When you’ve been in the business of investing for as long as founders Koen & Alex have, you’ve seen it all. Good investments, great investments, terrible investments, super cool companies, boring ones, awesome tools, messy Excel sheets and everything in between.

After a collective 50 years of VC experience Koen and Alex decided it was time to solve a problem that they had as investors – finding great companies to invest in. Venture IQ was born to solve the problem of how to manage and collaborate on the technology scouting and evaluation process.

Like any other startup, Venture IQ had humble beginnings in the basement of a friend’s company and quickly grew into a bigger office on the canals in Amsterdam with some awesome analysts and first clients. Venture IQ hired some developers and began building Catalist in 2016 to collect information on all the companies they saw and collaborated with clients to generate cool short lists.

Over the past 3 years Venture IQ and Catalist have come a long way – more than 50 clients; 400 completed searches, over 56000 companies in Catalist collections and 17M+ companies overall. With a new office in Shanghai, China we’re expanding our coverage and tracking innovation on a global scale.

We’re so confident in our scouting process that we’ll guarantee that we find at least one company that you didn’t know existed in a given technology space.

Get in touch to see how we can help you to improve the outcome of your next innovation and technology scouting project.