Federico Wengi

I spent the past few days in Berlin, back-to-back with founding teams building in spaces most VCs would have quietly passed on. Too regulated. Too dependent on human judgment. Too slow to scale. Markets simply overlooked. Sitting across from these founders, I was reminded of something I keep coming back to: the most interesting problems in B2B software right now are hiding inside industries that venture capital has systematically ignored. Audit and assurance. Compliance verification. Quality control in regulated manufacturing. In Germany, the Ausbildungsberufe, certified professions where expertise is not a credential you buy but a capability you build over years. You cannot solve a Meister shortage by raising salaries. The bottleneck is structural, not financial. For years, that made these verticals uninvestable. TAM looked limited, sales cycles painful, margins thin. But the calculus is inverting. In an agentic world, the very difficulty of these domains becomes the moat. Judgment, domain fluency, regulatory literacy are precisely what AI augments most asymmetrically. One qualified professional, properly enabled, can carry the workload of three. That is not automation. That is human enablement. The SME angle makes it even more compelling. The compliance burden on a 50-person Mittelstand manufacturer is not proportionally smaller than on a 5,000-person one. But until recently, the tooling was. Vertical SaaS re-packaged for SMEs, powered by agentic workflows, closes that gap. An almost entirely untapped market becomes addressable. There is one more layer. Founders and investors tend to solve problems they know personally. Auditors, compliance officers, and Handwerksmeister are rigorous, methodical, risk-averse by training. The result has been a systematic gap in founding activity across entire sectors, not because the problems weren't large enough, but because the people closest to them weren't starting companies. Generative AI is changing that. These industries work predominantly with language, contracts, standards, regulations, reports. And LLMs are extraordinarily capable with text. For the first time, a domain expert with deep professional knowledge but limited engineering background can build something meaningful. The barrier to founding in these verticals has dropped asymmetrically. The businesses built deepest into complexity will define the next decade of B2B software in Europe. Where are you seeing human enablement done right? #HumanEnablement #Mittelstand #VerticalSaaS #AIAgents #VentureCapital #B2BSaaS Reimann Investors Venture Capital

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A very big day for zerothird! We’re excited to share that we have successfully closed our Seed+ funding round, with VERBUND X Ventures joining as lead investor, alongside continued support from Sparring Capital Partners and participation from KGAL GmbH & Co. KG (KGAL) and other existing investors. This bridge financing will enable zerothird to advance to the forefront of European QKD certification initiatives ahead of the Series A round. For me, this is far more than just a funding update. With VERBUND X Ventures, we’re welcoming an investor from one of the most critical sectors of Europe’s infrastructure: the energy sector. This makes this step especially significant. It sends a strong signal that quantum-secure communication and entanglement-based QKD (eQKD) are moving beyond theory - into domains where security and resilience have immediate operational importance. And that signal resonates far beyond energy: into finance, healthcare, insurance, transportation, public communications, and other critical infrastructures. As quantum computing advances, the security of today’s encryption standards is no longer guaranteed. At zerothird, we are building hardware-based solutions for quantum-secure communication - bringing quantum security out of the lab and into real-world deployment.   This funding allows us to accelerate that transition: → scaling our systems for operational use → expanding deployments with partners → and strengthening Europe’s technological sovereignty in secure communications   We’re especially proud of the progress so far, including long-term testing with Erste Group and our role in the EU project QUAPITAL, working towards a quantum-secure link between Vienna and Frankfurt. More than half of this round is being carried by existing investors - for me, this is a particularly strong sign of trust in our team, our execution, and the progress we have made over the last years. A heartfelt thank you to the team at VERBUND X Ventures, especially Luca Bauer and Michael Strugl, as well as Christoph Thaler, CFA, our entire zerothird team, and all partners and investors like Michael Steiner, who are making this journey possible. Now we move forward with full energy. #QuantumTechnology #CyberSecurity #DeepTech #QuantumCommunication #QKD #Startups #VentureCapital #EuropeTech

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