The Renaisance of Private Equity

The old and new Gold Standard in startup & scaleup investments.

A short excursion into Economic History

My 1st exposure to Private Equity happened in the late 2000s also known as the Golden Age of PE. While initiating the related competence center of a Milan/Warsaw based Management Consultancy firm in my function as CEO and market responsible for the CEE, the firm was involved in setting up a PE-vehicle for a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund.

And what better place, what a more secrecy driven environment then Zuerich (CH) could have been, where PE-firms did not even have a detailed name-plate on their entrances.

But what impressed me more than anything was the extreme specialization of the partners running those companies. When talking about raising funds for eg specialized construction material manufacturing one was at the table with highly experienced engineers, seniority production facilities experts and more than knowledgeable marketing & sales experts in that very specific vertical.

Private Equity Fund concept by T. Reiss.

The ICT Jump & Dump pandemic

At the same time I saw the rising number of VC’s and related accelerators that claimed to be capable of incubating and accelerating start- & scaleups across multiple domains. Many of those were not being focused on specific verticals or regions and without employing & deploying staff with super specific knowledge.

The spray & pray approach started to infect VC’s across the globe where one was just hoping that out of a 100 at least one Unicorn emerges. This was followed by widespread disillusionment amongst investors and it was the beginning of an era of scarcity of capital available for great ideas in the 2020s.

Especially the EU Innovation ecosystems fell into the trap of believing that the laws of Silicon Valley apply globally, while not understanding the very special inner workings of that very unique place in the world.

The Renaissance of PE and highly sophisticated VC’s

When I joined in q4, 2025 Ecolation and the great team around Abbas Beheshti Askari, PhD, Dominik Thiel and a highly experienced and competent advisor team to support as finance manager the related fundraising efforts of this DeepScience startup, it was delightful to realize that there is a highly professional top tier part of VC’s that are super specialized in ScienceTech.

In the past weeks we had the privilege to meet with very sophisticated, focused VC’s in our domain that allowed us to accelerate our learning curve exponentially while the classic Spray-Vc’s did not even understand what we are talking about or told us that Ecolation is too early stage.

Well; when one has a patent, investing becomes a no brainer but also the risk-return balance shifts relevantly.

The CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) never lied in the past.

Therefore the top specialized ones bear the hope of a comeback in  confidence by wealthy individuals and investors and to return into the arena because these Focus-VC’s bring the knowledge, experience and ecosystems on the table to reduce risk in early stage investments.

In a wider sense Arbitrage seems very possible in this market segment while algos, speed trading and opaque balance sheets make it impossible for the average bond or shareholder to gain some extra yield on the dollar.

Be smart in choosing from whom to accept money …

Competence through specialization puts much more on the table than just the capability to evaluate the potential of a start- or scaleup when investing. Focused VC’s armor the companies that they invest in with multiple layers and dimensions also through their respective ecosystems like existing inbound and outbound relationships.

Furthermore they can rely, recommend and advise with professional & action-oriented precision and leverage the underlying value of a business.

Therefore I can only recommend to any startup or scaleup, founder and co-founder team to be smart when choosing the people bringing the money. Nobody needs the ones that believe they know just because they had a lucky short at an exit once.

Top Angels and VC’s are able to systematically reproduce success because of their resolute capacity to know …