Matthias Leibetseder, senior investment manager at Wave-X, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Matthias Leibetseder, senior investment manager for Austrian logistics group Walter Group’s Wave-X unit, may seem mild-mannered, but you would not guess that by his nickname: Crazy One.
“You have to be crazy to choose my line of work,” he says. “Handling the corporate and a startup at the same time, we all need to be a bit crazy to put up with that challenge.”
As Walter’s then head of innovation, Leibetseder set up Wave-X with the unit’s managing director, Thomas Muscher, in 2022. But the seeds for the fund were planted years earlier, when they went to Berlin to meet a tiny freight forwarder called Sennder, now a billion-dollar company.
“We thought it was great, so we went back to inform our board we should invest in these three guys in a garage because they had something promising,” he says. “But back then, there was a corporate culture and we had no idea how to do those things and nothing was ready.”
“Handling the corporate and a startup at the same time, we all need to be a bit crazy to put up with that challenge”
Wave-X has since gone from strength to strength, as AI and robotics bring new opportunities in areas such as manufacturing, logistics and driving. Leibetseder is the ‘face’ of the unit’s six-person team, handling marketing and speaking at events and, although Wave-X is a financial investor first and foremost, it can call on Walter Group’s business units when their startups need a hand.
Call him crazy, but it is a fairly good position to be in. “It is a huge opportunity to learn,” he says. “For us as an investor, we get to know some really smart, active people who are working on problems that need to be solved.
“We can help them find the right people within our corporation. Thomas and I have a strong logistics background, so we also try to help startups that are in the logistics business with expertise we can bring in directly and help the teams avoid pitfalls. I really appreciate having very open-minded and very smart people around all day.”
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
