We started Credo in 2009 with a simple logic: Central and Eastern Europe is a region with almost 200M people, $4T in GDP and strong technical education. Every year, it produces a new cohort of globally successful engineers and researchers - international olympiad winners, Nobel Prize laureates, founders of companies like Open AI or Databricks. Yet, back then, there was no startup ecosystem. No venture capital available for aspiring founders. In our eyes, that was a clear disparity. We believed that if CEE talent got access to the capital necessary to build globally successful startups, it would deliver. Credo was born to provide this capital.

Our thesis has remained the same since. We identify outstanding tech talent across all CEE countries as well as their diaspora communities around the world. Founders who have an idea but no product yet, engineers and operators who are thinking about becoming founders one day, students with clear spikes. We aim to get to know them as early as possible and work with them to help shape their startup ambitions. Making the right connections, brainstorming about their ideas. Being the first investors in their companies when they are ready.

We believe exceptional people always find a way, so we back them in the earliest possible stages and trust them to figure things out. We are not thesis-driven investors, the best founders can iterate, pivot, create new unexpected categories no one has even thought of. We concentrate our portfolio in a few high-conviction bets, so that we can work with our founders hands-on and give them as much of our time as they can use. Helping them to figure out their product and GTM propositions, build the core of their team, and raise the next round from the best later-stage investors in the US/Europe.

We strongly believe that VCs should never force their will upon founders - once we make an investment, we trust our founders to make the right decisions and we operate as their partners and peers, not supervisors.

The founders we like are usually distinctly Eastern European: Heavily technical, serious builders who don’t enjoy social media theatre and ego plays. They want to build difficult products that can genuinely improve people's lives. We are not afraid to take on a lot of risk and uncertainty and back founders experimenting with new technologies, research areas, or business models. Moonshots are always better than consensual bets. We look for strong fundamentals and build comfort around raw visions, unpolished pitch decks, imperfect storytellers, CVs not ticking the traditional boxes. Outlier founders can come from any place and any background.

If this resonates with you, reach out to us, we would love to get to know you.