HV Capital Interview: Written Stage, Cognitive Test, Partner Rounds

An HV Capital interview for an investment-track role starts before any CV is read: candidates answer at least two open-ended written prompts, and HV says it weighs "the effort, depth of thought, and any original or contrarian perspective" over polish. A cognitive ability test typically follows, then several rounds moving from junior team members toward partners.

The firm behind that process manages €2.8bn and has made close to 290 investments, and it started out in 2000 as Holtzbrinck Ventures, the in-house venture arm of a German publishing house. It dropped that name in a 2020 rebrand that also pushed it into growth-stage investing, and its early cheques into Zalando, Delivery Hero and FlixBus built the reputation its newer bets in deep tech and defence-adjacent hardware are now extending.

HV Capital at a Glance

How the HV Capital Interview Process Works

For investment-track roles, HV asks candidates to answer written, open-ended questions rather than lead with a CV. One posting put it directly: applicants should answer at least two prompts, with the firm weighing "the effort, depth of thought, and any original or contrarian perspective" over polish.

What the Written Stage and Later Rounds Test

A cognitive ability test typically follows the written stage, used across both investment and operations hiring rather than only for analyst-track roles. For one internship cycle, HV published a concrete timeline: applications closing in late October, with first interviews expected the following two to three weeks, implying a written review followed by a round shortly after.

Candidates describe a process that moves from broad to specific rather than testing the same thing twice — early rounds probe general reasoning and motivation, with the written responses and cognitive test doing most of that work, while later rounds shift toward live case discussion, closer to how the team actually evaluates a deal day to day.

• A written stage testing judgment and original thinking, not polish
• A cognitive ability assessment, timed and standardised
• One or more case-style conversations with the investment team
• A final round with partners, where fit and thesis alignment matter as much as technical ability

Nothing in HV's own materials names an exact number of rounds. What is consistent, across roles and years, is the order: written judgment first, live conversation later. HV's postings are written in English throughout, though nothing in its public materials says whether spoken interviews, particularly for Munich-based roles, also run in German.

Where to Actually Apply

HV has historically hired through its own Recruitee page rather than the shared board that carries its name, which mostly lists jobs at portfolio companies like Flix, Scalable Capital, sennder and Upvest, not at HV itself. The Recruitee page went offline in late 2025, which makes email and the team page the practical routes in for now.

Over the years, HV has hired for a wide spread of roles through that channel: Analyst positions on its Fintech and Deeptech teams, a Growth-stage Analyst and Associate track, Chief of Staff, Compliance Specialist, Finance Manager, Founder Associate, and internship cycles that run each spring.

"We recognise that venture capital can seem like a 'closed shop,' and we are dedicated to changing this perception. Our selection process is designed to be inclusive, placing more emphasis on your responses to our screening questions than on your CV. Additionally, we use cognitive ability tests to give you an opportunity to showcase your skills."

From Holtzbrinck Ventures to HV Capital

HV Capital's founding story runs through publishing, not tech. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the parent of Macmillan and a raft of German newspapers and magazines, set up Holtzbrinck Ventures in Munich in 2000 to invest in the internet companies its core business had no way to build itself. The unit became independently owned in 2010, while still trading as HV Holtzbrinck Ventures.

The current name arrived a decade later. On 29 October 2020, the firm dropped Holtzbrinck altogether and became HV Capital, announcing a new €535M fund in the same breath and adding growth-stage investing to its original seed and Series A territory, a broadening trade press at the time treated as the bigger part of the announcement.

HV's own history page calls itself "one of Europe's first VC firms," a claim that lines up with the timing: 2000 predates most of the independent European venture firms candidates will compare it against. Being early, and being backed by a publisher rather than outside limited partners in its first decade, is a real part of why the firm could survive the dot-com crash and still be standing, twenty-six years later, as one of the continent's most active investors.

Every Fund HV Has Raised

Fund VIII closed at €535M in October 2020, the vehicle announced alongside the name change itself. HV COCO Growth followed in 2022 at €430M, which HV describes as Germany's first continuation fund, built to give existing portfolio winners more time and capital rather than raising an entirely fresh generation. Fund IX closed in 2023 at €783M by HV's own count, though some contemporaneous press coverage put the figure closer to €710M in the days after the close.

