About

Károly Szántó - Venture Builder and Fund Architect

Károly Szántó is a venture builder, fund architect, and lifelong sailor who helps turn strong science into fundable ventures. He is the Founder and CEO of UniPrisma Venture Studio, which he co-founded with Thijmen Meijer. Based in Budapest, UniPrisma partners with universities and investors to translate research into investor-ready companies through hands-on venture building, capital strategy, and ecosystem orchestration. The studio operates where deep tech meets disciplined execution.

Károly brings more than 15 years of international go-to-market leadership across almost fifty countries and a decade of experience in venture creation and fund design. His philosophy is simple but hard-earned: you cannot control the wind, but you can adjust your sails. He believes structure should act like a flow, not a cage, something alive and adaptive, built on trust rather than bureaucracy.

From Underdog to Navigator

Károly was born in Budapest in the mid-seventies, in Hungary still marked by the Cold War. When he was seven, his father, a seaman, took a contract in Libya, and the family moved to North Africa. For a young boy it was both a shock and a revelation: the smell of salt and sand, the unpredictability of the streets, and the discovery that the world was far larger and more complex than he had imagined. When the family returned home, he saw everything differently. There was never one truth and never one single way to live. That early experience of contrast became the foundation of his ability to move between very different worlds, a skill that would later define his leadership and his calm presence in global environments.

At fifteen, his parents divorced, and he suddenly became the adult in the house, supporting his mother and younger brother while still in school. That period shaped his lifelong relationship with responsibility. Where many avoid it, he thrives on it. "If I do not have responsibility, I am not interested," he often says. The drive to take ownership, sometimes too much of it, became both his strength and his lesson.

Sailing, Resilience, and Perspective

Sailing entered his life early through his father. By ten he was racing, by fourteen he was part of Hungary’s national sailing league, and later he became a certified skipper with more than twenty-five years of experience on the water, including an Atlantic Ocean crossing as co-captain. For Károly, sailing is not a sport but a philosophy. It taught him how to stay calm in chaos, how to make precise decisions when the conditions shift, and how to keep a crew aligned toward a common goal. It remains the metaphor that runs through everything he builds: evidence before hype, rhythm before speed, humility before control.

The Global Operator

Károly began his professional career in the early 2000s at T-Systems Dataware and then as Regional Manager for GMC Software Technologies, where he developed sales and partnerships across Central and Eastern Europe. By 2007 he had become Country Manager for pmOne AG, and by 2009 he was leading regional business development for Planar Systems, overseeing partners from Israel to Sub-Saharan Africa. Those years, spent traveling through nearly fifty countries, formed his ability to navigate cultural complexity and understand how to read people and systems under pressure.

He continued this path as Area Sales Manager for Central and South-Eastern Europe at Milestone AV Technologies and then as Managing Director of DBH IT Services. These roles strengthened his operational discipline and strategic focus but also confirmed that large corporate structures were not where he could thrive. "Corporate is too slow and rigid for me," he says. "I need openness and freedom to build the right structure."

From Corporate to Venture

In 2018 he co-founded MandoLab and MandoVentures Holding, building startups from idea to exit and supporting VCs with deal flow and due diligence. As a collaborative effort of MandoVentures and two young emerging managers, they formed and launched Vespucci Partners, in which Karoly took the Executive Board Advisor role and sourced its first investment. That period marked his transition from corporate operator to venture builder. He learned the mechanics of fundraising, the importance of capital alignment, and the necessity of integrity in partnership. After experiencing betrayal in a venture project, he turned the lesson into a principle: "Integrity begins with choosing the right partners", and taking responsibility for that choice.

Between 2022 and 2024, he broadened his reach in the European venture ecosystem, fundraising for startups and scouting for VCs, bridging deep-tech innovation with capital. In 2023, he joined OUVC Venture Capital and Venture Studio as Director of Venture Studio, later serving as COO, where he refined models for university-linked venture programs. These experiences set the stage for his next chapter.

UniPrisma: Building Ventures from Research

During his years advising founders and funds, Károly realized that consulting wasn’t enough, real progress happens only when you co-build. That insight led him to create UniPrisma Venture Studio together with Thijmen Meijer in 2025.

UniPrisma connects universities, founders, and investors into one collaborative ecosystem where research turns into real companies through structured venture building. The studio blends company creation, capital sequencing, and partner orchestration, aligning scientific, clinical, and regulatory partners around a shared mission: to transform deep-tech research into scalable, investor-ready ventures.

Beyond building individual companies, Károly and Thijmen are developing sector-specific funds in MedTech and Ocean Tech, and co-founding a University Venture Capital Association that links academic funds and innovation offices across Europe. Their model reflects a conviction that venture capital must evolve, from transactional investing to relationship-based collaboration where trust, character, and curiosity drive performance.

The Philosophy Behind the Practice

Károly’s leadership combines logic with intuition. His frameworks, Peeling the Onion and The Chaos Coordinator Mindset, describe how he thinks. He begins by reading context deeply, sensing patterns and people, and then he applies analytical reasoning to remove everything that is not essential. He values clarity over harmony and truth over comfort. "My main tool is not to tell things, it is to ask," he explains. That approach allows him to guide founders, investors, and teams toward the real issues behind their challenges.

He believes structure should serve movement, not restrict it. He thrives in the early, unstructured stages of creation when nothing is fixed but everything is possible. He reads chaos the way a sailor reads the wind: each shift is information, not threat. His discipline as a skipper, small corrections, constant feedback, humility before nature, translates directly into how he builds ventures: iterative, evidence-driven, and human-centered.

Character, Impact, and Legacy

At the core of Károly’s work lies a human motive: to help people become the best version of themselves. "I try to become the person I used to need the most," he says. He mentors founders and investors to discover their true calling, replace fear with focus, and align ambition with purpose.

His values, authenticity, kindness, responsibility, and integrity, define his leadership. He is known for cutting through the noise, for speaking directly but with care, and for balancing ambition with humility. He believes that impact is the proof that existence makes sense, that business, like sailing, is a way to find rhythm in uncertainty.

Today, as Founder and CEO of UniPrisma alongside his co-founder Thijmen Meijer, Károly Szántó stands at the forefront of a new model of venture creation. He builds ventures and people that thrive under pressure and find meaning in progress, navigating uncertainty with clarity, courage, and authenticity.