Lakestar Interview: The Analytics Test, the Case Study and Team Interviews

Klaus Hommels had a reputation in European tech years before Lakestar existed as a firm. As an individual angel investor, he had already backed Skype ahead of its $8.5 billion sale to Microsoft, joined Spotify's board in its earliest days, and put his own money into Facebook, Xing and King, the studio behind Candy Crush.

He founded Lakestar in 2012 to formalize and scale that instinct into an institutional manager, and it worked: the firm went on to back Revolut, Klarna and, more recently, Helsing, now one of the most valuable defense-technology companies in Europe.

Then, in October 2025, Hommels told his limited partners something most venture founders never say out loud: Lakestar would stop raising new generalist funds. Future bets outside its defense strategy would come from his own capital instead, while a separate, institutional vehicle for European security and resilience would keep raising from outside investors. A month earlier, he had stepped down from an outside defense-fund chairmanship held for roughly two years, moving into a different advisory role there.

This is the story of a firm that spent thirteen years building a conventional venture-fund business on top of one investor's personal track record, and is now, in public, splitting that business into two different kinds of capital. Here's the fund history behind it, what Lakestar actually backs, and how its hiring works.

Lakestar at a Glance

How Lakestar Hires, and What Its Interview Involves

Lakestar hires in small numbers and on its own schedule, so the first practical question is where its own roles are posted and which of its two strategies they sit inside.

Where Lakestar Hires

Lakestar runs a named, dated hiring program rather than ad hoc recruiting: the Visiting Analyst Program, a paid, full-time placement lasting five to six months. Cohorts run twice a year, and the seats sit in Berlin and London.

How many open in a given cycle is a question for the firm's own hiring site rather than an old posting. The same programme at other European funds swings between three seats and one from one half-year to the next, matching each cohort to the deal flow the team actually expects.

That cadence comes with a concrete example behind it: one alumnus joined as part of the second-half cohort in 2022 and later transitioned into a full member of the investment team, evidence the twice-yearly structure has held for several years running.

Day-to-day, Lakestar's own role description for the position centers on screening and diligence: conducting an initial evaluation of companies, building a shortlist of the most promising opportunities sourced through the team's own research or inbound and outbound channels, and working alongside Associates and Analysts on market, product, customer, competitor and financial diligence. That's a genuinely central seat in the investment process, not a support role on the side of it.

Lakestar runs its own hiring directly on its own domain rather than routing candidates through a portfolio-company job board, a distinction that trips up applicants at a number of peer funds. Both the Visiting Analyst posting and a general talent pool for Zurich, Berlin and London sit under Lakestar's own name, which makes it one of the more straightforward funds on this roster to actually find open roles at.

The program's own framing is worth taking at face value. Lakestar describes it as a commitment to help students and aspiring professionals find a place in tech "as founders, operators or investors within the Lakestar group, or beyond," and a Principal has spoken about personally helping former Visiting Analysts move into roles inside and outside the firm afterward. Staying on is one outcome among several, not the only measure of the placement's worth.

Because the program runs on a fixed twice-yearly cadence rather than opening whenever a seat happens to become free, the practical advice for a candidate is to track Lakestar's own hiring page directly for the next cycle's dates rather than assuming a specific deadline from an old posting still applies. The structure, two cohorts, two cities, one seat each, has held since at least 2022; the exact calendar dates around it are the one piece worth confirming fresh each time.

From Europe's Best-Known Angel to a Fund

Which strategy a seat sits inside only makes sense against how the firm got two of them, and that starts with one investor's own cheque book.

Before Lakestar, Hommels ran his own capital through a vehicle called Hommels Holding, investing personally rather than through an institutional fund with outside limited partners. His resume before that reads like a tour of the European tech industry's formative years:

• Started at Bertelsmann
• Joined AOL Germany's board
• Became a venture partner at Benchmark Capital Europe
• Holds a doctorate in finance from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland

His personal investing track record before founding Lakestar is the reason the firm attracted attention from day one. Skype exited via Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition in May 2011. Spotify, which Hommels backed in 2009 and joined the board of, has gone on to become one of European tech's defining public companies.

