- Antwerp-based Pitchdrive closed its fourth fund at €60M, turning away about €25–40M in additional LP commitments to stay deliberately small, with all capital from entrepreneurs and family offices.
- The fund plans to invest in 25 to 30 AI-native startups in Europe and beyond. Each investment will range from €250,000 to €3 million.
- Pitchdrive’s first US deal, a $10M seed round in compliance AI startup ZeroDrift, alongside a16z speedrun, signals the Co-founder Capital model is gaining traction beyond Europe.
The Belgian pre-seed and seed investor Pitchdrive closed its fourth fund at €60 million, with all investors being entrepreneurs and family offices and with money left on the table.
“We received over €85 million in subscription requests against an initial target of €50 million, leaving the fund more than 70% oversubscribed. Rather than expand to absorb the excess demand, we capped at €60 million and scaled back commitments across the board,” tells TFN Boris Bogaert, co-founder, investor, and general partner at Pitchdrive.
“Because demand exceeded our target by so much, we made a deliberate decision to cap Fund IV at €60 million and pushed every subscription back to fit within that ceiling,” he adds.
The reasoning was strategic. Pre-seed and seed ticket sizes have risen sharply as artificial intelligence infrastructure costs push up early-stage capital requirements, and Pitchdrive wanted to size the fund around conviction rather than capacity.
The VC firm was started in 2020 by Belgian entrepreneurs Wim Derkinderen, Boris Bogaert, Koen Christiaens, Lorenz Bogaert, Toon Coppens, and Luc Verelst. Jonas Dhaenens, who founded the European unicorn team.blue, serves as chair.
Why AI changes the fund model
Pitchdrive started with a €3 million micro-fund, which Bogaert called a test. They later raised a €30 million fund, then €40 million two years ago. Each fund is sized so that the team can stay involved with every company, rather than just following market trends.
Raising the fund from €40 million to €60 million shows Pitchdrive’s belief that AI-native companies are fundamentally different from startups of the past decade.
“What we see is that the capital is mainly going to tokens rather than people. Small teams that are very compact, with a huge power to grow, but the importance of how founders look into it, the energy, the vision, the creativity to bring things together, and having the possibility to cope with the change, because it’s going so fast,” notes Bogaert.
Now, the main thing Pitchdrive looks for is whether founders can handle rapid change. Bogaert compares this to Formula One, where the best drivers are not just fast but also keep control at high speeds.
For Fund IV, the key question is whether a company has a clear purpose in the AI era and truly operates as an AI-native business. The product does not have to be AI-based.
However, the business model needs to fit today’s market. This could mean AI is creating new categories or changing how existing ones work. Sectors of interest include vertical AI, developer tools, AI consumer and commerce businesses, and software-driven companies in hardware, robotics, and mobility.
Pitchdrive avoids pure model labs, ‘AI for X’ projects that lack strong data or operational advantages, and companies that use AI only to attract funding instead of making it a core part of their business from the start.
What the portfolio shows
At the same time as closing the fund, Pitchdrive made its first US investment: a $10 million seed round in ZeroDrift, a New York compliance AI startup founded by Kumesh Aroomoogan, who also co-founded Accern, an early no-code NLP platform for financial services. The round included a16z, Speedrun, Reign Ventures, and others, and closed in three weeks with three times as much demand as available shares.
Since 2020, Pitchdrive has invested in 70 startups across Europe. Its first three funds are among the top 10% of global venture funds by performance. About 70% of its portfolio companies have raised more money within two years. Notable exits include Henchman, which was acquired by LexisNexis.
The firm reviews more than 500 pitch decks each month but invests carefully. The average investment is now €750,000-€1 million, as AI-native companies need larger pre-seed rounds. Fund IV will make 25 to 30 investments over two years, mostly in Europe and sometimes beyond.
Pitchdrive’s network includes founders and senior leaders from companies like team.blue, Deliverect, Lighthouse, and Loop Earplugs. “When we built team.blue, the kind of investor I wished I’d had on day one didn’t exist in Europe. That’s what Pitchdrive is: a firm run by people who’ve already been in the founder’s seat. Fund IV doubles down on the model: stay small, stay close, stay disciplined,” concludes Dhaenens.
The real challenge for Fund IV will be whether Pitchdrive can maintain its disciplined approach as investment sizes grow, more US deals emerge, and the pressure to invest quickly increases, especially now that AI accounts for over half of all European venture capital.