Antwerp-based Pitchdrive closes €60 million Fund IV to back AI-native early-stage startups

Pitchdrive, an Antwerp-based, entrepreneur-led pre-Seed firm, today announced the closing of its fourth fund at €60 million, further strengthening its commitment to the Co-founder Capital model, which places experienced tech founders and operators on the cap table from day one.

Notably, Fund IV is entirely privately backed, with no government or institutional funding, which is unusual for a European fund of this size. The firm secured far more than its €50 million target from investors within weeks. It also noted that it deliberately chose to keep the fund at €60 million and declined additional commitments from existing backers to keep its portfolio small and its support hands-on.

“We could’ve raised more. Plenty of LPs were ready. But a bigger fund would’ve pulled us in the wrong direction. The whole point of Co-founder Capital is staying close to the founders we back and rolling up our sleeves with them. You can’t do that across fifty companies. So we keep the number small and go all in on each one,” said Wim Derkinderen, Managing Partner, Pitchdrive.

Pitchdrive was founded in 2020 by Wim Derkinderen, Lorenz Bogaert, Toon Coppens, Boris Bogaert, Jonas Dhaenens, Koen Christiaens, Luc Verelst and Bart Swanson. It is chaired by Dhaenens, founder of the European unicorn team.blue.

Pitchdrive backs pre-Seed and Seed founders from day one and invests €250K–€3 million tickets across Europe, with offices in Antwerp, Ghent, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, London and New York.

It has invested in 70 startups across Europe, with Funds I, II and III placing the firm in the top 10% of venture funds globally. In 2024, Pitchdrive announced the raise of its third fund of €40 million to invest in early-stage startups in Europe.

Its portfolio includes companies like Henchman (acquired by LexisNexis), Introw, Heltia, Happl, Axe, Ravical, Conveo, Foodamigos and Gro. Its active scout network feeds the firm more than 500 pitch decks per month, of which only a small fraction are backed by design.

The firm states that Fund IV will invest in 25–30 early-stage startups in Europe and beyond. “The thesis runs through a single filter: does this company have a reason to exist in the AI era, and does it operate like an AI-native company? The product itself doesn’t have to be AI, but the business has to be a product of this moment, either because AI enables a category that couldn’t exist before or because it fundamentally changes the economics of an existing one,” Pitchdrive mentioned in the press release.

It highlights that operating AI-native enables small teams to scale more quickly, with infrastructure taking the place of headcount as the primary driver of growth, and founders who prefer building with AI from the start rather than adding it later.

The focus areas of Fund IV include AI-native products (vertical AI, developer infrastructure, agent platforms), AI-enabled categories (consumer, commerce, content and marketplaces where AI unlocks new unit economics), and software-defined physical companies (hardware, robotics and mobility, where AI sits in the design or operations).

Pitchdrive asserts that it will pass on pure model labs, “AI for X” wrappers without a defensible data or operator angle, and businesses whose AI story is bolted on for fundraising rather than core.

“When we built team.blue, the kind of investor I wished I’d had on day one didn’t exist in Europe. That’s what Pitchdrive is: a firm run by people who’ve already been in the founder’s seat. Fund IV doubles down on the model: stay small, stay close, stay disciplined,” said Jonas Dhaenens, Chairman, Pitchdrive

The firm has also announced its first US deal, investing in New York–based compliance AI startup Zerodrift in a €8.6 million ($10 million) pre-Seed round. The company was founded by serial entrepreneur Kumesh Aroomoogan, and the round was participated in by some of the largest US venture funds.