Cherry Ventures
Venture capital runs on relationships — and relationships are built in rooms. Cherry Ventures, one of Europe's leading early-stage VC firms and a first institutional backer to companies like FlixBus, Auto1 Group, and Infarm, understood that early. The founders they back are building fast, under pressure, and often in isolation. Bringing them together — meaningfully, memorably, away from their laptops — wasn't a nice-to-have. It was a strategic investment in the community they were building around their portfolio.
Cherry Ventures backs Europe's boldest founders — and since 2016, Openers has been building the experiences that bring their community together. Nearly a decade of portfolio days, founders retreats, and team offsites: each one different, each one designed to create something a pitch deck never could.
The Starting Point
When Openers became Cherry's trusted partner for events and experience productions in 2016, the brief was as much about culture as it was about logistics. How do you create the conditions for genuine connection between the boldest founders in Europe? How do you design a room — or a castello, or a club, or a mountainside — that makes people want to stay, open up, and think differently? That question has driven every format we've built together since.
What We Built
Portfolio Days 2016–2018: The Family Day
The foundation of the partnership was Cherry's annual Family Day — a one-day gathering for investors, portfolio startups, friends, and family that we produced for three consecutive editions from 2016 to 2018. Each year brought a different creative theme, a different atmosphere, and a different reason for over 400 guests to feel like they were part of something worth showing up for. Full creative concept, brand building, design, marketing collateral, and photography and video relations — we owned the experience end to end.
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Portfolio Day 2020: Berlin, Edgy, Future
For Cherry's Portfolio Day 2020, the brief was clear in three words: future, Berlin, edgy. The venue answered all three — an LGBTQ+ club connected to the old Vollgutlager, a space that carried its own cultural weight long before the event began. The day brought together aspiring startups and investors in an atmosphere built for the exchange of ideas: panels on stage, VR gaming from Hologate, cocktails featuring Infarm and Flaschenpost, and an extraordinary dinner served on a gay club dance floor. Over 250 guests. One night that felt unlike anything else on the VC calendar.
Portfolio Day 2022: Willy Wonka Meets Venture Capital
The first Portfolio Day after the pandemic carried an energy all its own. The theme — taking opportunities — found its perfect creative expression in an unlikely idol: Willy Wonka. Chocolate and cherries, expanses of green, a golden ticket for dessert. We developed the full event concept and production for both the conference and the party, handling branding, graphics, technical planning, and room design. It was playful, precise, and exactly the kind of unexpected creative decision that makes an event stick in the memory long after the night ends.
Founders Retreat 2019: Two Days, 150 Founders, One Open Exchange
In September 2019, Cherry invited the majority of their portfolio founders to a two-day retreat — the goal being to bring different members of their companies together for a genuine open exchange of strategies and ideas, away from the day-to-day. We handled creative concept, brand building, design, and marketing collateral alongside the full conference setup and a programme of leisure activities: raft building, team running, and a casino-themed evening that gave the retreat its closing moment. Over 150 guests, two days, one shared experience designed to strengthen the ties between people who were all building something significant.
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Founders Retreat 2023: A Castello in Northern Italy
By 2023, the Founders Retreat had grown into one of the centrepieces of Cherry's community calendar. We brought over 110 portfolio founders to a castello in Northern Italy for two days designed to keep them genuinely off their laptops — a deliberate choice that shaped every element of the programme. Conference sessions and workshops sat alongside yoga, sound baths, running, a camp cinema, a BBQ, and a gala dinner under the open sky. We handled creative concept, brand building, design, marketing collateral, and location scouting — finding a setting that did half the work of the experience before a single session began.
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Team Offsite 2023: Northern Italy, Rafting & Torino
Alongside the Founders Retreat, we also organised Cherry's internal team offsite in June 2023 — a two-day trip for 30 people to Northern Italy, scouted and designed to strengthen team bonds through shared experience rather than structured programming. A pool party, a big BBQ, karaoke, a rafting excursion, and a treasure hunt through the city of Torino. The brief was simple: make it memorable. The execution made sure it was.
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What It Moved
Nearly a decade of partnership, and the through-line is consistent: every format we've built with Cherry Ventures has been designed to do something that a Slack message or a Zoom call cannot. To create the conditions for the kind of trust, openness, and genuine connection that makes a portfolio community more than the sum of its investments.
From a club dance floor in Berlin to a castello in Northern Italy, from 30-person offsites to 400-guest portfolio days, the work has grown in scale and ambition while staying true to the same founding idea: that the best experiences are the ones that make people feel something worth remembering — and worth coming back for.
