One year in Silicon Valley: 12 new investments, 15+ co-investing funds and a growing founder community

In November 2025, Silicon Gardens opened its office in Palo Alto with Gregor Rebolj and Nina Leskovec on the ground. The goal was simple: build a bridge between our founders and Silicon Valley, and find the best early-stage teams where they are building.

Why being in San Francisco matters

We believe one of the most important moves a European founder can make is to spend real time in San Francisco and see up close how things work there. Our portfolio company Daytona is the clearest example: the team moved from Split to the US and has just raised a $60M Series B.

Our Bay Area presence exists to make that move easier for the founders we back.

12 new investments

Over the past twelve months, Silicon Gardens Fund III made 12 new investments. Together, these rounds raised more than $40 million:

• Phylo: an AI agent for drug discovery from a Stanford team
• HiringCafe: an AI talent agent fixing the job hunt
• EVE: an AI revenue operator for small businesses
• Fictional: a consumer AI platform with proactive multimodal AI characters
• Astute: an AI-native B2B marketing platform for newsletters, podcasts and creators
• FotoNation: ultra-low-power AI silicon for edge devices
• SuperApp: an AI tool that turns an app idea into a production-ready native iOS app
• *codeplain: code generation from plain-language specifications; a follow-on investment in its seed round
• rmBug: identity-based database access control
• Three further investments that are not yet announced

Investing alongside the best in the Valley

In these rounds, we co-invested with more than 15 funds, including a16z, Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures, Spark Capital and Mighty Capital. For our founders, being on the same cap table as these investors opens doors that are hard to reach from Europe.

Building the community

We hosted three founder and investor events in the Bay Area:

• Stanford evening (October 2025): around 80 founders, operators and friends
• Founders Circle (April 2026): an evening for founders from our network in San Francisco
• Founders & Friends Mixer (29 October 2026): founders, VCs, LPs and angel investors in San Francisco

Looking ahead

“The statistics speak for themselves. What began as a test a year ago has become one of the best decisions we’ve made as a fund. We continue to invest actively on the ground and plan to keep growing our US presence from this strong base.” — Nina Leskovec, Partner, Silicon Gardens

If you are building in the Bay Area, or you are a European founder heading to the US, we would love to hear from you. Reach out!

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