Kathi Wilhelm

Kathi is one of our Partners based out of our Berlin office, leading deals across Europe and the US. She is focused on backing and supporting exceptional founders using AI to solve previously uncracked challenges in the B2B world.

I’ve always been an extrovert and deeply curious: In school, I played theater for many years. I loved immersing myself in different characters and watching a play come to life after months of teamwork. I took any opportunity to travel - the first time I left Europe was when I went on a high school exchange to Rwanda through my local public school. A few years later, I worked at a French passport office filing ID applications for my summer job (- and got free housing to explore Paris!).

After studying in St. Gallen, joining BCG felt like another way to explore the world and see different industries and business problems - and it opened the door to the US for me.

It was only during my time at Harvard Business School for my MBA that I was truly exposed to entrepreneurship and to people relentlessly pursuing their own ideas and visions of the world. It's also where I first learned about venture capital as an industry and immediately felt drawn to it.

I’m a die-hard optimist, and there's hardly another job that's both all about people and truly mostly about thinking "What if it works?" (a sign we have hanging up in our Berlin office). It’s a privilege to dream alongside founders and see them persevere when conventional wisdom says they're wrong. Of course, the path is rarely a straight line. I strive to be a founder’s first call when things get messy. Those moments are often the most pivotal for a company's journey, and it's during those that you earn the right to call yourself a true partner to a founder. 

Over the past eight years of investing, most recently at Index Ventures, I've had the opportunity to work with founders across the DACH region and beyond. I've worked with them from the earliest stages of an idea to pre-IPO on both sides of the Atlantic.

I’ve learned that, for me, it's all about the people. I like to spend time on the origin story: What shaped these founders? What drove them to tackle this specific problem?

Besides that, I’m passionate about what others mistakenly dismiss as “boring spaces” - the founders working away in unglamorous corners to develop software that improves factory yield and AI models that solve previously unsolved challenges in R&D-intensive industries. These might not be the topics everyone wakes up excited about, but they address some of the biggest unsolved problems of our time. I’m fascinated by the founders who choose to take them on - and by what motivates them.

Outside of work, I love having a full house and bringing friends from different walks of life together over a good glass of wine and a home-cooked meal. Some days it’s Ottolenghi; some days it's ceviche. Recently, I’ve gotten into the Sichuan cuisine.