T.Capital

Managing Partner Oliver Schmäschke steers the overall investment strategies and operations, while the Ventures and Tech Fund teams operate with dedicated partners. Julia Kainz leads the combined Tech Fund and Venture Investments group from Deutsche Telekom's side. The Tech Fund partnership includes Maneesh Sharma, formerly a Managing Director at Aleph Capital, and Till Sutor, who spent six years at Berlin-based private equity firm Elvaston Capital (per the firm, 2025).

Deal flow is heavily relationship-driven and anchored in Deutsche Telekom's global commercial network. Portfolio companies such as ElevenLabs and Perplexity gain direct distribution through Deutsche Telekom's subscriber base and enterprise sales channels, which drives a significant volume of warm introductions. The team also sources through co-investor relationships built from prior DTCP funds and through the hub:raum early-stage program's alumni network.

T.Capital is the strategic investment arm of Deutsche Telekom AG, a publicly listed corporation, with €2.3 billion in assets under management (per the firm, 2025). It operates like a hybrid of a corporate venture capital unit and a committed-growth platform, not a family office. The firm manages discretionary balance-sheet capital and syndicates with external co-investors, but all positions must carry a commercial partnership theses with Deutsche Telekom.

The firm is entirely direct in its current mandate — it invests from its own balance sheet and does not operate as a fund-of-funds. It may co-invest alongside external venture and growth equity managers, but its capital goes directly into portfolio companies, not into third-party funds.

The Ventures arm covers early-stage and growth-stage rounds, including seed through Series B and later. The Tech Fund targets buyout, expansion, and late-stage growth positions, especially in software and managed service providers. The portfolio reflects this split — recent 2025 rounds include seed-stage AI infrastructure plays like Nscale alongside later-stage Series B observability platform Dash0.

DTCP was the investment platform co-founded by Thorsten Langheim and others inside Deutsche Telekom that has since split into two separate entities. T.Capital is the renamed and refocused strategic investment arm of Deutsche Telekom, while DTCP continues independently as a growth equity and digital infrastructure manager. Oliver Schmäschke was COO of both platforms before becoming Managing Partner of T.Capital outright.

No. T.Capital itself is a strategic corporate investment platform and does not manage philanthropic capital or DAFs. Deutsche Telekom conducts corporate social responsibility initiatives separately through the corporate parent, not through the T.Capital investment mandate.