Düsseldorf

As early-stage VCs, most companies we look at are early, some pre-inception. To properly capture the formation layer, we looked back no more than 18 months from a company's founding, and no more than one institutional round raised.

We believe getting to the core truth of a company radiates from the founding team, and that those signs show up long before a company has its breakout success. So we got on the ground, city by city, talking directly to the ecosystem leaders, university professors, angels, operators and micro VCs who see these companies before anyone else does. The names that kept coming up independently, before they showed up anywhere public, were what we went after.

Every one of those names, alongside thousands of other companies we track a year, went through the same internal scoring model: the scale of impact the company could have globally, how genuinely AI-native the product is, the strength of the thesis, and the team, their talent density, where they've built before, how deep that experience really runs. We ended up with ten companies per city that we believe combine all of the above, while capturing the city's own heartbeat and the themes defining it.