QXL.com, an earlier bet, sold to Naspers for £946 million in 2007. By the time Lakestar launched in 2012, Hommels wasn't a new entrant trying to prove himself; he was formalizing a track record institutions already wanted access to.

That origin story matters for how Lakestar is built today. It isn't a spin-out of another firm, a rename, or a successor to some earlier entity. It's Hommels' own personal investing, scaled into an institutional vehicle with its own funds, its own limited partners and its own team, a structure that makes the firm's later return to personal-capital investing look less like a retreat and more like it going back toward its original shape.

Every Fund Lakestar Has Raised

Lakestar's fund history runs in two parallel tracks, seed-and-growth vehicles that built the firm's institutional base, and a newer, dedicated defense fund that arrived after nearly a decade of quieter positioning in the category.

Lakestar itself, in a fund-administrator retrospective, has described its own historical boilerplate as understating its scale: aggregator profiles still circulating describe "an aggregated volume of over EUR 1bn across three early-stage funds," a description that predates both the 2024 close and the 2026 Resilience fund by a wide margin. The fund table above reflects the firm's current, dated releases rather than that older language.

Two things stand out reading the table as a sequence rather than a list. First, each generalist fund roughly doubled the one before it, a growth curve typical of a manager building institutional credibility fund by fund rather than raising one outsized vehicle early and coasting on it.

Lakestar I, 2013

€135M

Lakestar II, 2015

€350M

Lakestar III, 2019/20

€245M

Growth I, 2019/20

€490M

Resilience I, 2026

€262.2M

Early IV/Growth II's $600 million combined close is priced in dollars and left out here to keep the comparison in one currency.

Second, the gap between Growth II's 2024 close and Resilience I's 2026 close is the shortest interval between any two closes in the firm's history, itself a sign of how quickly the defense and resilience category moved from a niche interest to something institutional money was actively chasing.

Two Numbers, One Firm

Lakestar publishes two different figures for how much it manages, and both are accurate for what they describe. Its careers materials state roughly €2 billion, the total raised across its six named institutional venture and growth funds through the April 2024 close. Its homepage states over $6 billion, a figure that explicitly adds Klaus Hommels' personal investments, made outside the fund structure, on top of that institutional total.

€2bn

institutional funds

six named venture and growth funds, through April 2024

$6bn+

combined with personal capital

adds the personal investments Hommels holds outside the fund structure

Those are two different scopes, not two competing claims about the same thing. A candidate asked about Lakestar's size in an interview is better served naming which figure they mean, the institutional fund total or the combined figure including Hommels' personal capital, than repeating either number as if it were the whole picture.

Neither page cross-references the other, so a reader landing on just one of them has no way to know a second, differently scoped figure exists at all. That's a minor point next to the rest of Lakestar's story, but it's a useful habit to carry into the interview itself: this is a firm that increasingly runs two different things under one name, and the AUM figures are the first place that shows up in public.

What Lakestar Backs

For most of its history, Lakestar described itself as stage-agnostic within venture, investing from seed through growth, across fintech, deep tech, healthcare, logistics, AI and digitalization. Revolut, Klarna and SumUp all sit inside that broad, generalist mandate, backed at various stages as the firm's institutional funds grew larger.

That mandate narrowed sharply in October 2025. In the same conversation where he announced the fundraising pivot, Hommels named the specific bets he was doubling down on: Revolut, and what he called defense unicorns Helsing, Auterion and Isar Aerospace. He described a preference for what he called real companies with real surplus, over speculative, unicorn-chasing bets, a real change in stated thesis rather than a rebrand of the same strategy under new language.

• Historically stage-agnostic across seed to growth, spanning fintech, deep tech, healthcare, logistics, AI and digitalization
• Since October 2025, a stated preference for fewer, larger, more concentrated positions in companies already generating real revenue
• A defense and resilience thesis dating back to 2017, formalized into its own dedicated fund in 2026
• Geography historically pan-European, with the resilience strategy explicitly targeting Europe and NATO-allied markets

A candidate should treat those four points as describing two overlapping eras of the same firm rather than a single, static thesis. The generalist mandate is the one that built Revolut, Klarna and SumUp into the portfolio over more than a decade, and it's still the mandate governing how those existing positions get managed.

