Picus Capital Interview: The Four-Stage Process and the GMAT-Style Test

A Picus Capital interview runs four stages: an application reviewed for role fit, a first call on the firm and the role, a track-specific interview, and onboarding with an assigned mentor. Interns sit an online round, an in-person round, and for some roles an analytics test the firm itself compares to the GMAT's integrated-reasoning section — one of the more candid hiring FAQs in European venture, naming the exact prep resources to use.

The firm behind that process was built without a fund at all. Alexander Samwer and Jeremias Heinrich founded Picus Capital in Munich in 2015, financing it privately, and Picus was the first institutional money into two German unicorns, Personio and Enpal, years before either was a household name.

Picus Capital at a Glance

How the Picus Capital Interview Process Works

Picus structures its hiring into four named career levels, each with its own page on its careers site: Students, for on- or off-cycle internships and working-student roles during studies; Graduates, moving into an Analyst or Junior Manager seat right after graduation; Young Professionals, for people with some prior work experience joining as an Associate or Manager; and Experienced Hires, for Vice President, Principal or Team Lead roles.

Applications run year-round on a rolling basis, though Picus recommends applying roughly six months ahead of a desired internship start date given demand. There's no fixed intern-to-full-time conversion rate; offers to interns are made case by case, and Picus explicitly tells rejected candidates they can reapply later after picking up more experience in "fast-paced environments like consulting, investment banking, or startups."

The Four Stages, and the Test Itself

The process runs four stages. An application is reviewed by the team for role alignment. A first call covers the firm, the open positions and the candidate's interest in venture capital.

An interview stage follows, split by track: interns face an online interview, an in-person interview, and, for some roles, an analytics test; full-time candidates face first-round online interviews on personal fit and entrepreneurial topics, followed by a final on-site round. New joiners are then paired with an assigned mentor Picus calls a "Buddy" for onboarding.

That FAQ also states interns get formal feedback at the mid-term and end-term points, with an informal two-week check-in and further informal feedback available on request. Its careers site's expectations page names what Picus screens for beyond the test itself:

• Strong academic achievement, though explicitly open to candidates "from all backgrounds, regions and professional experiences"
• Relevant practical experience, ideally from a fast-paced environment
• Above everything else, "a strong entrepreneurial instinct"

Every page in that process is written entirely in English, with job titles carrying the German legal-compliance suffix "(m/f/d)" even though the surrounding copy stays in English throughout. A Munich-based Executive Assistant posting broke that pattern, requiring fluency in both English and German alongside a described office rotation programme — the exception rather than the rule, since no German-language requirement appears anywhere in the investment-track postings.

Campus Recruiting, and a Job Board That Mixes Its Own Roles With Its Portfolio's

Picus runs a real, if lightly documented, campus pipeline. Closer to home, Picus has hosted a "Running Dinner" at its Munich office in partnership with CDTM, the Center for Digital Technology and Management, alongside Manage & More and Academy Consult München.

A candidate coming from outside that circle isn't excluded by anything Picus states, but the rolling application on the careers site remains the same door open to everyone, and Picus's own FAQ is explicit that it welcomes "talents from all backgrounds, regions and professional experiences."

Picus's live job board, hosted through a tool called Recruiterflow, is worth reading carefully before you apply: it lists Picus's own corporate and investment-team openings right alongside listings from named portfolio companies posting through the same board, such as a Deployment Engineer role at Aidera or a Techbio Associate role at Spira Labs, each distinguished from a Picus role only by the company name printed at the front of the listing title.

Who Runs Picus

Alexander Samwer studied economics and politics at Oxford before an MBA at Harvard, then co-founded European Founders Fund, an early backer of Zalando and LinkedIn, before building Picus as his move away from the Rocket Internet model he is also known for: instead of cloning proven ideas at speed, back original founders early and stay in for the long run.

Jeremias Heinrich brought a different background entirely, trained in civil engineering and business administration at the Technical University of Munich, with prior experience in renewable-energy and real-estate investing.

Beyond the three founding partners, Picus's own team page names a working group of senior partners who have been with the firm for most of its life: Oliver Heinrich (ex-McKinsey Munich, joined 2017), Florian Reichert (ex-BCG Zurich, also 2017), and Sebastian Schäfer (joined 2018, Partner from 2023).

