VCs from the US are pushing into Germany: “This has never happened before!”

It might be a bit cheeky to say that Markus Wagner is a kind of Austrian Samwer brother. But there is an undeniable parallel between his life and that of the Samwers as entrepreneurs: In the early 2000s, Wagner founded a startup that, like Jamba, had something to do with cell phones. 3united AG offered mobile communications services. And like Jamba, the US corporation VeriSign acquired this company in 2006 for almost 60 million euros.

Markus Wagner, a native of Vienna, stayed on board. He went to New York as a vice president at VeriSign, later moving to Palo Alto. "I've always been a big Silicon Valley tech fan," says the Austrian with Bavarian roots. With his "learnings and know-how, with the money and time from my first exit almost 20 years ago," as he puts it, he then founded i5invest.

The firm currently has investment banking offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid. Under the brand i5growth Capital, a kind of VC arm, Wagner makes direct investments in tech companies. Specifically, in those "that have the good fortune and the bad luck to have been born in Europe and not in Palo Alto," as he says. He helps startups gain a stronger presence in the US—including on the radars of potential buyers. He has already sold companies to Google, Salesforce , Qualcomm, Microsoft, and other tech companies.