The concentrated, defense-anchored mandate is the one actually raising new institutional capital today. Someone interviewing for a role tied to the resilience side should expect questions about NATO-aligned markets and dual-use technology specifically, not a generic venture-thesis conversation.

Building a Resilience Business Since 2017

Lakestar's dedicated defense fund didn't appear out of nowhere in 2026. The firm's own materials describe building toward it since 2017, nearly a decade earlier, through a handful of early, individually large bets in the category: a $10 million seed round in Auterion in 2018, a $75 million Series B in Isar Aerospace in 2020, and a €23 million Series A in Aleph Alpha in 2021.

Helsing is the clearest payoff from that patient positioning. Lakestar's position, taken around the company's Series A era, sat inside a company that has since become one of the most valuable defense-technology businesses in Europe, raising $1.8 billion at an $18 billion valuation in the middle of 2026, up from a reported $12 billion only months earlier.

Few generalist venture firms had any credible defense-sector position when the category was still unfashionable. Lakestar's decade of quiet groundwork is exactly why it could raise a dedicated fund the moment institutional appetite for European defense caught up.

Lakestar Resilience I itself closed at €262.2 million in July 2026, oversubscribed, with an advisory board that includes General Sir Nicholas Carter, General Volker Wieker, Baroness Martha Lane Fox and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Lakestar states that founders across its resilience-focused portfolio have collectively raised more than $5 billion in private capital, a scale that would have been unthinkable for a European defense-technology portfolio a decade ago.

The Portfolio: Curated, and Wider Than It Looks

Lakestar's own homepage shows a short, deliberately curated list under the caption "sector defining companies we have put our conviction and our work behind": Airbnb, Coinbase, Facebook, Fuse, Helsing, Isar Aerospace, Klarna, Neko Health, Revolut, Spotify and SumUp. That's a highlight reel, not a full accounting. Independent portfolio trackers put Lakestar's actual investment count considerably higher, into the hundreds, which makes sense for a firm that has been actively investing across three fund generations and thirteen years.

Not every name in that longer list became a Revolut or a Helsing. Builder.ai, a workflow-automation startup Lakestar co-led into its first institutional round, a $29.5 million Series A, back in November 2018, went on to raise more than $450 million from investors including Microsoft, the Qatar Investment Authority and Insight Partners, reaching a peak valuation between $1.3 and $1.5 billion.

In 2025, it collapsed: a major creditor seized funds from its accounts over debt defaults, the company filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware, and parallel insolvency proceedings opened in the UK, India, the UAE and Singapore.

The reason its collapse became a genuine scandal, rather than an ordinary venture write-down, is what came out during it. The startup's "AI assistant," marketed as automating software development, turned out to rely substantially on manual engineering work performed by an estimated hundreds of human engineers, mostly in India. Regulators separately began investigating allegations of inflated revenue reporting. Founder Sachin Dev Duggal resigned as chief executive in February 2025, months before the company folded entirely.

The Letter That Redrew the Firm

Hommels' October 2025 letter to Lakestar's limited partners says it plainly: "Going forward, both Lakestar's and my focus will be on maximising the potential of the existing portfolio and we will not raise any new generalist venture funds as we have in the past. Our future investments will be larger, more concentrated, and made with own capital, allowing greater agility and freedom to pursue the big, visionary bets that have always defined our work."

Read plainly, that's a founder telling his own institutional investors that the fund structure they had backed for over a decade is done, at least for anything outside defense. Future bets on the next Revolut or the next Helsing, outside the resilience category, will come from Hommels' own money rather than from a seventh institutional fund.

The firm will keep raising for "targeted new investment products" where useful, a category the resilience strategy specifically fits into, evidenced by Resilience I's own July 2026 close less than a year later.

