Nico Wittenborn built one of Europe's best-performing early-stage funds by betting on consumer subscriptions before anyone else

Nico Wittenborn, Adjacent

Nico Wittenborn built Adjacent into what he describes as one of Europe's best-performing early-stage funds by making a contrarian bet on consumer subscriptions at a moment when nearly every new fund was chasing SaaS multiples. He launched in 2019 as a solo GP — before that structure had a name — and closed a $40 million first fund after an 18-month fundraise that overlapped with COVID and the birth of his first child.

Origin

Wittenborn grew up in Tübingen, Germany, stumbled into his first business selling jailbroken iPhones via a tool called Red Snow, then cold-emailed his way into what became Point Nine Capital, the first institutional venture fund in Berlin. Five years there, investing in Zendesk and Loom among others, led to a recruiting call from Insight Partners, where he moved to New York in 2016. When he left Insight in early 2019, the solo GP infrastructure — AngelList rolling funds, Carta — was just starting and, in his view, wasn't institutional-grade. He hired a fund admin and auditors the traditional way.

His first LP close started with founders he'd already made money for: Nik Storonsky (Revolut), the founders of Calm, and GPs from his Point Nine days. Thrive Capital and Founders Fund anchored the first fund. The first family office to come in was SES, which had early relationships with both Thrive and Founders Fund.

“The second investment I did was Speechify, which ended up doing very well. And so with some proof that I could also function by myself, I then went to the institutions and then was able to get a $40,000,000 first fund together. I just started investing out of fund four now.”

Consumer subscription thesis

The first two Adjacent funds focused tightly on consumer subscription businesses, a deliberate pivot away from the SaaS consensus of 2019–2021. The logic was structural: these companies reach revenue quickly, run lean on headcount, and generate meaningful profit at scale — but they hit churn ceilings that make venture-scale outcomes harder to sustain than SaaS.

That tension led Wittenborn toward an aggregation play. The insight was that consumer subscription apps reaching $50–200 million in revenue but struggling to grow further were natural acquisition targets for someone willing to run them efficiently. A 2020 webinar conversation with Luca, the CEO of Bending Spoons, crystallized the investment. Bending Spoons, which recently went public, is described as the first notable exit for Adjacent. Bending Spoons subsequently acquired Tractive, Wittenborn's Austrian pet-tracking portfolio company — likely the largest exit in Austrian startup history — completing what he calls a "fund one, fund one" loop.

Aura, the health-tracking wearable, came out of an SPV Wittenborn co-led with the team that later founded Left Lane Capital, before Adjacent had a formal fund. The hardware-plus-subscription pattern behind Aura also informed investments in Backbone and Tractive.

Consumer AI now

The consumer landscape has grown harder for early-stage venture. Wittenborn points to RevenueCat, which powers subscriptions for 60% of newly launched apps, as a proxy for just how many new consumer apps are entering the market. More apps means higher competition and lower probability of venture-scale outcomes, even as more niches get served.

The bigger structural problem is the labs. General-purpose AI — ChatGPT, Muse, Instinct — absorbs use cases that would previously have supported standalone apps. He is skeptical of pure-play consumer AI at early-stage valuations, arguing it is too crowded and too exposed to being eaten by OpenAI, Meta, or Apple. His current consumer bets trend toward deeper technical differentiation: Popcorn, a next-gen telco with its own core infrastructure and an AI call-screening layer, is his example of the kind of vertical depth that can still command a durable position.

Europe

Wittenborn is candid that Europe has structural disadvantages — regulation, labor law, bureaucracy — that slow startups relative to their U.S. counterparts and that AI has largely passed European companies by as a consequence of earlier underinvestment in software infrastructure. His view is that Europe should play to differentiated strengths rather than try to replicate U.S. AI infrastructure. Revolut and Bending Spoons matter, but they took time to compound, and the ecosystem trickle-down is still early.

He is skeptical of the "Europe needs its own LLM" framing, drawing an analogy to Spotify: Europe never built a European Facebook, but Spotify succeeded precisely because it ran a complementary race rather than a direct one.

Current bets

Adjacent is now investing out of Fund IV. Wittenborn's LA visit is to see Inversion Space, a hypersonic re-entry vehicle company partnered with Unreal on the Golden Dome program and holding a NASA contract — his clearest break from the consumer subscription thesis. He is also an LP in Cantos, Ian Rountree's San Francisco fund, reflecting his broader effort to anchor first-time solo GP funds as that structure has become mainstream.

His read on Bending Spoons' M&A pipeline is straightforward: the orphaned AI-era software companies being built today, well-funded now but likely abandoned when the hype cycle turns, are tomorrow's acquisition targets at 10 cents on the dollar. The cycle, he says, is already repeating in real time.