Janine de Leeuw

Founder's Associate
focus areas:
Fundraising
GTM
Portfolio Success
Dealflow
about:

I've never been able to sit still, new hometowns, new hobbies, new challenges, I'm obsessed with what's next. That curiosity became a fascination with permanently challenging the status quo at scale. What are the factors that shift entire societies? I thought this was mostly about politics, geopolitics, and large corporations; those were the forces and actors I believed shaped our lives. So I went into consulting, working across industries on innovation strategy and transformation. It became clear that technological progress had a much greater impact and that its acceleration through innovation would only keep compounding.

I wanted to be part of it, so I joined a deep tech startup from its early pre-seed days through its exit. While having led product development from the first MVP to customer deployments, I helped secure its CE certification (an industry first). Now I'm on the other side of the table: Backing the bets.

At First Momentum, I'm interested in everything from moonshot ideas to businesses that fundamentally change how things are done. Only a small number of companies ever drive real change; that's just how the outlier math works. Being around founders who have the hunger and audacity to bet everything on becoming one of them gives me tremendous energy.

Talent density here in Europe is at an all-time high, the ecosystem has strong momentum, and graduates are choosing to build rather than default into banking or consulting. There's now also a generation of operators who've already lived through one startup cycle and know exactly what it takes. What's still missing is enough capital willing to back that talent at scale. That's what pulls me toward the fund's core work: raising the next fund, driving investment deal flow, co-incubating new ventures, and supporting our teams in accelerating financing rounds and GTM initiatives.

focus areas:
Fundraising
GTM
Portfolio Success
Dealflow
email:

Start up wish list

  • European sovereign compute infrastructure: home-grown chip architectures, AI hardware, and edge computing stacks that reduce dependency on external supply chains.
  • The sensing and perception hardware that makes autonomous systems trustworthy enough for safety-critical environments. Getting a CE cert for autonomous driving taught me how high that bar is, and how few teams clear it.
  • Robotics for construction and the built environment. One of the world's largest industries, and one of the least digitized.
  • Novel approaches to large-scale energy generation, especially the physics-first bets. Some of what we accept as "how it works" only persists because nobody bothered to challenge it seriously.
  • Low Earth orbit as an industrial platform: the logistics, manufacturing, and sensing infrastructure that makes space economically useful.