U.S. venture capitalists once insisted that international startups move stateside before they would write a check. The three 28-year-old founders behind Furo are convinced that their decision to leave Silicon Valley and move back to their home country of Germany has paid off in both VC dollars and business growth.
The startup, which developed software for industrial battery storage systems, has secured $4 million in funding from mostly U.S. backers. And just a year after its founding, Furo has locked in enterprise clients such as German rail company Deutsche Bahn.
“We’re currently moving faster in Europe than if we’d have stayed in the U.S.,” Furo co-founder Lena Sophia Voß said.
On paper, Furo is a Delaware C Corp. that raised a funding round led by U.S.-based TQ Ventures with participation from Neo and Sheryl Sandberg’s fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. But its journey is also representative of an observation recently shared by VC firm a16z that “there is now an advantage to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley.”
Furo’s bridge to Silicon Valley was Munich’s Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), which also participated in its round. It was through this program, which is tied to their alma mater TU Munich, that Voß and her co-founders Leonie Wagner and Simon Wittner made it to the Bay Area, where they studied at Stanford and UC Berkeley.
