Dr Carolin Gabor, Managing Partner of the early-stage fund caesar., has been named Best Female Investor 2025 at the KfW Capital Award ceremony. Miki Yokoyama, founding partner of Aurum Impact, received the award for Best Impact Investor. The special prize "VC Game Changer 2025" was presented to Prof Dr Helmut Schönenberger, CEO of UnternehmerTUM and Vice President Entrepreneurship at Munich Technical University. Each winner received a prize of EUR 5,000.
The awards were announced during an event at ‘Bar Jeder Vernunft’ in Berlin. Nominees could apply themselves or be nominated by others. Two juries consisting of venture capital experts selected the winners through a multi-stage process.
This year marks the fourth presentation of the KfW Capital Award, which is held alongside the KfW Entrepreneurs’ Award that has recognized successful business founders for nearly thirty years.
"By selecting Dr Carolin Gabor, Miki Yokoyama and Prof Dr Helmut Schönenberger, the juries have selected outstanding candidates as winners. The latter won this year’s special prize 'VC Game Changer', which for the first time honoured a personality who has taken the further development of the VC ecosystem forward with his deep personal commitment, vision and values. If Helmut Schönenberger did not exist, he would have to be invented for the VC ecosystem," said Dr Jörg Goschin, CEO of KfW Capital.
"As a successful investor, Dr Carolin Gabor, the winner in the category Best Female Investor, is an important role model in the VC market – particularly for young talents. We need to have the brightest minds for a strong VC ecosystem in the future as well."
"The award for Best Impact Investor underscores the high strategic importance of venture capital investors who are not just pursuing financial returns but want to achieve measurable positive societal and ecological impacts. By honouring Miki Yokoyama, this time we have the special situation that we are honouring an investor who conducts impact investing deliberately from a family office, which is still quite rare in Germany," said Alexander Thees, Member of the Management Board of KfW Capital.
Dr Carolin Gabor began her career as a consultant at BCG before moving into executive roles at TopTarif.de and autohaus24.de; both companies were sold under her leadership. She later took on various investment roles before founding caesar. in May 2023. She holds a PhD from RWTH Aachen University and serves on several advisory bodies within Germany's fintech sector.
Miki Yokoyama has developed Aurum Impact as part of the GOLDBECK Group since 2023. Aurum Impact invests in enterprises and funds that generate social and ecological value while mobilizing private capital towards these goals. The company focuses on climate action, circular economy initiatives, and social participation business models.
Prof Dr Helmut Schönenberger leads UnternehmerTUM and serves as Vice President Entrepreneurship at Munich Technical University. He established Europe’s largest innovation center connecting academia with industry and investors. Under his leadership, start-ups focused on deep tech and AI have raised more than two billion US dollars in venture capital funding.
Juries for each category included representatives from finance ministries, venture capital associations, academia, industry foundations, and KfW Capital itself.