Raphael Mukomilow (leads Growth Investments, joined 2021), Julian Roeoes (runs the Americas from a 2020 hire), and Naman Jhawar round out the bench; Jhawar joined as Partner and Head of India & Southeast Asia in August 2023, the same month Picus opened a Singapore office.

From Rocket Internet's Orbit to a Firm of Its Own

Robin Godenrath joined as a third founding partner the following year, coming from a finance master's at WHU and a stint at McKinsey in Munich. No spin-out, no predecessor entity, no earlier name sits behind Picus; it began as founders' own money, deployed under one name, from day one.

Picus describes itself as "a privately financed venture capital investor with flexible long-term capital," language it has repeated, largely unchanged, across every dated press release since. The pitch to founders was patience: capital that would back a company from its first check through twenty years and an eventual IPO, without a fund's clock forcing an exit on someone else's timeline.

That patience shows up in the numbers: Picus's own December 2025 release states an annual IRR "north of 40%" since its 2015 inception, driven substantially by being the first money into Personio and Enpal. That figure has stepped down each time Picus has restated it, from "north of 50%" in February 2024 to "north of 45%" in May 2025 to today's 40%.

It's the ordinary drift of a firm's own IRR claim as more capital and time get added to the same handful of early wins, not a sign anything went wrong. The lesson for an interview is simpler: cite whichever figure Picus most recently published, not an earlier one still circulating online.

The Slow Build Toward a Real Fund Structure

For its first six years, Picus ran entirely on privately financed capital, unconstrained by the fund lifecycles and exit horizons that shape how most venture firms have to think. That changed in 2021 with the launch of Picus Venture Fund I, sized at roughly €100 million and, per Picus's own account, oversubscribed in under seven months.

Fund II followed a similar, larger arc: a first close in February 2024 at roughly €140 million, then a final close in May 2025 at its €250 million hard cap, more than double Fund I's size. The final close drew a genuinely institutional roster — M&G Investments came in as anchor investor through its £5 billion Catalyst fund, alongside Wilshire, an unnamed large European insurer, fund-of-funds, corporates and family offices.

Fund II is explicitly a double-down vehicle, built to pour more capital into Picus's existing winners while reserving room for new bets in generative AI, cybersecurity and climate tech.

Then, in December 2025, came a structure with no earlier precedent at Picus: a €150 million preferred-equity financing from Carlyle AlpInvest, described by Picus as the start of "a strategic relationship" meant to fund both existing-portfolio growth and new investment activity. This isn't fund capital in the traditional sense — it's a structured instrument, closer to the kind of financing a growth-equity shop takes on than anything a typical seed fund would touch.

Every Vehicle, Sized and Dated

Fund I, 2021

€100M

Carlyle AlpInvest facility, 2025

€150M

Fund II, 2025

€250M

The group's original private capital carries no fund-size figure at all, which is exactly why it does not appear here.

Read across a decade, the pattern is unmistakable: an evergreen pool of private money has gradually adopted the vocabulary and the institutional backers of ordinary venture funds, one instrument at a time, without ever fully becoming one. Two Munich-registered entities sit behind the operation, Picus Capital GmbH and Picus Capital Management GmbH, with a Luxembourg-based management company, IQ EQ Fund Management, handling the fund side.

For an interview, the useful shorthand is simpler than the full structure: whichever vehicle comes up by name is doing a distinct job, and treating any two of them as interchangeable is the kind of slip that signals a skim rather than real preparation.

Where Picus Actually Operates

Picus's homepage states a footprint in one line: "170+ Investments · 20+ Countries · 9 Offices · 50 Team Members." Its own pages name overlapping but incomplete subsets of those nine cities: the legal imprint registers only Munich, London and New York; a 2025 job posting names six, adding Berlin, Bangalore and Singapore; and the December 2025 Carlyle AlpInvest release names five, dropping Singapore but keeping the rest.

170+

investments

20+

countries

9

offices

50

team members

That kind of partial listing is consistent with a firm that has been actively expanding and reshuffling regional coverage: Picus opened in Latin America around 2021 and 2022, then added Singapore in August 2023 alongside a new regional partner hire. A candidate can safely combine the sources into a working mental map, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, Bangalore and Singapore at minimum, without waiting for a single page that names all nine at once.

