A German startup that builds software for industrial battery storage has raised $4 million from mostly U.S. investors after its three 28-year-old founders left Silicon Valley and returned home to Munich, according to a September 10 report from TechCrunch. The company, Furo, secured funding led by U.S.-based TQ Ventures with participation from Neo and Sheryl Sandberg's fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, just one year after its founding. The trio's decision to relocate contradicts the traditional venture capital requirement that international startups move to the United States before receiving funding.
Furo's founders—Lena Sophia Voß, Leonie Wagner, and Simon Wittner—came to the Bay Area through Munich's Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), which also invested in the startup's round, and studied at Stanford and UC Berkeley. They previously worked at Apple, Google X, and AI startups, and all received full-time offers with visas allowing them to stay in the U.S. The startup remains a Delaware C Corporation on paper but operates from Germany, where it has signed enterprise customers including Deutsche Bahn, the German national rail company. The founders now return to the United States three or four times annually for administrative tasks and investor meetings.
"We're currently moving faster in Europe than if we'd have stayed in the U.S.," co-founder Voß said, explaining that the decision to return wasn't driven by immigration concerns but by opportunity. The report notes that Voß called starting Furo from Munich "highly beneficial" for growth, citing network-driven customer recommendations, operational expertise, mentorship, and proximity to technical universities for hiring. According to the report, Voß emphasized that the company's U.S. investors questioned whether Furo could hire talent with its budget, which actually represented top-end salaries in Germany.
The report explains that Furo chose to focus on Europe because the founders determined that high electricity costs for industrial companies were a more urgent problem there, particularly in Germany, which has experienced repeated energy crises over the past five years. Voß told TechCrunch that being far from Germany made the company's work harder when it briefly operated from the U.S. under its former name, Lumera Energy, during Neo's accelerator program. For early-stage companies, she said, success depends heavily on network proximity and customer access. The startup benefits from lower engineering salaries compared to Silicon Valley, less competition with Big Tech for talent, and strong CDTM connections that help the company gain visibility. The report frames Furo's path as representative of a recent observation from venture firm a16z that startups now gain advantages from maintaining presence in both their home country and Silicon Valley.
The company's trajectory suggests that European energy startups can access U.S. venture capital while building operations at home, reversing a long-standing pattern where American investors demanded relocation as a funding condition. Voß told the outlet that the team deliberately chose to return "because we see that right now, it's a better time to build an energy startup in Europe instead of the U.S." The founders' ability to secure Silicon Valley funding while operating from Munich may signal a broader shift in how international founders balance market opportunity with investor expectations. Founders navigating geographic strategy may find that maintaining dual presence requires accepting the friction of regular transatlantic travel, while investors backing distributed teams must weigh operational efficiency against access to concentrated talent markets.