Munich-based Matterwave Ventures is immediately asserting a €75m first shut of a brand new €130m fund to again European industrial deeptech startups.
Matterwave’s traders embrace the European Funding Fund, LfA Bayern and NRW Financial institution in addition to industrial corporations, foundations and household workplaces.
The cash might be used to again 20-25 corporations, with preliminary ticket sizes ranging €1m-4m, and as much as €10m in follow-on rounds (round half of the fund might be reserved for follow-ons). Matterwave was a part of generalist VC agency btov Companions (identified for backing DeepL and SumUp), and was previously referred to as btov Industrial Applied sciences earlier than going unbiased and rebranding final 12 months. Its final fund was a €100m automobile launched in 2019.
The fund says that it’s the primary of its variety investing in industrial deeptech throughout Europe, and never simply in a single nation.
Areas of curiosity
Matterwave will proceed to put money into the sorts of know-how it backed with its final fund:
Enterprise automation
“Frontier tech” (which has beforehand included tech like photonic and quantum processing)
Way forward for manufacturing
Sensor-powered know-how
Useful resource effectivity
Matterwave is particularly eager to again startups engaged on useful resource effectivity — which incorporates tech like carbon seize and wind farm optimisation — with this newest fund. In June 2022 the fund employed a brand new associate, Ines Kolmsee, to herald experience from the manufacturing and vitality industries (she beforehand held senior positions at a steelmaker and a German utility firm).
One space that Kolmsee significantly needs to see pitches in is industrial warmth seize. Matterwave’s founding associate Christian Reitberger sits on the board of Orcan Power — which turns warmth from factories into sustainable vitality — and Kolmsee says there are tons extra purposes for warmth seize tech that she “finds massively fascinating”.
Reitberger provides that a part of the explanation for specializing in useful resource effectivity with this new fund is right down to the maturing local weather tech funding panorama.
“We’ve been ready for co-investors to affix the social gathering,” he explains. “These are typically extra capital-intensive experiments and we want to have the ability to syndicate these offers and follow-on finance them. That’s now attainable with the emergence of recent local weather tech funds.”
A unique context
Reitberger says that a wider effort from European policymakers to supply capital for strategic deeptech — a part of the continent’s drive for so-called tech sovereignty — helped with the fundraising course of this time round.
“We had been fairly unique in our final fund era,” he says. “There’s been a realisation that Europe actually must get its act collectively to regain know-how sovereignty — in each sector from semiconductors to scrub vitality.”
Matterwave is considered one of a choose variety of VC companies staffed by traders with real technical know-how, with the vast majority of the eight-strong group holding levels in areas like engineering or physics. Reitberger — who has a PhD in physics from the College of Vienna and labored on the CERN analysis laboratory — additionally says that many generalist VCs have traditionally stayed away from deeptech as a result of long-term timescales concerned in scaling these companies.
“Deeptech will not be like generic B2B SaaS, as a result of success will not be linear,” he argues. “It’s not such as you instantly purchase clients after which scale them. In our companies there’s a for much longer slog to get the product prepared and it may be six or seven years the place zero income occurs.”
That mentioned, Reitberger believes that there’s nonetheless an enormous alternative to be realised in modernising Europe’s industrial sector — that he claims makes up round half of the area’s GDP — because it comes beneath growing stress from rivals within the US and China.
“Europe has this unbelievable industrial base which we have to defend — it’s beneath extreme risk,” he says, “That’s the place we are available, we discover and nurture these applied sciences that may assist European business thrive.”
Tim Smith is senior reporter at Sifted. He tweets from @timmpsmith