What Picus Backs

Picus's own philosophy page states the mandate plainly: predominantly first checks into pre-seed, seed and Series A companies, pursuing "a very long-term investment approach investing significant amounts throughout the lifecycle." Sector focus has consolidated into five areas named consistently across its philosophy page and press releases: energy and climate, fintech, enterprise infrastructure and cybersecurity, generative AI, and healthcare. Geography is explicitly not a filter — Picus describes its approach as global, "independent of location."

No check-size or ownership-target figure appears on Picus's own site. Outside estimates disagree sharply on the range, one citing $100,000 to $5 million, another citing $400,000 to $3 million with a stated sweet spot near $1.5 million, and neither is confirmed by Picus itself.

Personio, Enpal, and the Portfolio

Picus's own portfolio page tags six companies "unicorn": Enpal, Personio, FINN, Clara, Kin and Blitzy. Of those, Personio and Enpal carry the strongest first-cheque story. Picus's own May 2025 release states plainly that the firm "has been the first investor in multiple unicorns such as Personio (last valued at 8.5B USD) and Enpal (last valued at 2.2B EUR)."

Picus's public taxonomy doesn't distinguish a profitable sale from a distressed one; it uses the single word "Exit" for both, which is exactly why the failure below is worth naming rather than lumped in with the ordinary sales.

Two Companies Named Hadrian

A Failure Worth Naming: Homeday

Not every bet compounded. Homeday, a German hybrid real-estate brokerage Picus backed and now tags "Exit" on its portfolio page, went through a rough few years in public view, competing in the same tech-enabled residential-brokerage category as rivals like McMakler. Roughly a fifth of staff were laid off in July 2022, another 56 people that October, and a further round the following year.

German business press described Axel Springer, Homeday's existing majority shareholder, as taking over an ailing startup, with yet another restructuring accompanying the full takeover — not a bankruptcy filing, no evidence of insolvency proceedings turned up anywhere, but a clearly documented, value-destroying outcome for early investors rather than a clean win.

Other companies on Picus's "Exit" list read very differently: Paytron and Proprioo were both ordinary, non-distressed sales, and Thermondo remains an independently operating, well-capitalised business years later, now backed by Brookfield, HV Capital, the EIB and E.ON. Homeday is the one that actually struggled.

What a Strong Answer Sounds Like

A candidate who has actually read Picus's own pages, rather than someone else's summary of them, has several things to work with that a generic answer misses:

• Know the difference between the group's founder capital and its two closed-end funds, and be able to explain why Picus added Fund I in 2021 rather than staying purely evergreen from day one.
• Be ready to discuss Personio or Enpal specifically as first-cheque wins, not just as names on a portfolio slide.
• If Hadrian comes up, know there are two companies with that name and be specific about which one Picus actually backed.
• Recognise that Picus's own portfolio taxonomy treats a distressed wind-down (Homeday) and a clean sale (Thermondo) with the identical "Exit" label.
• Have an opinion on one of the five named sectors rather than reciting the list.
• Understand what "double-down" means as a strategy: Fund II exists specifically to pour more capital into Picus's existing winners, not primarily to write brand-new first cheques.

Picus's own language rewards a candidate who thinks in terms of long holding periods and follow-on conviction rather than one who treats every investment as a single event. A strong answer on "why Picus" points at that patience specifically, not at the portfolio names everyone already knows.

How to Prepare

1. Read Picus's philosophy page directly and be able to state, in one sentence, what "not constrained by fund lifecycles" actually means for how the firm invests.
2. Treat the GMAT-comparable analytics test seriously if your track includes one, and use actual GMAT integrated-reasoning material to prepare, exactly as the FAQ recommends.
3. Practice a case using Preplounge, the specific resource Picus itself names.
4. Read a few recent issues of Gründerszene and Sifted so a "what's an interesting company" question doesn't catch you flat-footed.
5. Prepare one or two favourite startups you can discuss in real depth, since the how-to-prepare page names this explicitly as something interviewers ask for.
6. Have a clear, current view on Personio or Enpal as investment decisions, not just as names, since they are the firm's strongest first-cheque evidence.
7. Look at the live job board before you apply, and confirm which listing is actually Picus and which belongs to a portfolio company like Aidera or Spira Labs.

Picus built a decade of returns on a bet that most funds don't get to make: capital with no clock forcing an exit. That patience produced Personio and Enpal. It also gave Homeday years to work out before a majority shareholder finally stepped in. Both are the same strategy playing out, and a candidate who can talk about both, not just the wins, is the one who actually understands what Picus is.