Add those up and HV describes the result as ten fund generations across 26 years on its job board, and nine on its homepage — a rounding difference nobody at the firm seems bothered by. What every page agrees on is the number that matters most: €2.8bn under management today.

Fund VIII (2020)

€535M

HV COCO Growth (2022)

€430M

Fund IX (2023)

€783M

Funds I through VII were raised under the Holtzbrinck name without individually disclosed sizes, which is why they are not shown here.

What Each Fund Solved For

Fund VIII arrived in 2020, right as European venture was recovering from an early pandemic scare and heading into one of its strongest fundraising years on record. HV COCO Growth, closed two years later, solved a different problem: rather than force a strong but not-yet-exited company out of the portfolio when an older fund's life cycle ended, HV rolled the position into a purpose-built vehicle so it could keep backing the company on the same terms.

Fund IX, closing in the middle of a broad downturn in 2023, was proof the model still worked when the market turned against founders rather than for them.

How HV Is Structured

The regulated entity behind HV Capital is HV Capital Manager GmbH, based in Munich and supervised by BaFin, Germany's federal financial regulator. HV describes 2023 as the year it became the first German venture firm to be fully BaFin-regulated, the same year Fund IX became its first fund under the EU's SFDR Article 8 sustainable-finance rules.

HV runs a traditional closed-end, fixed-life fund family, backed by what its own materials describe as top-tier global institutional investors, without naming any individually. The Venture and Growth vehicles sit inside that same regulated structure as two separate funds managed by one entity, which is part of why HV can describe them with different mandates and different cheque sizes without one constraining the other.

Who You'd Be Interviewing With

HV has operated out of Munich and Berlin for most of its history, and its team page breaks its headcount down by function rather than by office.

Those first five categories add up to 62, in line with the "60+ investment and operations professionals" language HV uses in its own job postings. Operations is by some distance the largest single function, which fits a firm running two fund vehicles, a continuation fund and a growing office network at once.

Berlin has carried real weight in that structure since well before the rebrand, close to a startup scene that produced Zalando, Delivery Hero and much of the rest of HV's early portfolio.

Operations

32

Venture

14

Growth

9

Founding Partners

4

Advisory Board

4

Platform

3

Operations, not either investing team, is HV's largest function — a firm running two fund vehicles and a continuation fund at once needs the support to match.

The London Office and HV's First Female Partners

A London office opened in 2025, HV's first outside Germany, when the firm hired Lina Chong from Target Global and Mina Mutafchieva from Dawn Capital as partners to run it. Until then, no woman had held a partner title at HV. Felix Klühr and Barbod Namini were promoted to general partner around the same period.

London gives HV closer proximity to the UK's deep-tech and defence-adjacent investor base, exactly the corner of the market its recent cheques into Isar Aerospace, Quantum Systems and Neura Robotics have been chasing.

What HV Actually Backs

HV runs two vehicles side by side rather than one blended fund. The Venture arm leads Seed and Series A rounds with cheques from €500K to €10M. The Growth arm invests up to €60M in Series B and later rounds, with follow-on capital of up to €100M for existing portfolio companies. Job postings sometimes flatten this into a single €0.5m-to-€60m range, a coarser summary aimed at a different audience rather than a contradiction.

The sector focus has moved with the times: consumer internet and marketplaces in the founding era, enterprise software and fintech through the growth years, and now AI, deep tech and what HV calls resilience — its term for defence-adjacent technology and hardware. Geographically, the firm backs European founders with global ambitions, a phrase that shows up throughout its own materials.

HV does not state a target ownership percentage for new investments, the kind of "we aim for X% of the round" figure some peer firms state outright.

The two-vehicle structure shows up directly in how HV talks about individual deals. A Seed-stage company backed by the Venture arm at, say, €2M can, if it performs, come back to the same firm for a €40M Series C from the Growth arm rather than pitching a stranger who has to relearn its history from scratch.

That continuity is part of the pitch HV makes to founders, and just as useful as a pitch a candidate can make about why the platform is built the way it is.

The Portfolio, From Zalando to Deep Tech

HV's own materials return to the same handful of early names again and again. Zalando, the online fashion retailer that became one of Europe's largest e-commerce companies, IPO'd in 2014, an exit HV credits with making it the first German institutional VC to take a company public. HelloFresh and Delivery Hero both listed in 2017, part of what HV calls the first wave of German internet IPOs.

