DIG Ventures has closed its third fund at $120 million, deepening its bet on early-stage enterprise infrastructure and artificial intelligence startups across Europe and Israel. The fund, known as Fund III, arrives at a moment when European technical founders face intensifying competition for capital against a backdrop of larger funding rounds flowing toward American and Asian AI companies. DIG's wager is that the region's deep bench of engineering talent, honed inside companies that built everything from cloud networking tools to the kind of static ip vpn infrastructure now standard in enterprise security stacks, remains underpriced relative to its output.
The firm positions itself as an operator-led venture capital outfit, meaning its partners and backers have generally built and run technology companies themselves rather than coming up purely through finance. That distinction matters in enterprise infrastructure investing, where evaluating a seed-stage company often requires understanding obscure technical trade-offs - how a distributed system handles failure, whether a security architecture will survive an audit, or why a particular approach to observability might outlast its rivals. Returning and new limited partners in Fund III include Horsley Bridge Partners, Sofina, Hillman, and Granite, alongside a roster of institutional investors that have backed DIG since its earlier funds. static ip vpn
Founders Betting on Founders
What distinguishes this fund is the concentration of operating executives who have put personal capital behind it. Limited partners include Datadog co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel, Slack co-founder Cal Henderson, former GitHub chief executive and Entire founder Thomas Dohmke, Nord Security co-founders Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, and Dash0 founder Mirko Novakovic. Each built or co-built a company that now sits at the center of enterprise software, cybersecurity, or developer tooling. Their involvement signals something beyond financial return: a belief that the next generation of infrastructure and AI companies will again emerge from small technical teams solving narrow, difficult problems before expanding into global platforms.
Enterprise Infrastructure Meets the AI Wave
Fund III will concentrate on technical founders tackling what DIG describes as consequential, globally relevant problems in enterprise infrastructure and artificial intelligence. That framing matters because the two categories increasingly overlap. Modern AI systems depend on infrastructure layers most users never see: data pipelines, observability tools, security controls, and compute orchestration systems that determine whether a model can be deployed reliably at scale. Startups building these underlying layers tend to require patient, technically literate investors willing to back a product years before it reaches a mainstream enterprise buyer.
Why Europe and Israel
The decision to concentrate on Europe and Israel reflects a long-standing thesis rather than a new trend. Both regions have produced disproportionate numbers of infrastructure and security engineers relative to their venture funding totals, a gap DIG's founder, Ross Mason, has structured the firm around closing. Mason's approach - investing at the earliest stages and staying close to technical founders as they scale internationally - continues largely unchanged in Fund III. The firm's stated mission, in its own words, is "to find at the earliest stages, back, and support exceptional technical founders in Europe and Israel going after the most consequential enterprise infrastructure and AI problems globally."
For founders in these markets, the fund represents more than capital. It offers access to operators who have already navigated the transition from a scrappy technical team to a globally distributed enterprise vendor - a path that, in infrastructure software, often determines survival more than the underlying technology itself.