PROJECT A - Key Persons
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- Head of Investor Relations
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- Venture Development Manager
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- Junior Growth Marketing Manager
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- Junior Talent Acquisition Manager
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- Teamlead Talent Acquisition
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- Senior Talent Acquisition Manager
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- Senior Talent Acquisition Manager
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- Talent Acquisition Associate
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- Venture Development Project Lead
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- Junior Compliance & Finance Manager
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- Partner
- Partner / Private Equity
Christoph has held multiple positions within Project A and was an integral part in forming our operational support team. He has founded and led our Sales & Customer Success team, as well as overseeing the entire operational support as Head of Venture Development. Before moving over into the investment team in 2021, he served Project A as Chief Commercial Officer. He has worked with over 40 of our portfolio companies in a variety of roles and led value creation programs across our Private Equity portfolio.
Prior to joining Project A, Christoph worked at company builder Rheingau Founders and led the commercial team at Itembase. Christoph was educated in London at London School of Economics (LSE) and WHU.
Job Titles:
- Working Student Talent Acquisition
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- Teamlead Talent Acquisition
Dr. Florian Heinemann is a General Partner and co-founded the firm in 2012.
He is responsible for the functional areas of marketing, CRM and business intelligence.
Before co-founding Project A, he was managing director at Rocket Internet with the same areas of responsibility (2007-2012). During his time at Rocket, he was mainly involved at Zalando, Global Fashion Group, and Spark Networks (aka eDarling/Affinitas). Prior to Rocket, Florian was co-founder and managing director of JustBooks/AbeBooks being in charge of marketing and product (1999-2002, exit to Amazon in 2006). Then, he was co-heading the digital marketing department of Jamba! and the online dating portal iLove (2003-2005, exit to Verisign). In 2006, he was co-founder of the online marketplace antibodies-online.com (exit to Broadoak).
Florian holds a doctorate's degree in innovation management/entrepreneurship from RWTH Aachen University (Germany). He was a visiting scholar at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (USA). His research has been published in leading international journals, such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of International Marketing, and Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft. Furthermore, Florian holds a master's degree in business administration from WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management in Koblenz (Germany). During his studies, he was a fellow of "Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes" (German National Academic Foundation).
Moreover, he has been an investor/business angel in more than 80 startups including Trivago (seed investor), Zalando (founding investor), Audibene (seed investor), Home24 (founding investor), CityDeal/Groupon (founding investor), Betreut.de/Care (seed investor), ClassPass (early stage investor), Mimi Hearing (early stage investor), Bitbond (seed investor), Lillydoo (early stage investor), and the Code University (seed stage investor).
Besides his Project A-related board activities, he sits on the board of About You and the digital advisory boards of Henkel, Koerber, and Oetker. Moreover, he is a shareholder and sits on the advisory board of Startup Teens, one of the leading German non-profits to foster entrepreneurial activity among pupils.
Job Titles:
- Managing Director Chief Risk & Compliance Officer
Jan-Willem is a Managing Director and joined Project A in 2023.
Within Project A's regulated AIFM Platform (Kapitalverwaltungsgesellschaft), his management resort "Risk Management & Regulatory Affairs" primarily covers the responsibilities for risk management, outsourcing controlling, compliance, anti-money laundering and organization and processes as well as supervisory law and tax structuring.
Jan-Willem has long-term professional experience gained in German and Luxembourg-based AIFM platforms, i.a. from Union Investment and PATRIZIA SE, and its worldwide investing closed- and open-ended fund products. Due to many years in cross-functional roles, he provides a deep understanding of fund and investment structures as well as of operational and administrative end-to-end processes in Front and Back Offices in BaFin-supervised entities. Academically, Jan-Willem holds a diploma of fiscal affairs from Hamburg's tax authorities and is a fully qualified lawyer state-examined in Regensburg and Nürnberg with a PhD in insolvency law from Hamburg University.
Jan-Willem is a northern soul who lives with his wife and their four children at the outskirts of Hamburg. As a balance, he enjoys sensory sharpened sitting on a deer stand in his hunting ground in the Saxon Forest area. As son of a captain, Jan-Willem is also closely connected to the sea since his childhood days; just before starting at Project A, his latest achievement was the Coastal Skipper Certificate.
We've founded and scaled successful companies ourselves, and we've learned firsthand that doing meaningful work requires vision, drive, and investors who believe in you every step of the way.
Job Titles:
- Senior System Administrator
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- Senior System Administrator
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- Senior Venture Development Manager
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- Head of Demand Generation
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- Venture Development Project Lead
Leopold Lerach has been promoted to Principal at Project A.
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- Principal / Private Equity
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- Venture Development Project Lead
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- Partner / Managing Director at Project a Services UK Ltd.
- Partner and Managing Director of Project
Before joining Project A, Malin was a General Partner at Passion Capital. She brings extensive and diverse experience from investment and operational roles across the startup and business ecosystem. Previously, Malin was on the executive team at Browns (NYSE: FTCH) where she was responsible for building Browns into a key pillar for the group's supply and platform strategies. Prior to that Malin was an investor at Index Ventures, specialising in consumer and SaaS across venture and growth in Europe and the US.