Depop sold to Etsy for $1.6bn in 2021. Across its full history, HV counts 12 IPOs and roughly 290 investments.

Where the Newer Cheques Are Going

FlixBus rebuilt long-distance coach travel across Europe around a tech platform rather than owned buses; SumUp turned card payments into a piece of hardware small enough for a market stall. Isar Aerospace is building one of the first orbital-class rockets to launch from mainland Europe; Quantum Systems makes reconnaissance drones used by European militaries; Neura Robotics builds humanoid robots aimed at industrial and home settings.

Enpal rents rooftop solar systems to German homeowners as a subscription; Marvel Fusion is chasing commercial nuclear fusion using lasers rather than magnetic confinement. Sennder digitises freight forwarding for trucking, n8n is a workflow-automation tool built for developers, Scalable Capital runs digital wealth management and a retail brokerage, and ARX Robotics builds autonomous ground vehicles for defence use.

Read together, the list traces a fairly clean line: HV backed the platforms that digitised how Europeans shopped, ate and travelled in the 2010s, and has spent the years since moving the same playbook toward hardware, defence and the physical economy.

The Last Two Years

HV calls 2024 the year it completed a full generational transition, the same year it says its portfolio companies collectively raised more than €1 billion — the people who built the firm's reputation over two decades handing day-to-day decision-making to a newer set of managing directors and partners, without the firm changing its name or its investors a second time. The London office and its first two female partners followed in 2025.

2026 brought some of the largest individual funding events in HV's history. Quantum Systems raised $1.2bn in July 2026, more than doubling its valuation to roughly $8bn. Neura Robotics raised $1.4bn in June 2026, and Isar Aerospace raised €270M the same month. All three sit inside HV's newer cluster of deep-tech and defence-adjacent bets, and all three are large enough that a candidate who can discuss one in detail will stand out against peers who default to Zalando.

What a Strong Answer Contains, and How to Prepare

• Cite €2.8bn with confidence. The fund-generation count varies by a page; the AUM figure doesn't.
• Know the Venture and Growth split. Backing a company from €500K at Seed through €100M in follow-on inside one platform is a concrete example of staged conviction.
• Have a view on where the thesis has moved, not just where it started. AI, deep tech and defence-adjacent robotics are where the recent cheques are going.
• Use a dated recent event. The 2026 raises at Quantum Systems, Neura Robotics or Isar Aerospace beat relying only on Zalando.
• Skip Holtzbrinck as current branding. Knowing the history is a strength; naming it as if it's still the firm's name reads like research that stopped at an old page.

The generic "why HV" answer, citing the portfolio and the Munich base, is available to anyone who spent ten minutes on the homepage. A stronger one draws on the arc: a publisher's venture arm that went independent, rebranded, and then moved its thesis twice more — first into growth-stage rounds, then into deep tech and defence-adjacent hardware.

Naming the Venture and Growth split as a structural feature, not a marketing phrase, does the same work at the thesis level, and tying it to a specific example, an Isar Aerospace or a Neura Robotics moving from an early cheque toward a growth-scale one, shows you understand why the platform was built the way it was.

1. Read HV's own history page in full, and note that the fund count differs slightly from its job board.
2. Have a specific, current view on HV's thesis, its move into deep tech and defence-adjacent robotics, rather than a generic sector list.
3. Bring one dated, recent portfolio event, such as the 2026 raises at Quantum Systems, Neura Robotics or Isar Aerospace.
4. If applying to an investment-track role, expect a written screening exercise that rewards original thinking over CV polish, plus a cognitive ability test.
5. Check HV's team page and its shared jobs board directly for open roles, and email the firm directly if nothing is posted.
6. Don't assume the interview runs in English simply because the postings do; ask directly if the working language matters to you.

The Bottom Line

HV Capital is, by its own account, one of the largest and most active venture firms to come out of Germany: €2.8bn under management, close to 290 investments, and a portfolio running from Zalando's 2014 IPO to nine-figure 2026 rounds in drones and robotics. It got there by changing twice: once when it dropped its publisher parent's name and became an independent brand, and again when it pushed its thesis from consumer internet into deep tech and defence-adjacent hardware.

The firm's own hiring process rewards exactly that kind of preparation over CV polish, which is a rare and useful alignment: the same depth of thought that makes for a good interview answer at HV is the same thing its screening questions are explicitly built to surface.