I've now been at this for almost two decades, and the pattern I keep coming back to is deceptively simple: the best European companies are built by founders who take a genuine structural advantage and scale it before the rest of the world notices. Zalando did it with European fashion supply chains. HelloFresh did it with fresh food logistics. Scalable did it with regulated fintech infrastructure. Today, I see that same pattern in energy, in mobility, in deep tech. Europe has the engineering talent, the regulatory sophistication, and increasingly the capital to produce global winners. The founders I want to back are the ones who see that clearly and are already building toward it.

"Building a company is an endurance game. You know setbacks will come, you just never know when. Ultra running taught me that giving up is never the answer. There is always a finish line. You commit, adapt, and pull through. That's what the founders we back do. And that's what I do alongside them." 

Rainer is one of HV's longest-serving team members, backing founders from first check to IPO across consumer, fintech, climate, mobility, and an expanding frontier tech portfolio. An engineer by training and an endurance athlete by discipline, he worked on four continents before joining HV in 2008, bringing analytical precision from Siemens and commercial instinct sharpened at 3i and INSEAD. 

Three weeks into the job, HV invested in Zalando. It was an early signal of a career defined by conviction at formative moments, but far from the only one. HV was the first institutional investor in HelloFresh, staying with the company through the long arc from ambition to scale. HV has backed Scalable Capital, FINN, and Quandoo from early stages into category-defining positions, and more recently widened his focus to include European frontier tech in deep tech, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.

Beyond individual investments, Rainer has helped shape HV into one of Europe's enduring venture platforms and driving the firm's generational transition. His focus has been consistent: build through cycles, stay grounded in fundamentals, and ensure HV is designed to outlast any single market environment. An Ironman World Championships finisher in Hawaii, he brings that same endurance to everything he does.