Lucanus Polagnoli

Lucanus Polagnoli is Founding Partner of Calm/Storm Ventures, a Vienna-based early-stage HealthTech VC firm he founded in 2020. Calm/Storm describes itself as a boutique venture capital firm focused on founders changing “life, health and wellbeing for the better,” and its legal imprint lists Calm Storm Management GmbH in Vienna with Polagnoli as a managing director.

Before founding Calm/Storm, Polagnoli worked in financial consulting, private equity restructuring, and startup operations. His public profiles list earlier experience at KPMG Australia from 2004 to 2010, restructuring and interim management with Erhard F. Grossnigg Private Equity Group from 2010 to 2013, and operating roles including Managing Director at whatchado from 2013 to 2015.

Polagnoli joined Speedinvest in 2014, helped raise Speedinvest Fund II, built the firm’s first health team, and worked with portfolio companies as a board member. He later founded Calm/Storm to focus on early HealthTech investing, arguing that HealthTech founders need specialist industry knowledge, network access, and investors with operator experience.

He is a Kauffman Fellow, Class 27. Kauffman Fellows lists his education as a Master’s degree in International Business Administration from Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration and a Master of International Management from Bocconi University in Milan through CEMS.

• Calm/Storm invests at the “super-early” stage, typically pre-seed or seed, and says it wants to join founders “as early as we can,” usually in the first fundraising round.
• The firm’s core thesis is HealthTech and wellbeing: digital health, prevention, care, B2B and B2C startups, AI-enabled infrastructure, mental health, fertility, clinical decision support, chronic-condition care, and healthcare SaaS.
• Polagnoli has described the pre-product-market-fit stage as a search for “Founder-Market-Fit” rather than “Product-Market-Fit.”
• Calm/Storm looks for founders solving important healthcare problems before markets are fully formed. In a 2025 interview, Polagnoli said the thesis is that the more relevant the problem and the better the digital solution, the more likely a new market will emerge.
• The firm emphasizes founder community and founder support; its founders page says portfolio founders support one another with the shared objective of “sailing not drowning.”
• Diversity is part of the mandate. Calm/Storm says more than half of its portfolio companies are co-founded by underrepresented founders, and the firm has developed a visible FemTech focus.
• In women’s health, Polagnoli has argued that “Women’s health has enormous potential - both in terms of impact and returns.”