Roger Bendisch

Roger Bendisch was born in 1959 in Berlin. He studied business administration and economics at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin), the London School of Economics, and the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin), and began his professional career as a consultant at the research and consulting institute Prognos.

Bendisch spent roughly 28 years at IBB Ventures (IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH), the venture-capital subsidiary of Investitionsbank Berlin, the German capital's promotional bank. He became Managing Director (Geschäftsführer) in 1997, having earlier led the Berlin Seed Capital Fund, and ran the firm's public/state-backed venture funds as its long-time face and chief investor. Over his tenure he enabled seed financing for more than 300 Berlin startups, and under his leadership Germany's first fund dedicated to the creative economy was launched.

His funds achieved commercial success as well as public-mission impact: more than 80 portfolio investments were exited, allowing the evergreen public funds to refinance themselves. Standout companies backed early by IBB under Bendisch — including the language-learning platform Babbel and the personal-styling/fashion company Outfittery — grew into significant, internationally operating Berlin businesses. By 2022 the portfolio counted around 92 companies generating roughly €683M in revenue and employing about 3,865 people.

Bendisch retired from the IBB Ventures managing-director role on 31 May 2025. He was succeeded by Katrin Robeck (a former Moody's rating analyst and ex-CEO of Berlin Industrial Group) and Markus Lehmann in a co-leadership structure. On departing, Bendisch signaled that he intends to remain active in and connected to the Berlin startup ecosystem — consistent with his positioning as an angel investor/advisor.

• Stage: Seed and early-stage financing, providing equity to young companies to bring innovative products and services to market; his successors extended this into a dedicated pre-seed fund for university/research-institute spin-outs (Q3 launch).
• Check size: Approximately €/$100K to ~1.5M per seed investment (aggregator estimate), typically co-investing alongside private investors — IBB reported leveraging roughly 5x private capital for each euro it committed.
• Sectors: Technology/ICT and digital businesses, the creative and media industries (Bendisch pioneered Germany's first creative-industries fund), life sciences/health IT, consumer internet, SaaS/enterprise software, and an impact-VC mandate aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (health, education, clean energy, climate).
• Geography is the filter: Portfolio companies must be based in Berlin. As Bendisch put it, "We see 90 percent of all deals in Berlin" — his conviction being that Berlin founders are exceptionally well-networked and that "investors come from all over the world to Berlin."
• Public mission + returns: He backed companies that create Berlin jobs and could scale internationally, while running the funds as self-sustaining (evergreen) vehicles refinanced through exits.