How backtrace built its Back Office with bunch

backtrace backs the technology infrastructure that most people never see but everything depends on. Founded in Munich in 2024 by Dr. Michael Münnix and Dominik Tobschall, the firm was built on a conviction that European venture capital has long overlooked the middle layer of the tech stack: the developer tools, runtimes, observability systems, and security primitives that sit below applications but above hardware. While the market chased consumer SaaS and deep tech moonshots, Michael and Dominik saw a structural gap in the infrastructure every product runs on and decided to back the founders building there.

Both are engineers who became investors. Michael was a Partner at Target Partners, with a portfolio spanning exits to IBM and ServiceNow. Dominik was a Partner at Speedinvest with exits to Sophos and OpenAI before co-founding backtrace. They had been co-investors for over a decade before launching together, and their thesis reflects the vantage point of people who built things before they funded them. They back technology infrastructure: the foundational technologies beneath the application layer, from runtimes and cloud primitives to developer tooling, cyber security, networking, novel compute, and semiconductors. This category has historically received less attention from European VC than from US investors, despite Europe producing ambitious infrastructure companies with global potential. backtrace’s focus is on genuinely innovative infrastructure: Building blocks born in Europe, but intended for global adoption.

In March 2026, backtrace announced the final close of Fund I at €50 million, oversubscribed, with backing from some of the most respected names in European and US tech.

Michael and Dominik had both spent years inside large funds. They knew what proper operations looked like: dedicated teams across compliance, AML, reporting, and investor communications. At backtrace, those same requirements existed from day one, but the team was two people with a fund to raise.

Michael's prior experience made the stakes clear. Everything had run through external service companies working in Excel. It was slow, fragmented, and labour intensive. That was not the model for backtrace, and it would not have been adequate for the LPs they were targeting. Institutional LPs such as EIF bring onboarding, reporting, and compliance requirements that most emerging managers are not structured to meet without a dedicated operational layer.

The alternative, coordinating a fund administrator, tax provider, compliance function, and auditor separately while fundraising, was, as Dominik put it after speaking to another fund manager attempting exactly that: operationally unrealistic for a small team. And the time it would have taken was time that needed to go somewhere else entirely.

Michael's instinct was straightforward: as few service providers as possible. When something goes wrong across a fragmented setup, providers pass the problem to each other and a small team ends up owning the coordination anyway. What bunch offered was a single contact covering the full operational scope, fund administration, transfer agency, compliance, reporting, and AIFMD filings through the ManCo. When bunch tax came into scope, the tax function consolidated under the same roof. As Michael said: that integrated setup is exactly what they wanted.

Dominik's framing was equally direct: they wanted fund admin to be handled properly from day one, without becoming an internal bottleneck. By relying on bunch, they could stay focused on fundraising. bunch introduced the team to the wider partner network, including law firms, auditors, notaries, and banks, and took on the full operational scope from there.

backtrace closed Fund I at €50 million in March 2026, oversubscribed, without an ops hire and without a fragmented provider stack to manage. 

The closing was not without complexity. Towards the end of the fundraise, a significant jump in AUM brought with it a complicated equalisation payment across multiple LPs. It was the kind of problem that could have absorbed weeks of a smaller team's attention at the busiest possible moment. Michael described bunch as genuinely integral in working through it: handled at eye level, resolved quickly. The founding team stayed focused on the portfolio and their investors.

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backtrace is now in deployment mode. Seven investments made, a clear thesis on European technology infrastructure, and a fund positioned, as Michael put it, at the right spot at the right time. The operational question has shifted: not how to build the infrastructure, but how to make it work harder.

Dominik has been part of bunch's product feedback sessions, working directly with the product team on what comes next. The direction he described is bunch as a single source of truth: a platform from which backtrace can build processes, pre-fill forms, and pull data without leaving the system. APIs, MCP access, direct portfolio data integration.

Michael describes the partnership and sees bunch not as a vendor but as something closer: a team that takes feedback seriously, grows alongside its customers, and gives them a stake in how the product develops. For a firm whose entire thesis is infrastructure that works invisibly and at scale, having an operational partner that thinks the same way matters.

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