Solo-Fondsmanager mit 15 Mio. Euro Fund II: Deep Tech statt schneller Markups – Robin Haak (Robin Capital)

A solo GP bets Europe's deep tech is mispriced

Robin Haak is betting that Europe's deep tech is mispriced. He runs a €15m solo fund writing first checks into robotics, space and defence, where German VCs wait for €2 to 5m in ARR before they will invest. The model relies on a media audience for dealflow and on LPs who return, which lets him hold positions longer than funds that need quick mark-ups.

Takeaways

• Robin Capital closes €15M solo deep tech fund. Fund II is run by Robin Haak alone, writing €100,000 to €600,000 checks into deep tech, AI enterprise, space, robotics and defence, mostly in DACH and Europe with occasional deals in Israel and the US.
• Contrarian bets sit below German VCs' ARR bar. A digital twin for injection moulding machines charges €12,000 per machine a year, and Keba's 300,000 machines imply €300m. With €200,000 ARR, it falls under the €2 to 5m ARR German VCs demand for Series A, so Insight Partners enters later.
• Fund II needed no cold sales emails. Fund I took 18 months, five closes and 100-hour weeks, with 7,000 cold contacts narrowing to 700 conversations and 70 LPs. For Fund II he brought back 69 of the 70 and wrote no sales emails.
• Media audience generates 300 deals a month. Haak publishes 3m impressions a month, a 10,000-subscriber newsletter and 50,000 Instagram followers, and roughly 300 deals arrive monthly, 30 to 50 of them VC-led. In Fund I, 65 percent of deals were contrarian first checks.
• Solo funds trade fast mark-ups for lower risk. Haak says his model is more long-term and mitigates risk better because it does not need quick mark-ups. Three solo GPs can fill a €3m round with a €2m lead and €250,000 each, and he would accept €250,000 instead of €400,000.
• European solo GPs lacked belief in big funds. Haak thinks many European solo GPs chose the model because they did not trust themselves to raise a €250m fund with partners. He cites Peter Thiel's bell curve in Zero to One, where the niche analysts and the extroverted salespeople succeed.
• Agents keep the solo fund lean. Haak runs the fund with agents and built his own CRM with Claude, and a 200-person chat of LPs and founders supplies dealflow. He has done 40 co-investments alongside the funds.

Robin Haak's path to Robin Capital

1. MBA, then a role for Axel Springer's chief digital officer, where he built the Axel Springer Plug and Play accelerator with Saeed Amidi and Matthias Döpfner.
2. Founded Jobspotting with three co-founders who had spent 20 years combined at Google, merged it with SmartRecruiters, moved to San Francisco and sold enterprise contracts above €1m ACV to SAP.