Christoph Osburg, investment principal at DB1 Ventures, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Christoph Osburg started his career as a private equity investor, before moving into corporate venturing in 2017. He spent five years at Neosfer, the early-stage CVC unit of Commerzbank, where he led on an investment into a London-based fixed income e-trading startup.
Osburg joined the team at DB1 Ventures, the corporate investment arm of Deutsche Börse group, in 2022. “I am now working in a team of six people responsible for CVC activities. This is something I really enjoy, because it is always a trade-off between keeping a close eye on the financial performance of the portfolio companies and leveraging it from the perspective of the parent company.”
DB1 Ventures is a balance-sheet investor, with an investment budget of €400m. Around €280m has already been deployed in 17 direct investments and seven fund investments. The typical stage size of interest is series A+ to series C for entry investment, with a ticket size ranging between €5m and €25m.
“It is always a trade-off between keeping a close eye on the financial performance of the portfolio companies and leveraging it from the perspective of the parent company”
The unit’s goal is to explore areas of strategic interest to the parent company. This led to its €5m series A investment in October 2024 in Primary Portal.
Osburg also has his eye on generative AI and its use for financial markets. “There are a lot of use cases for using LLMs in the trading and
pre-trading area. It also raises the question of how quickly the incumbent GenAI players can adapt their mother models to dedicated use cases in the capital market and financial service industry, or if there are some new players,” he says.
“It is not enough to have global AI models in the capital market space. You need domain expertise to train the models. And there are a lot of opportunities for new ventures using new technology approaches for building more efficient and more sophisticated solutions.”
Osburg has some simple advice for anyone beginning their CVC journey: “Be open, persistent and resilient,” he says.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
