Olaf Sakkers is betting he can beat the emerging-manager squeeze

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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. Olaf Sakkers has spent the past…

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.

Getting to this point has been a test of endurance as much as salesmanship, seemingly.

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