Alast-minute flight to Berlin, Germany, back in 2008 changed the course of Pawel Chudzinski’s career and set him on the track to become the top venture capital investor in Europe.
Chudzinski was working at American investment bank Greenhill in London, UK, helping chemicals and car-makers cut deals and raise funds. But work had slowed to a trickle during the financial crisis. Then the Polish-born investor got a tip from a college friend about a hot angel investment at the heart of Berlin’s then seedling startup scene.
Chudzinski jumped on a plane to meet with the founders of Niana, who were building a Poland-focused online marketplace, and wrote a $20,000 check from his savings on the spot. Within six months, Chudzinski had quit his job and moved to Germany’s capital to join his college friend to back and build more startups like Niana. “I had some entrepreneur friends and I had a big desire to be part of this,” said Chudzinski.
It was a bet to get in on the ground floor of the burgeoning Berlin startup scene, and it worked.
Photo by Andrejs Zavadskis for Forbes
Chudzinski scored one of his first exits when Niana was snapped up by a Swiss publishing group just three years later. Nearly 15 years on Chudzinski is still based in Berlin and now is the cofounder of venture fund Point Nine Capital which manages $500 million. A five-year veteran of the Midas List Europe, Forbes and Truebridge’s ranking of the continent’s best venture capital investors, he now tops our rankings thanks to a string of smart early bets on British fintech phenom Revolut, which raised in August at a $45 billion valuation, blockchain analysis tool Chainalysis, which is now valued at $8.6 billion and healthcare booking unicorn Docplanner.
The publicity-shy investor hasn’t given an interview in years. When rumors began circulating last month that Point Nine was considering shutting down, it was founding partner Christoph Janz who dispelled them. And Chudzinski, 45, told Forbes that nothing could be further from the truth; talk the pair might be planning to retire aren’t true, either. Point Nine is focused on raising a new fund, and backing the next generation of founders.
For a German fund, Point Nine makes relatively few investments in Germany, and even more unusually for an European fund writes a quarter of its checks in North America. It backed software as a Service (Saas) powerhouse Zendesk (listed for $1.7 billion in 2014), video recording tool Loom and AI search tool Algolia with great success. “Sand Hill Row is the most competitive place in the world for VC but the U.S. is much bigger than that,” Chudzinski told Forbes. “On software and Saas, I think we can be fast, competitive, and opinionated.”
Chudzinski has made some side bets on marketplace and consumer-focused businesses that have paid off as well; in 2016, he invested in Revolut, a London-based digital bank, at a $50 million valuation. It’s now worth $45 billion.
There have been some clunkers too. Chudzinski was one of the first investors in German e-scooter company Tier which rocketed to a $2 billion valuation in 2021 on an irrationally exuberant $200 million raise. Three years and a merger later, it was worth just $160 million.
While he’s built his rep on savvy investments in fintech and business software, Chudzinski has lately been most excited by the renewable energy sector. He’s made bets on startups like Amperecloud and Solarize that make software for solar energy producers. “There’s a massive need for our energy landscape to change,” he said. “Our lens is software for the energy transition.”
Berlin and billion dollar valuations are a long way away from Poland’s Zielona Góra (“Polish for “green mountain”) where Chudzinski grew up with two parents who worked as construction engineers. He left home at 16 for an experimental high school in Germany and went onto study business at the European University Viadrina where he met fellow student Lukasz Gadowski who tapped him to work on Spreadshirt, his online T-shirt printing company.
It was Gadowski who convinced Chudzinski to join his angel investment in Niana. After Chudzinski moved to Berlin, the pair teamed up with entrepreneur Kolja Hebenstreit in 2008 to found Team Europe, similar to another startup incubator called Rocket that was pumping out quick and dirty clones of popular American companies like Facebook or Groupon. “It was like basically the copycat of the copycat,” laughs Hebenstreit.
In 2009, Chudzinski met Janz, fresh from selling his third startup, and in 2011 they formed Point Nine. One of their first investments was in Gadowski’s next project, food dispatch startup Delivery Hero, which went public in 2017 for $5.3 billion.
A steady parade of deals, and exits, followed. In 2019, Chudzinski ranked 23rd on the Midas List Europe; In 2021, he ranked 15th; then sixth last year. Now he’s snagged the top spot.
Chudzinski still calls himself an immigrant despite having lived longer in Germany than Poland. His old home and new home have been transformed in that time. Poland’s GDP per capita nearly doubled in that period while Berlin, once branded by its mayor as “poor but sexy” thanks to chronic unemployment, is now one of Europe’s biggest tech hubs. “It’s unbelievable,” says Chudzinski. “Just as unbelievable as the development of the tech ecosystem in Europe.”
