German VC Firm Raises €400M to Improve Supply Chains

Berlin-based VC firm Visionaries Club has raised a new €400 million fund to invest in B2B technology, a press release said.

It will be divided into three funds: “a €150m seed fund; a €200m early growth fund to invest in startups post-Series B; and a new so-called Tomorrow Fund of €50m, which will focus on science and technology investments at pre-seed and seed,” the report said.

Visionaries Club is focused on the digitizing of the enterprise supply chain, which includes sourcing, sales and more, along with tools letting people work remotely.

One of the founders, Robert Lacher, has said he’s excited about B2B fintech and things like BNPL and B2B payment stacks. He said the latter is because “there’s no PayPal for B2B yet.”

In addition, Visionaries Club is looking into Software as a Service (SaaS) for small businesses, which Lacher said is an “underserved” sector for software — and the biggest market globally overall.

The new Tomorrow Fund, however, will focus on big world issues like climate change and pollution. The money from that fund will go toward startups in health, transportation, agriculture, construction and mobility.

“There is just not enough ‘courageous capital’ combined with entrepreneurial experience being deployed in these areas. We are happy to have our share in making both more accessible from now on,” said fellow founder Sebastian Pollok.

Earlier this month, PYMNTS wrote that venture capital, private equity and various other funding were down, but B2B payments had been seeing some activity — 10% of the top 100 most recent transactions were in the B2B FinTech space.

Read more: B2B Payment Funding Down — But Not Out

That has included Berlin-based fintech topi, which raised $45 million in a second equity investment round. The company offers a platform letting merchants to offer computers, monitors, smartphones and more for subscription services.

In addition, there have been companies in the ag sector, transportation and in various countries worldwide that have seen some activity going on.

New PYMNTS Study: How Consumers Use Digital Banks

A PYMNTS survey of 2,124 US consumers shows that while two-thirds of consumers have used FinTechs for some aspect of banking services, just 9.3% call them their primary bank.