The pivot didn't arrive without warning. About a month earlier, Lakestar had already closed a $265 million continuation vehicle, one of the largest of its kind in European venture, built to extend existing portfolio positions rather than fund new ones. Combined with early defense-fund commitments, Hommels said the firm was on track to raise close to $500 million by the end of 2025, a trajectory that led directly to Resilience I's close.

A Chairmanship That Ended in September 2025

The letter did not arrive out of nowhere. A month earlier, Hommels had stepped down as founding chairman of the NATO Innovation Fund, a role he had held since March 2023. The fund, a roughly $1 billion vehicle backing European and allied defense and dual-use startups, replaced him with vice-chair Fiona Murray. Hommels moved into a newly created role instead, chairing a Geopolitical and Strategic Advisory Council at the same organization.

The step-down followed reporting that named a specific concern: Lakestar and the fund shared overlapping portfolio positions, including in the robotics company ARX Robotics and in Isar Aerospace, while Lakestar was separately raising its own dedicated defense fund and citing Hommels' chairmanship there in its own pitch to investors. The fund itself pushed back publicly, stating that any suggestion its board members held undue influence over investment decisions was "categorically and demonstrably false."

The new role keeps Hommels inside the same organization, chairing a council rather than sitting on its board — a change in scope, not an exit.

Two Structures Under One Name

The practical result of the October 2025 letter is that Lakestar now runs two genuinely different kinds of capital under one brand. Six fixed-life, closed-end institutional funds, five generalist and one folded into the "existing portfolio" category, sit alongside Resilience I, an actively raising institutional vehicle with its own advisory board and thesis.

Above both sits Hommels' personal capital, an open-ended structure the letter names as the vehicle for whatever comes next outside defense. A separate, smaller vehicle rounds out the picture: Lakestar's Halo Fund, a community-based angel program built to co-invest with European angels at the pre-seed stage, lighter-weight than the numbered funds and unaffected by the October reorganization.

For a candidate trying to understand what they'd actually be joining, the honest answer depends on which part of Lakestar they'd sit inside. Someone on the defense and resilience side joins a fund still actively raising institutional capital with a clear, growing mandate.

Someone on the generalist side, by contrast, joins a team managing an existing portfolio that will keep compounding, but is not, by its own founder's public statement, going to be replenished by a seventh outside-LP fund the way the first six were.

The Sequence That Got Lakestar Here

Laid end to end, a few events from the past two years landed close together. None of Lakestar's own materials link them to each other, but the dates are worth having straight before an interview:

Hommels' own public statements attribute the pivot to conditions across the wider venture market and a stated preference for fewer, larger, more concentrated bets, not to any single event above. The table is useful for keeping the dates straight, not for reading a cause into their proximity that Lakestar itself hasn't stated.

Zurich, Berlin, London, and Now Munich

Lakestar's team has grown from roughly 40 people across 15 nationalities at its April 2024 fund close to more than 50 today, spread across Zurich, its headquarters, plus Berlin and London. A fourth office, in Munich, was announced alongside the October 2025 pivot, specifically to build out the resilience strategy in a city that sits at the center of Germany's defense industry.

That geographic split says something about how deliberately the firm has separated its two strategies operationally, not just financially. Munich isn't a satellite of the existing three offices doing overflow work; it's a dedicated build-out for one specific mandate, in the same way the firm's fund structure now separates defense capital from everything else.

A handful of aggregator profiles claim additional Lakestar offices in New York, Hong Kong or Amsterdam, but none of those cities appears in Lakestar's own current materials or in recent, reliable press describing the firm, so they're best treated as noise rather than confirmed locations.

The choice of Munich specifically is worth sitting with. It's Germany's defense-industry hub, home to established manufacturers and a growing cluster of dual-use startups, and a dedicated office there, rather than running the strategy out of Berlin or Zurich, signals proximity to that industrial base, not just to capital. For a candidate weighing which office to target, Munich is a bet on a specific industry, not simply a fourth city added for growth's sake.

