Berlin's Pre-Seed Investor Pool, by the Numbers
Berlin has 150+ investors tagged to the pre-seed stage in the AngelMatch database, and that single number tells you most of what you need to know about where to start. Roughly half of every pre-seed investor listed anywhere in Germany is based in Berlin. Munich, the country's second-biggest startup hub, has less than half of Berlin's pre-seed count. If you're raising a pre-seed round and you're not at least looking at Berlin, you're skipping the city with the deepest bench in the country.
That bench gets deeper as a company matures, too. Berlin's investor base includes 450+ backers tagged to seed and 300+ tagged to early stage venture, roughly three times and twice the pre-seed count. That's a normal pattern everywhere, more capital shows up once there's traction to point to, but the size of the jump in Berlin specifically tells you the city has real depth at every stage, not just a crowded early round followed by a cliff. A pre-seed investor here has usually watched plenty of the companies they've backed graduate into that seed pool, so they're not guessing about what a good next round looks like.
What this means practically: don't treat your pre-seed round as a one-off transaction with whoever says yes first. The same people who write your first check are often connected to the seed and early-stage names one ring out, and a Berlin angel who feels well treated in a small pre-seed round is a real source of warm introductions later. Building a Berlin round with that in mind, rather than just chasing the largest number of yeses, tends to pay off by the time you're back out raising again in twelve to eighteen months.
Who You'll Actually Be Pitching
Individual angel investors make up the large majority of the pre-seed names tagged to Berlin, not institutional venture capital. A good number of them are current or former founders themselves, writing checks alongside an operating job, an advisory practice, or their own next company. That matters for how you pitch. You're talking to someone who has sat exactly where you're sitting, not a committee reading a memo, so lead with the problem and the traction, not a polished market-sizing slide.
Venture capital firms are still part of the mix, just a smaller slice of it, and a number of the people on this list wear more than one hat: angel and operator, angel and accelerator mentor, angel and part-time venture capital scout. Filtering by angel/individual versus fund-backed investors before you start outreach will save you from pitching a $2 million round to someone who typically writes a $50,000 check, and it's a filter AngelMatch's investor database lets you apply directly.
Berlin's Funding Climate Right Now
Berlin isn't just Germany's biggest pre-seed city on paper, it's also where the most funding activity is happening overall. In the first half of 2026, Berlin led every German state both in the number of funding rounds closed (95, though that's down about 30% year over year) and in total capital raised (nearly €1.7 billion, up around 10%), according to EY's Startup Barometer. Over the full 2025 year, Berlin startups raised funding more often than startups in any other German state, out of a national total of roughly €8.4 billion across 716 deals, Germany's third-highest year on record.
Here's the part that matters more if you're pre-seed specifically: that money is not spreading evenly. EY's own analysis points out that investors are increasingly backing fewer, larger startups they see as safer bets, which means younger and smaller companies are having a harder time competing for capital even as the headline totals look strong. In practice, that means a pre-seed pitch in Berlin has to work harder to stand out this year than the city's overall funding numbers might suggest. A tight, specific pitch beats a broad one, and it's worth using a tool like a runway calculator to show investors exactly how far their check gets you and when you'll need the next one.
How Pre-Seed Rounds Actually Get Put Together in Berlin
Angel checks in Berlin follow the same general range you'll see anywhere: $25,000 to $500,000, with the lower half of that range being far more common at pre-seed than the upper half. Dilution at this stage typically runs 15% to 20% per round. What's a bit different in Berlin, and in Germany more broadly, is how often a pre-seed round gets stacked. It's common to see a handful of angel checks sit alongside non-dilutive public funding, most notably the EXIST founder grant, rather than one lead investor writing the whole round. If you haven't looked into EXIST or similar regional grant programs yet, it's worth doing before you finalize your cap table, since it changes how much you actually need from angels.
German investors also tend to want things buttoned up earlier than you might expect from a pure pre-seed conversation. A clean cap table, a simple term sheet, and clear documentation of who owns what go a long way here, more so than in markets where a loose SAFE and a handshake are the norm. Getting this organized before you start meetings, rather than scrambling once someone says yes, is the single easiest way to speed up a Berlin pre-seed round. A fundraising CRM earns its keep here too, since a stacked round with several small checks is much easier to track in one place than across a dozen email threads.
What Berlin Investors Expect to See in Diligence
German company law adds a wrinkle that catches some first-time founders off guard. If you're set up as a GmbH, the standard structure for a German startup, any transfer of shares has to go through a notary. That's not optional paperwork, it's a legal requirement, and it means a Berlin pre-seed close usually needs a notary appointment booked well in advance rather than a quick electronic signature the night before. Build that lead time into your closing timeline from the start instead of discovering it a week before you'd hoped to have money in the bank.
It also means the US-style SAFE, a one-page instrument with no notary involved, isn't a standard tool under German law the way it is in Silicon Valley. Most Berlin pre-seed rounds instead use a convertible loan agreement built to fit German legal requirements, which your lawyer will typically already have a template for. If an investor sends you their own version, read it closely. Terms like the discount rate, the valuation cap, and what happens if the loan isn't converted before a set date can vary more between individual Berlin angels than you'd expect from a single, standardized market.
Timing and Focus
Two stretches of the year go quiet for German fundraising: Sommerferien, roughly mid-July through late August, when a meaningful share of Berlin's investor and founder community is out of the country, and the back half of December into early January. Sending your first outreach in early June or early September, ahead of both slow periods, tends to get faster replies than trying to force a meeting in the middle of either one. Outside those windows, Berlin's founder and angel community runs on a fairly dense calendar of meetups and pitch events, and showing up consistently at a few of them tends to do more for your pipeline than a single big-name conference appearance.
Berlin's wider investor base leans heavily toward fintech, e-commerce, enterprise software, and other B2B tools, and that pattern holds at the pre-seed stage too. If your startup sits in one of those categories, you'll find a wider set of people who already understand the space without a lengthy explainer. If you're building something outside them, plan on a longer education phase in early meetings, and don't rule out seed-stage investors from elsewhere in Germany or Western Europe who might come in slightly earlier than usual for the right team.
Berlin's pre-seed pool is smaller than London's or Paris's in raw numbers, but it's the deepest one in Germany by a wide margin, and about half of the country's active pre-seed investors are sitting in this one city. That's worth more to you right now than a longer, thinner list spread across a country you don't have relationships in yet. Start narrow, find the investors who actually write pre-seed checks in Berlin, and use AngelMatch's investor database to filter down to them before you start sending emails.
Pre-seed investors
