an entrepreneur? Which scientist met someone capable of commercialising their technology? Who found the CTO? Who became CEO? Who received co-founder status, and who joined the company several months later as its first employee? Above all, how were the founders’ shares divided?

The future distribution of venture capital therefore depends partly on decisions taken long before the first investor pitch.

That is precisely where AUXXO now wants to intervene.

Its pan-European platform is designed to connect solo founders looking for technical or operational expertise, experienced startup employees considering entrepreneurship, and incomplete teams looking for a co-founder and, potentially, capital. The fund is drawing on its European network of entrepreneurs, business angels and communities including EVANGELISTAS and ENCOURAGEVENTURES.

ENTREPRENEUR FIRST shifted sourcing from startups to individuals

The logic is not entirely new in venture capital.

ENTREPRENEUR FIRST has probably developed its most advanced version through the concept of talent investing. Instead of waiting for a team and product to exist, the organisation identifies individuals before they have necessarily found a co-founder, or even settled on an idea.

ENTREPRENEUR FIRST defines talent investing as identifying and supporting people before they have a co-founder and, often, before they have even decided what they will build. Its Talent Investors then help them explore ideas and form relationships with potential co-founders.

The distinction from traditional venture capital is fundamental.

Conventional sourcing broadly follows this sequence:

startup → pitch → due diligence → investment

Talent investing begins several steps earlier:

individual → co-founder → idea → company → investment

ENTREPRENEUR FIRST explicitly draws this distinction itself: while venture capital allocates capital to existing startups, talent investing seeks to create the supply of startups that will later feed the ecosystem.

ANTLER has moved onto similar ground. Its continental European programme brings together around 100 founders selected from roughly 10,000 applicants and now operates two separate tracks: one for already established teams and another specifically dedicated to co-founder matching. Solo entrepreneurs and incomplete teams are given an initial period to find their partners before ANTLER makes an investment decision, with an initial commitment of up to €500,000.

Y COMBINATOR has also turned the search for a co-founder into infrastructure. Its free Co-Founder Matching platform allows entrepreneurs to sign up with or without an idea, specify the kind of profile they are looking for and connect with potentially compatible candidates. Using the platform does not imply any investment from YC, but it reflects the same conviction: the ecosystem can no longer assume that the right people will simply meet by chance.

Having organised the market for startup financing, part of the venture capital industry is therefore beginning to organise the market for startup formation.

AUXXO adds a gender lens to talent investing

This is where AUXXO’s strategy becomes distinctive.

ENTREPRENEUR FIRST and ANTLER primarily seek to produce teams with the greatest potential to build high-growth companies. AUXXO is pursuing an additional objective related to the composition of those teams.

The fund is therefore applying to gender-lens investing a method similar to the one already developed by talent investing: intervening before the company has been fully formed.

This matters because most initiatives designed to reduce funding inequalities have so far intervened once the startup already exists. They help female founders access investors, professionalise their pitch, expand their networks or raise their first round.

The Austrian platform FEMALE FOUNDERS illustrates this approach. It now claims 87,000 members, a network of more than 500 VCs and 250 startups supported, while its Fund F has raised €28 million to invest in teams that include women among their founders. It therefore organises a network around female entrepreneurs and their access to capital.

AUXXO is moving one step further upstream.

It wants to intervene when a scientist is still looking for a commercial counterpart, when a future CEO is searching for a CTO, or when an experienced scaleup operator is considering becoming a founder for the first time.

The platform therefore gradually turns the fund’s diversity policy into a sourcing strategy.

A specialised fund has an incentive to expand its own market

The strategy also follows an economic logic.

Every specialised fund deliberately narrows its investable universe. A climate tech fund cannot invest in just any SaaS company; a health-focused fund excludes a large share of the market. AUXXO imposes a different but equally tangible constraint on itself: an outstanding startup founded exclusively by men does not fall within the mandate of Female Catalyst Fund II.

The fund could therefore simply wait for more companies fitting its thesis to emerge naturally.

Instead, it is choosing to help increase their number.

This amounts to a form of market creation applied to dealflow: AUXXO is no longer merely trying to capture a larger share of the best startups with female founders, but to expand the number of companies that could eventually enter its investable universe.

The resulting loop is particularly interesting:

talent network → matching → team formation → startup creation → AUXXO investment → subsequent rounds with other VCs → new entrepreneurs and operators feeding back into the network

For an early-stage fund, moving further upstream can become a competitive advantage. The earlier the relationship with an entrepreneur begins, the less dependent the investor becomes on dealflow that is already visible and being competed for by dozens of other funds.

But how far should a VC influence the composition of a founding team?

The strategy nevertheless raises a more delicate question.

AUXXO requires the presence of a female founder holding at least 20% of the founders’ shares as a condition for investment. At the same time, it is now offering teams help in finding their future co-founders. The investor’s eligibility criteria can therefore indirectly begin to influence the composition of the company that may later seek its funding.

The line is a fine one.

On the one hand, such a platform could enable women with scientific, technical or operational expertise to secure co-founder status where they might otherwise have joined a startup as CTO, COO or first employee. In an innovation economy where a substantial share of wealth creation comes from equity ownership, the status secured at the company’s creation can matter as much as the job title held several years later.

The 20% threshold makes it significantly harder to add a cosmetic female co-founder purely to satisfy an investment criterion.

But the strategy must also avoid turning diversity into a simple condition of funding eligibility. A founding team cannot be reduced to a combination of complementary skills or a cap table that complies with an investor’s mandate: it is a long-term relationship between people who will have to make particularly difficult and often conflicting decisions together.

A second fund 75% larger, but below its original target

The new strategy accompanies the final closing of Female Catalyst Fund II at €33.3 million, around 75% more than the €19 million raised for the first vehicle.

The fund announced a first closing of €26 million in July 2025, with the EUROPEAN INVESTMENT FUND as anchor investor alongside investors including AURUM IMPACT, CHERRY VENTURES and SPEEDINVEST. ENBW NEW VENTURES has also joined the LP base of the final vehicle, alongside European family offices, business angels and entrepreneurs. More than half of the fund’s investors are women.

The increase from the first fund is significant, but the closing also illustrates the current difficulty of fundraising for European emerging managers.

At the time of the first close, AUXXO was still targeting €50 million. The vehicle ultimately closes at €33.3 million. Gesa Miczaika says she began raising the fund in 2022 and has described the three-year fundraising process as one of the most difficult experiences of her career.

AUXXO therefore finds itself facing, at its own level, a challenge similar to the one it is trying to address for entrepreneurs: access to capital remains selective, including for those whose business is allocating it.

The fund nevertheless now has a larger vehicle than its predecessor and has already made eleven investments. Sector agnostic, its portfolio has a strong deeptech and science component, including MARBLE IMAGING in Earth observation, BIOORBIT in pharmaceutical manufacturing in microgravity and STANHOPE AI in neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence. AUXXO typically invests around €500,000 for a 3% to 8% stake and aims to build a portfolio of roughly 25 to 30 companies with the vehicle.