Alexander Kremer
As a teenager I played Call of Duty semi-professionally, won a German national championship, and ranked among the top players in Europe. It taught me that small edges compound ruthlessly, that the best teams over-communicate, and that real commitment usually looks a little obsessive from the outside. My parents were less convinced. Before any of that, I had a short-lived screen career: a few episodes of Sesamstraße in primary school. Peak fame came early, and it has been a gentle decline since.
I eventually traded the headset for a slightly more conventional path, though not by much. I started out with a traineeship at IBM and a stint at McKinsey in Germany, then took a hard left turn to Beijing, where I somehow talked my way into the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua. That was my return to China, and it stuck: I stayed on for three years at JD.com building product and chasing international growth, and learned Mandarin along the way. China is where I fell for technology as a force in the real economy, not just a category on a pitch deck.
Since coming back to Europe in 2024, I have been hunting for founders building AI-native software. At Keen, my focus is SME Tech: the startups building the tools for the businesses that actually run the economy, the SMEs that rarely make headlines but quietly keep the lights on. Bonus points if they bring the kind of relentless commitment and passion that makes a great company impossible to ignore.
Professional Bio
I came into investing through my own angel deals, backing early-stage founders across commerce, robotics, and AI applications before making it my full-time focus. Most recently I was a Partner at Picus Capital, where I led investments across Gen AI and Frontier Tech in Europe, the US, and Asia, after first joining as Managing Director for the firm's Asia practice. I had the pleasure of backing founders across emerging fields like AI coding, AI infrastructure, applied AI in consumer, and AI x Healthcare (incubated businesses). Before venture, I was a Director at JD.com in Beijing, first leading product for its Search & Recommendations platform, then heading international growth, partnerships, and investments. Earlier in my career I was a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Hamburg and began with a traineeship at IBM.
I hold a Master of Global Affairs from Tsinghua University, where I was a Schwarzman Scholar and Bosch Fellow, and a BA in International Business from the Berlin School of Economics and Law, including an exchange at Copenhagen Business School. I have also completed a certificate in Deep Learning at Tsinghua and executive education at Carnegie Mellon University, and earlier undertook doctoral research on the traits of successful founding teams (on hold), a question I now get to test in practice with every deal. Outside of investing, I co-author Repository Radar, a bi-weekly newsletter on open-source and AI infrastructure, and was named to the Forbes China 30 Under 30. I'm an avid runner, speak German, English, and Mandarin, and am working on my Spanish.
