Not a day goes by without some confirmation that deep tech is on the rise in Europe — and that public and private capital investors are here for it.
Latest case in point, OTB Ventures, which closed a $185 million fund to invest in deep tech in Europe that it will mostly deploy at the Series A stage.
OTB’s take on deep tech focuses on four verticals that do sound fairly NATO-compatible: space tech, enterprise automation and AI, cybersecurity and fintech infrastructure.
This means we can’t confirm either whether the funding that went to OTB could also have gone to, say, a French or Austrian deep tech fund.
Like NIF, OTB is headquartered in Amsterdam, and its other office is in Warsaw, where NIF is also planning to have a regional office.
One path, which is particularly well trodden, is to start a venture fund.
Instead of launching a VC fund, they’re starting with an incubator called Montauk Climate, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Montauk Climate is one of the latter.
Montauk Climate will remain shareholders in its spinout companies and have seats on their boards.
As the number of incubated companies expands, Montauk Climate expects to raise its own venture fund to help support them.
The CHIPS Act can be seen as a direct result of a number of pressing geopolitical issues.
The above, coupled with long-standing efforts to revitalize U.S. industry, spurred on economic efforts to reshore manufacturing.
While the CHIPS Act was still winding its way through Capitol Hill, Intel announced plans to open a $10 billion manufacturing facility just outside of Columbus, Ohio.
It says it expects those efforts will create 20,000 construction and 10,000 manufacturing jobs — music to the ears of an administration keenly focused on monthly jobs reports.
Notably, Intel recently pushed back the manufacturing start date of its New Albany, Ohio, plant two years to 2027, citing changes to the business environment.
Yi and Shin started Ethos Fund two years ago to bridge opportunities and startup communities between Vietnam and the United States.
They are also investing smaller checks into third culture founders there who fall into categories, including returned Vietnamese diaspora, Vietnamese Americans and expats residing in Vietnam, and subsequently doubling-down with larger checks into validated startups.
“Ethos is called Ethos because we focus on the ethos of the founders,” Yi said.
One of the things Yi noticed about his startups was that they weren’t growing past a certain stage.
Now the pair wants to help startup founders figure those lessons out early.
Two years ago, he launched Ballistic Ventures with an inaugural $300 million fund, a laser focus on cybersecurity, an interesting business model, and a who’s-who of investing partners.
Now Ballistic has already closed a second fund, even bigger than the first.
“We set out to raise a second $300 million fund and stopped at $360 million,” Schlein told TechCrunch.
Ballistic formally registered its plans for a second fund just four months ago, in November, TC was first to report.
The Ballistic team also includes general partner Kevin Mandia, the former CEO of Mandiant, which sold to Google in 2022.
Deep tech is on the rise in Europe, fueled in part by the match between AI and a local flavor of math excellence.
The deep tech fund will focus on computing, industry and life science.
The report, which was published this Wednesday, highlights 50 European deep tech companies, but more as an editorialized showcase than as a ranking.
While the firms may overlap in investments, they don’t fully see eye to eye on the “deep tech” term.
“For us, deep tech is a natural fit, as we’ve always been very close to research at Elaia,” she said.
Peak XV, the venture firm formerly known as India and Southeast Asia arm of Sequoia, didn’t disclose the size of the new fund.
The new fund, called Peak XV Anchor Fund, will be funded by an internal balance sheet, the source said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private.
The fund will enable Peak XV to “create a global network for learning and collaboration,” the venture firm said, according to the LP source.
The fund will enable Peak XV Partners to have broader skin in the game with its own fund and also explore investment in newer areas, the source said.
With Peak XV Anchor Fund, the venture firm plans to partner with other “managers across regions, strategies and sectors.”Peak XV didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
With the second fund, Ada says it will invest between £250,000 and £1.5 million in pre-seed and seed stage startups, with a “significant amount” allocated for follow-ons.
So far, 12 investments have been made from the second fund.
Ada claims 30% of the investments from Fund I and Fund II were sourced this way.
Warner retorted: “There are 350+ fantastic female VC partners in Europe.
: “I think every leader of every VC fund needs to do whatever we can to attract the best talent in the industry.
The Artemis Fund, which invests in underrepresented founders, closed on its second fund with $36 million in capital commitments.
“We really wanted to make sure that our LPs aligned with our long-term goal of backing diverse founders,” Murakhovskaya told TechCrunch.
VC investment itself continues to be fairly stagnant in these areas, according to my colleague Dominic-Madori Davis, who crunched the numbers on venture capital funding to these demographics earlier this month.
Female founders and co-founders secured more capital overall in 2023 than they did in 2020, according to new Pitchbook research.
For Fund II, Artemis intends to continue leading and co-leading investments and will target around 20 new companies.
TikTok announced today that its revamped creator fund has increased total creator revenue by over 250% within the last six months.
The company says the fund, which launched a year ago and eventually replaced TikTok’s original $1 billion Creator Fund, is exiting beta in the coming weeks.
Since rolling out longer videos, TikTok says users are spending 50% of their time watching longer content, while viewership of longer videos has increased nearly 40% over the last six months.
When TikTok first launched the revamped fund, it estimated that creators would be able to make more than 20 times what they were previously earning on TikTok.
TikTok’s new creator fund seeks to appease creators and encourage them to post their longer videos on TikTok, instead of just YouTube.