She started her career as a management consultant at Bain & Company in Stockholm. She holds a Master of Engineering as well as a Master of Science in Biotechnology from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
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- Head of Sales & Go to Market
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- Head of Sales & Go to Market
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- Talent Acquisition Manager
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- Head of Accounting and Reporting
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- Head of Frontend Engineering
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- Senior IT Compliance Manager
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- Talent Acquisition Manager
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- Working Student Talent Acquisition
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- Head of IT Infrastructure
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- Principal
- Software Engineer
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- Partner / Procurement & Supply Chain, Sales
- Partner at Project
Philipp is a true operator turned investor who focuses on early-stage investing in supply chain & logistics, construction, and energy. He joined Project A in 2015 and led our venture development team before taking over marketing and analytics as CMO and ultimately joining the investment team. Philipp has significantly impacted Project A and our portfolio, from working closely with companies such as Trade Republic, Kry, and Catawiki to leading our investments in Valve and Vay, amongst others.
As a Rhinelander who lived and studied in France, Philipp speaks German, English, and French and is now based in Cologne, where he is closest to Paris and his favorite football club. Philipp holds an MBA from Hamburg Media School.
Job Titles:
- Managing Director
- Operational Partner and MD of Project
Before joining Project A, he managed large scale projects at the international football associations UEFA and FIFA, the global operations strategy team at the Adidas Group and the technology consultancy Accenture. Rainer received his diploma in education science, organizational science and business administration from the University of Cologne (Germany).
Driven by his personal path and his experience as a passionate father, Rainer cares a lot about diversity and sustainability. At Project A, he drives projects related to these themes and is a proud member of "Leaders for Climate Action". He speaks German, English and French, is currently studying Polish. He has also lived and worked in Poland and Switzerland.
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- Head of Office Management
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- Senior Data Scientist / Engineer
Simon Walter - Chief Strategy Officer
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- Director Software Engineering
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- Chief Technology Officer
- Chief Technology Officer and MD of Project
Stephan started his career as a Software Engineer after finishing his diploma in Computer Science and worked many years in Software Engineering and Tech Leadership roles.
Since joining Project A in 2015, Stephan has worked with our portfolio companies to build modern, scalable software systems and the corresponding tech organizations. He has advised them on their digital transformation.
Companies like Trade Republic, Kry, Spryker, Sennder, Lampenwelt, Gartenhaus, Amann Girrbach, and many more were supported in interim CTO and VP Engineering positions, with teams of experts and by interviewing, hiring, and mentoring their Tech Leadership. In addition, Stephan works closely with our Investment Team on the VC and PE side to support them in their Due Diligence processes.
Job Titles:
- Junior Talent Acquisition Manager
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- Teamlead Talent Acquisition
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- Working Student Venture Development
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- General Partner
- General Partner at Project
Before co-founding Project A, Thies was CEO of a German online comparison startup. Previous to that, he was a principal at The Boston Consulting Group (Berlin, New York) and headed the global operations strategy team at the sporting goods company Adidas. Thies holds a double master's degree from WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management in Koblenz (Germany) and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Chicago (USA).
Thies Sander is a General Partner at Project A and co-founded the firm in 2012.
Thuy Ngan Trinh is Chief Marketing Officer and MD of Project A Services.
Before joining our Marketing team in 2015, Thuy Ngan previously worked at Zalando and Bosch. After 4 years at Project A, Thuy Ngan consulted Germany's biggest digital companies (e.g. HelloFresh, DeliveryHero) at Meta.
She returned to Project A to work even closer with the portfolio companies and help them scale their marketing engine. Since 2021, she has been leading marketing efforts as the Chief Marketing Officer for different portfolio companies, being involved in reaching the first 1M customers for Trade Republic and significantly increasing Kry's marketing efficiency.
Job Titles:
- Head of Backend Engineering
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- General Partner
- General Partner and Co
Together with Anton Waitz, Uwe is responsible for the venture capital investment activities and the investment team.
Before co-founding Project A, Uwe was active at Rocket Internet from the company's founding in 2007, as one of the first staff members and a managing director. He holds a bachelor's degree in business from WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management in Koblenz (Germany) and a master's degree in engineering from the University of Stuttgart (Germany).
He has been included in Forbes Magazine's "30 under 30" list, recognized as a "Young Leader" by the German-American think tank "Atlantik-Brücke eV" and selected for Capital's "40 under 40" list. He has lectured on venture capital at Stanford University (USA), WHU and ESADE Barcelona (Spain) among others. In 2019, he was elected to the executive board of the German Startup Association. Since his assignment in 2006 to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, disaster logistics has been his passion. He serves as a consultant to United Nations organizations through field work in e.g. Ethiopia, Colombia, Turkey and Greece. He speaks German, English, Spanish and French, is currently studying Arabic and has lived and worked in East Africa, Japan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.
Uwe Horstmann is a General Partner and co-founded the firm in 2012.
Job Titles:
- Working Student Talent Acquisition
Job Titles:
- Senior Talent Acquisition Manager
Job Titles:
- Working Student Talent Acquisition