Who Runs Lakestar

Klaus Hommels remains Lakestar's founder and chairman, and his own outside roles say something about the network the firm draws on: he sits on Henkel's digital board and the innovation board of the Munich Security Conference, was previously a member of the UK Capital Markets Industry Taskforce, and chaired Invest Europe, the trade body for European private capital, from July 2022 to June 2023.

Around him sits a wider partner group spanning both the generalist and resilience sides of the firm, including a general counsel who doubles as a managing partner, dedicated partners for deep tech and for growth-stage investing, and Ninja Struye de Swielande, Partner and Chief Communication Officer, who has been the named spokesperson for the Resilience I close and its advisory board.

That structure, a founder with an outsized personal profile surrounded by a broader partner group running the day-to-day, is common at firms built around one investor's early reputation, and Lakestar is a clear case of it.

The advisory board Lakestar assembled for Resilience I is itself a signal of how the firm expects the resilience side to be judged:

• General Sir Nicholas Carter and General Volker Wieker bring decades of senior military command between the UK and Germany
• Baroness Martha Lane Fox brings a European technology and public-policy profile
• Mike Pompeo, a former US Secretary of State, brings a name that carries weight in a fund explicitly targeting NATO-allied markets

None of the four is a typical venture advisory-board pick, which is exactly the point: a defense-technology fund needs credibility with governments and militaries, not just with limited partners.

What a Strong Answer Sounds Like

A candidate who understands Lakestar's current structure, not just its portfolio, will stand out in an interview built around any of this material:

• Know the difference between the €2 billion institutional figure and the $6 billion-plus combined figure, and be able to state plainly which one a given question is really asking about
• Understand the October 2025 letter as the central fact about where Lakestar is headed, not a footnote to the fund history
• Be able to discuss Helsing's trajectory as evidence of a defense thesis that predates the fashionable moment for the category by close to a decade
• Be willing to discuss the AI-washing collapse honestly, including what it revealed about diligence on AI-labeled products more broadly
• Recognize that a role on the resilience side and a role on the generalist side of Lakestar are, in practical terms, joining two different kinds of firm under one name

How to Prepare

Before the first conversation

1. Learn the full fund history well enough to state which vehicle is actually raising today, Resilience I, rather than reciting an older, generalist fund as if it were still open to new capital.
2. Read Hommels' October 2025 letter in full rather than a secondhand summary, since it's the clearest first-person statement of where the firm is headed.
3. Know that the Halo Fund, Lakestar's community angel program, sits outside the October 2025 reorganization entirely, in case a pre-seed-adjacent question comes up.
4. Be ready to discuss Helsing in depth, including its valuation trajectory, as the clearest example of the resilience thesis paying off.
5. If applying to the Visiting Analyst Program, prepare specifically for an analytics test and a case study, the two concrete steps Lakestar's own postings describe.
6. Ask a question that shows you understand the firm's dual structure, such as how deal flow and diligence differ between the resilience side and the rest of the portfolio.
7. Know which office you'd actually be joining, Munich for resilience, or Zurich, Berlin or London for the wider firm, and why that split exists.
8. Be ready to name the advisory board Lakestar built around Resilience I and explain, in your own words, why a defense fund needs that kind of credibility beyond its limited partners.
9. Have a plain-language answer ready for how Lakestar's two AUM figures relate to each other, since it's the kind of detail a well-prepared candidate can turn into a genuine advantage over one who has only skimmed the homepage.

If an interviewer asks how much Lakestar manages, the strongest response isn't picking one of the two headline figures and hoping it's the right one. It's naming both, in the right order: roughly €2 billion across the six institutional funds, and over $6 billion once Hommels' personal capital outside those funds is added in.

Follow that with an observation about why the second figure exists at all now, given what the October 2025 letter says about where new capital is actually going to come from.

Klaus Hommels spent two decades building a personal reputation before Lakestar existed as an institution, and thirteen years after founding it, he's telling his own investors he's returning to that earlier shape, just with a defense-focused institutional fund running alongside it.

That's a more interesting story than any single portfolio company, and it's the one a well-prepared candidate should be ready to discuss, whether the conversation starts with Revolut, Helsing, or the letter that redrew the firm around them both.