Operator Circle launches to support Europe’s next decacorn

Dozens of European tech company executives have backed a new venture firm built on the thesis that people who have scaled billion-dollar companies know which founders can do it again.

For years, criticism of European venture capital has been structural: too few companies willing to write big checks and too little operational experience on the other side of the term sheet. A new fund announced this week is trying to address the second part of that problem.

Circle of operatorsa newly formed venture firm, was launched with the backing of dozens of senior executives who have built and scaled European tech companies, including Enzo Wälchli, former chief commercial officer of Swiss robotics company ANYbotics, who joins as a general partner.

The fund’s thesis is that operators, people who have lived through the specific chaos of growing a European tech company from Series B to exit, are better positioned than professional venture capitalists to identify which founders have the tools to build at decacorn scale.

The exact size of the fund was not disclosed at the time of publication.

The transition from operator to venture capital is not new in the United States, where companies like Andreessen Horowitz built their early reputation in part on the credibility of the association’s former founders and executives. In Europe, the model has been slower to gain traction, partly because the exit ecosystem that produces experienced operators at scale is younger; Europe’s first generation of decacorns emerged in the last decade.

What Operator Circle is betting is that this generation is now big enough to matter. The executives backing the fund bring direct experience from companies that have overcome the specific challenges of scaling in fragmented European markets: multilingual sales, compliance with multiple regulations, and a talent ecosystem that, while improving, still cannot match Silicon Valley’s depth across sectors.

Whether traders are better investors than analysts is a thesis that the data does not clearly support in either direction: many great traders have been mediocre investors, and vice versa. What the model does provide is close-range pattern recognition: the ability to recognize organizational stress fractures that appear in 200 employees but not 20, and to spot founders who have thought about those problems before arriving.

The launch of Operator Circle is a bet that the right guide through it is less like a partner in a suit than someone who has already climbed.