Filip is a founding partner of Cherry Ventures, one of Germany’s most important seed investors. Their portfolio includes unicorns like Flixbus, Auto1 Group, Forto, Infarm, and well-known startups like Amorelie, Kitchen Stories, Flaschenpost, Spryker, and Superlist. Their portfolio also includes our former guests: Qualifyze, Sanity Group, and Rows. Filip has a background as an entrepreneur himself, so he and Cherry approach startup investing differently. Tune in to learn more about him and the VC.

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This interview is in media partnership with the German startup association (Bundesverband Deutscher Startups https://deutschestartups.org/). Their German Startup Awards #GSA22 honor each year outstanding female and male founders and investors in special categories. You can learn more about the winners in our interviews and on this website: https://germanstartupawards.de/rueckblick/rueckblick-2022  

You can also have a look at our history, we also interviewed many winners of the German Startup Awards 2021 already. 

Filip Dames has had an accomplished career, starting out as an intern in Malaysia with DaimlerChrysler, at BCG, and Sony BMG in New York City. Following his venture into the corporate world, he then founded a collectible marketplace called Tamundo. There he went on to oversee the international expansion of Zalando and become the founder and CEO of Zalando Lounge (Zalando’s shopping club). The venture was a success, helping Zalando to go public in 2014. He decided to leave the company, making his 30th birthday also his Zalando farewell party.

From there Filip decided to venture off and focus on venture capital; so it came as no surprise when he started Cherry Ventures in 2013 in Berlin as business angel and startup investor. With tickets of 10.000–50.000€ they are dedicated to helping Germany, Europe, and beyond with investments for entrepreneurs wanting to make their visions reality.

Cherry Ventures (https://www.cherry.vc/) is an early-stage venture capital fund founded and led by former entrepreneurs. They are focusing on European seed-stage companies in the B2B and B2C space. Cherry invests there at the pre-seed- and seed stage with initial tickets between €500k and €5M.

They started out with their first fund with their own money and the money of close friends, much less than 10 m €. From there they build a portfolio of 30 companies, of which some did really well. This in turn enabled them to raise an institutional fund, worth 150 m Euros. In the second...