Visionaries Club, the Berlin-based early-stage VC firm, is heading into its next fund with a dramatically leaner investment team. General partner Rob Lacher announced on Tuesday that he will lead investing alongside partner Venkat Kondragunta — positioning the firm as explicitly "GP-led" as it prepares to raise later this year.

A Significant Restructuring

The announcement confirms and expands on reporting from Sifted last week that multiple partners were departing full-time roles. Robert Jäckle and Marton Sarkadi Nagy are leaving their full-time partner positions, though both will reportedly take on more entrepreneurial roles and "complement the full time investment team" going forward — the specifics of which remain unclear.

Judith Dada, who joined as a general partner just last year, has since taken on the role of co-CEO at portfolio company Langdock and will continue as a senior partner at Visionaries in an advisory capacity.

It's also uncertain what happens to the firm's remaining junior staff. Visionaries' team page still lists Johann Butting, Sahar Meghani, Sandra Tur Mayor, and Isabella Yamamoto as partners or junior investors. Lacher did not respond to questions about their futures at the firm.

The 'Concentration Model' Thesis

Lacher is framing the restructuring not as a retreat but as a strategic evolution — what he calls the "concentration model" for VC in the AI era.

"Founders increasingly look for a direct line into the people who have operated at the frontier as they optimise for speed, distribution, geopolitical connectors, policy influence, operator access and compute."

His central argument: AI has automated the analytical heavy lifting that traditionally justified large investment teams.

"AI now does the 'standard' diligence work VC firms built teams and analytical edge around."

The ambition, he says, is to build a "more AI-native VC firm" — one where the human edge comes from relationships, judgment, and operator experience rather than headcount.

Visionaries was founded in 2019 by Lacher and Sebastian Pollok and has backed notable names including Lovable (the vibe-coding platform), Black Forest Labs (a frontier AI image model lab), and agent startup N8n.

A Broader Industry Trend

Visionaries isn't alone in reading the room this way. Earlier in 2025, Austrian VC Speedinvest cut 10% of its team, with managing partner Oliver Holle citing the need to become "more lean and effective" and calling out the volume of manual back-office work as "completely ridiculous."

At the other end of the spectrum, QuantumLight — the AI-powered VC firm founded by Revolut's Nik Storonsky — has built its own proprietary model tracking 700,000 VC-backed companies. It closed its first fund at $250M in May 2024 and is reportedly in talks to raise $500M for its second.

What This Means for Founders

For startup founders seeking early-stage backing, the shift has real implications:

  • Partner access becomes more direct — at GP-led firms, you're more likely to be working with the decision-maker from day one, not a mid-level investor who needs to escalate internally.
  • Speed may improve — smaller, more concentrated teams can theoretically move faster on term sheets.
  • Relationship quality matters more — as AI commoditizes deal sourcing and diligence screening, the value a VC adds increasingly comes down to the specific humans involved, not the firm's infrastructure.

Whether the concentration model becomes a dominant structure or a niche experiment depends largely on whether leaner firms can compete on deal access. For Visionaries, the proof will come with the next fund — and the names it backs.