IFBH GmbH - Holding, Investment, Ventures from Berlin

01 · The Firm

Three things most institutions keep separate

IFBH GmbH does three things that most institutions keep separate. We hold and develop established participations. We allocate capital to outside opportunities. We incubate new ventures from the founding stage. The combination is deliberate, and it is the firm.

A pure holding company tends to grow conservative. A pure investment vehicle tends to grow detached from the businesses it owns. A pure incubator tends to run out of patience and money at the same moment. Each of our three legs corrects the worst tendencies of the other two.

We are constituted as a German GmbH because the legal form matches the intent. Closely held ownership, controlled governance, no obligation to return capital on a fund clock, and the regulatory clarity of operating inside the German legal system. The form is not a default. It is a commitment.

The time horizons follow from the form. A typical holding position runs eight to fifteen years and is reviewed against the underlying business, not against a quarterly mark.

02 · What We Do

Three legs, one balance sheet

Holdings

We take long positions in operating companies where good governance compounds returns rather than merely preserving them. Inside a holding, our role is structural rather than operational.

The qualifying criteria are simple to state and harder to satisfy. The business must be intelligible. The cash flows must be real. The management must want to build.

Investments

We commit our own balance sheet. That changes how we underwrite. Every position is one we will live with through its full cycle, not a fee we collect for placing other people's money.

We disqualify on understanding before we disqualify on price. If we cannot describe in two paragraphs how a position makes money and how it loses money, we do not take the position.

Ventures

Some businesses do not exist yet. We identify the ones worth building and back them from the first draft of the business model. This is not seed-fund cheque-writing. It is institutional construction.

A venture graduates when it becomes a holding, or it terminates when the thesis fails. The intermediate state is not the product. The product is the resulting business.

03 · Where We Look

Categories where capital is genuinely useful

We look in places where capital is genuinely useful and where the rules of the game are stable enough to underwrite. In practice this concentrates the firm in a small number of categories.

Regulated finance and financial infrastructure

Capital markets, securitisation, payments, and the institutional plumbing that moves money across jurisdictions. We understand this sector at the level of detail that allows us to structure rather than simply allocate.

Energy

A preference for assets that produce cash flow and a tolerance for the regulatory complexity that European energy entails. We do not pursue narrative-driven energy positioning. We pursue economics.

Selected industrial and frontier-market opportunities

Where the operating thesis is sound and the institutional environment supports a multi-year build. We do not chase geographies. We commit to specific situations within them.

What unifies the categories is not sector but discipline. We back businesses whose audited statements are an accurate description of what is happening, whose management has skin in the outcome, and whose downside is something the firm can carry without strain.

04 · How We Work

Discipline as a working method

We hold long horizons because the work compounds, or it does not work. Positions are measured in years and decades, against the business, not against a benchmark constructed by other people's marketing departments.

We concentrate. A small number of well-understood positions outperforms a portfolio assembled to look balanced. The administrative comfort of diversification is a poor substitute for the analytic discipline of conviction.

We invest our own capital. The discipline this imposes is impossible to fake. A firm whose principals are the largest economic counterparty to every decision the firm takes will price risk differently from a firm whose principals are paid to deploy other people's money on a clock.

We treat governance as a tool rather than a posture. Board work, structure, and oversight exist to make companies more decisive, not less. A board that prevents a clearly correct decision because the process has not been observed is a board doing harm.

We say no often, and we say it early. The cost of declining a deal that would have worked is bounded. The cost of taking a deal that does not work is open-ended. The asymmetry shapes the discipline.

05 · Berlin

By choice, not by accident

We are in Berlin by choice, not by accident.

Most German institutional capital still sits in Frankfurt and Munich. Berlin offers a different combination: higher founder density, weaker institutional reflexes, proximity to the political institutions that shape the regulatory environment, and a working-distance position to Central and Eastern European markets that other European capitals cannot match.

The city has changed since reunification, and again since 2016, and again since 2022. Each change has expanded the relevant talent pool and shortened the distance between operating businesses and the people who finance them. Frankfurt remains the centre of German banking. Berlin is becoming the centre of German capital that thinks beyond banking.

That is the position we wanted, and the building we sit in reflects it.

06 · Responsibility

An input, not a reporting exercise

Every firm of any size now has a paragraph about responsibility. Most of those paragraphs are written for the document and not for the reader. We will not add to the pile.

Responsibility, in practice, means the discipline to refuse certain positions and to take others knowingly. It means accurate accounting, controlled disclosure, paid taxes, observed regulation, and the willingness to terminate a position when the underlying business behaves in a way that the firm cannot endorse.

The firm operates inside the German legal and regulatory system, applies the same standards to its non-German activities, and treats environmental, social, and governance considerations as inputs to underwriting rather than as a reporting exercise.

07 · What We Will Not Do

The discipline of declining

We are not a fee-driven investment manager and we have no intention of becoming one. The economics of fee-based asset management produce the wrong incentives, and the result is visible in the industry's track record.

We do not flip companies on a five-year clock. The investors and operators who built durable European businesses across the postwar decades did not do it on a five-year clock, and we see no reason to start now.

We do not invest in models we cannot explain in two paragraphs. If the cash flow requires a slide deck to justify, the cash flow is probably not what the slide deck claims.

We do not run holdings the way leveraged buyout funds run them. Extraction and exit is a coherent strategy. It is not our strategy, and it is incompatible with the businesses we want to own.

The discipline of saying no to these things is what allows us to say yes to the work that matters.

08 · Contact

Direct lines, not a contact form

IFBH GmbH

For corporate, investment, and venture inquiries, please contact us directly at the email or telephone number below.

Registered office

Goethestrasse 49, 12305 Berlin, Germany

info@ifb-holding.com

Telephone

+49 30 50508720