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Olaf Sakkers is betting he can beat the emerging-manager squeeze
Entering into the world of venture capital has never been easy, especially as a first-time fund manager. But it’s especially daunting right now.
According to PitchBook data, firms raising their fourth fund “or later” captured a whopping 88.2% of U.S. VC fundraising dollars through the first three quarters of this year, while first-time funds captured a measly 4.5%. Just 81 first-time funds closed in the first nine months of 2026. That puts the year on track to be the worst for first-time managers in at least a decade, according to PitchBook’s estimate.
Olaf Sakkers has spent the past five years proving that difficult doesn’t mean impossible. He founded his firm RedBlue Capital in 2021 and closed its first fund with roughly $5 million in capital commitments in 2023. He has now held a first close on a second fund that he says will total at least $50 million.
Raised in South Africa, he studied anthropology at Princeton, focusing on global health and health policy, and wrote his thesis on HIV in his home country. He moved to Israel after graduating and was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, where he says he had a desk job liaising with the U.S. military, and where he became interested in autonomous vehicles.
An introduction led to Michael Granoff, founder of the venture firm Maniv Mobility and an early backer of electric-vehicle startup Better Place. Granoff, who had money to invest, hired him on the spot, Sakkers says. Neither had been a venture investor at that point, so they built a fund “almost by accident,” learning as they went. Sakkers says he ran the investment process day to day, backing Israeli founders who were bringing cybersecurity skills into the automotive world, and later expanding to the U.S. and other markets.
By 2021, Sakkers says, he was an equal partner in Maniv’s economics, but he wanted something different — more formal and scalable — so struck out on his own. Today, RedBlue backs what he calls the “real economy,” including robotics, logistics, manufacturing and energy.
Getting to this point has been a test of endurance as much as salesmanship, seemingly. Sakkers says that institutional limited partners, outfits like endowments and pension funds, have been the toughest to win over because his checks are small (and theirs are comparatively huge) but also because their risk model is built to “avoid getting a zero,” which is why they tend to gravitate toward established brands.
Says Sakkers, it’s akin to founders who come to be seen as “inevitable,” after they’ve previously founded another company. Meanwhile first-time founders often battle against the “gravity of perception,” meaning a more dominant brand can bend how people perceive a newer one.
His answer has been to let the results speak, but it takes time. “It’s a long-term game of building trust, demonstrating performance over time,” Sakkers says.
The first fund was a proof of concept, backed by LPs he had known for a while, including family offices. The second draws on family offices and institutions.