Furo, a startup building software for industrial battery storage systems, has raised $4 million from mostly US investors after its three co-founders chose to relocate from Silicon Valley back to their native Germany. The move challenges the long-standing Silicon Valley orthodoxy that international founders must be based in the US to secure venture funding, and reflects a broader shift noted by VC firm a16z that startups can now benefit from having ties to both their home country and the Bay Area. Just a year after founding the company, Furo has already signed enterprise clients including German rail operator Deutsche Bahn.

Furo's funding round was led by US-based TQ Ventures, with participation from Neo, Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, and Munich's Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), which helped the founders reach Stanford and UC Berkeley. Co-founder Lena Sophia Voß, who previously worked at Apple, alongside colleagues from Google X and AI startups, said returning to Germany was a deliberate choice rather than a necessity, given the country's ongoing energy crises made the problem they were solving more urgent there. She cited advantages including a stronger local network, closer proximity to customers, cheaper and equally skilled engineering talent, and easier hiring near technical universities such as TU Munich.