Matthias Engel

Matthias is an active Business Angel and Partner at Vireo Ventures and invests into pre-seed and seed companies. He further advises Start-ups in their fundraising and M&A efforts and supports corporates as mentor and senior advisor in the fields of open innovation and corporate venture capital.

 

In the past 15 years, Matthias gained substantial transaction experience in building and managing a portfolio of venture capital investments as well as by executing large scale M&A projects.

 

Before founding Vireo Ventures his role was the position of Managing Director at innogy Ventures, leading the venture capital investment activities for innogy SE (former RWE AG), one of Europe’s largest listed utility groups. He was instrumental in founding innogy Ventures, hiring a high-profile team and defining the overall investment strategy and processes. As an active investor he was sitting on various boards of portfolio companies in Europe, Israel, and the US. Investment fields included Future Energy (e.g. distributed energy, smart grids, storage), Future of Cities (e.g. Mobility, Smart Cities, PropTech) as well as New Technologies (e.g. IoT, AR/VR, AI). Focus were investments in early to growth stage. As Managing Director, Matthias was responsible for innogy’s overall innovation portfolio that included 60+ investments (€ 162m under management).

 

Previously, Matthias was a Senior Manager for Groupwide M&A at RWE AG since 2006 and in that function was responsible for the execution of national and international M&A transactions along the entire value chain of the energy industry. Transactions included sell-side, buy-side, joint-ventures and public take overs with an aggregated transaction volume of € 7bn.

 

Before, he was an investment banker at Metzler Corporate Financing supporting and advising corporate clients and private equity funds in M&A. Sectors covered included real-estate, consumer goods and media. Matthias holds a Diploma in Business Administration of Leipzig Graduate School of Management (HHL).