What does Hello World Investments do?

Hello World Investments is an Amsterdam-based angel investment firm that backs early-stage founders with time, knowledge, and capital. We invest pre-seed and seed in high-conviction founders building the next generation of great companies.

Who founded Hello World Investments?

Hello World Investments was founded by Sam Renders (co-founder of Sam Feldt and Fangage) and Nick Velten (founder of Stimmt and Fangage), two Amsterdam-based entrepreneurs with deep roots in the European startup ecosystem.

How can I pitch my startup to Hello World Investments?

You can reach out to Hello World Investments directly via the contact form on our website at helloworld.amsterdam or email us at hello@helloworld.amsterdam. We review every pitch personally.

What stage startups does Hello World invest in?

Hello World Investments focuses on pre-seed and seed stage startups. We back founders at the earliest stages of company building, often before product-market fit, when the right support network matters most.

Q1 2026 Portfolio Update

Q1 2026 has been one of the most active quarters we've seen across the Hello World portfolio. Across categories — beverages, analytics, developer tools, AI audio, and events — our companies have been shipping, raising, and expanding into new markets. Here's what stood out.

Highlights This Quarter

Three themes defined Q1: AI integration going from experiment to core product, consumer brands accelerating their European expansion, and analytics platforms seeing outsized demand as privacy regulations push marketers toward first-party data solutions.

On the fundraising side, several of our companies closed or extended rounds this quarter, and the quality of co-investors coming into those rounds has been a strong signal. The market is rewarding fundamentals — revenue, retention, and genuine user love — over narratives, which suits the kinds of founders we back.

Company Spotlights

TrackBee had its strongest quarter since founding. As third-party cookies continue their long goodbye and digital advertising becomes harder to measure accurately, TrackBee's first-party marketing analytics platform has stepped directly into the gap. The team launched a new integration layer in February that makes it significantly easier to ingest data from across a marketing stack, and the response from enterprise customers has been immediate. They're expanding their sales function in Europe and APAC. trackbee.io

AudioStack shipped a major update to its AI audio production platform, adding support for dynamic audio personalization at scale — the ability to generate thousands of unique audio variations from a single creative brief, customized by audience, context, and channel. For brands and agencies running large-scale audio campaigns, this is a genuine step-change in workflow efficiency. AudioStack is increasingly being referenced in the same conversation as the leading AI content tools, which speaks to how far the team has come. audiostack.ai

Update expanded its retail footprint across the Netherlands and entered its first German retail accounts in Q1. The functional beverage category continues to grow faster than the broader soft drinks market, and Update's positioning around cognitive performance and sustained energy is resonating with the demographic that's most skeptical of traditional energy drinks. The brand story is clean, the product works, and the distribution strategy is methodical. They're doing it right. drinkupdate.com

WebSummit announced a new conference format for the European market, adding a mid-year event designed specifically for growth-stage founders and investors — smaller than the flagship Lisbon conference but denser in terms of curated meetings and programming. For the ecosystem broadly, this kind of structured connection infrastructure matters. The best conversations we've had as investors have started at WebSummit. websummit.com

Looking Ahead

Q2 will see several of our companies entering new geographies — we expect Update to be in the UK market by June, and there are product launches in the pipeline from Apollo HQ that we'll be able to talk more about soon.

More broadly, we're entering a phase where AI is no longer a differentiator for most products — it's table stakes. The question for our portfolio companies is whether they've integrated AI in ways that genuinely improve the core product loop, or whether they've bolted on features that look good in demos. The companies in our portfolio that are using AI to compress workflow time, personalize output at scale, or surface insights that were previously buried in data are the ones we're most excited about right now.

We're also watching the fundraising environment carefully. Institutional rounds at Seed and Series A remain competitive for the best companies, but there's been a notable improvement in the quality of diligence being done — which is healthy. Fast money chasing narrative is leaving the market, and what's replacing it is more durable.

For our thinking on what makes a fundable company in this market, read why we invest in founders, not ideas. For context on the ecosystem we operate in, see our 2026 Amsterdam startup ecosystem overview.